Keep it Moving

less universal advice (2/2)

Yesterday and today, we’re turning our attention to pieces of advice about being a writer that are less universal than the big four in the articles before that, but that I find worth considering. Today’s batch is about keeping your writing process moving, and in that spirit, let’s get to it.

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Advice: Move Quickly

Writing faster is, obviously, an important aspect of writing a lot. It’s very easy to get bogged down. This advice says: don’t.

There are whole books with very practical tips about writing faster, such as 2k to 10k by Rachel Aaron, which is a pleasure to read. I don’t quote it here because if I got started, I’d soon quote the whole book and you might as well read it yourself.

It was easier to find good, quotable tips from Hillary Rettig, who says:

Increasing your tempo … often entails replacing a “Swiss cheese” writing process filled with holes (pauses, hesitations, and interruptions) with a smoother one. Basically, you just sit down and write—and write. You don’t stop to format the work, check your email, answer the phone (it should be shut off, anyhow), or get a snack. You just write. You don’t even stop to try to recall a word or fact; you just leave a space and move on. … Memory is tricky, and you’ve probably had the experience of struggling to remember something, only to have it effortlessly pop into your mind later. So don’t waste time trying to force it. As for research, it’s not part of the composition process, and it’s also a common vehicle for procrastination, so save it for later. Leave a space in the manuscript to remind you of what you need to look up, or jot a quick note on a pad.

The first time it occurred to me to write this way was over a year ago, when I saw my co-worker Nate’s early drafts of a non-fiction book he was writing. He was pounding out draft material at a dizzying pace, and sure enough, it was littered with TODOs. I was surprised at how readable the text was anyway. Clearly Nate was getting enough words down to demonstrate what the book was going to say, and deferring the work to fill in the blanks was absolutely correct at that stage.

Once I got the hang of it, I started doing it all over the place. Leaving TODOs fits very naturally with my top-down style of outlining and drafting. My brain doesn’t balk at leaving blanks in an outline; that’s just a place I haven’t filled in the details yet.

I take it a step further than that. I try to avoid writing anything I would term a “draft” until I know almost everything about what I’m trying to say. It’s all lowercase and bullet points until I have the whole picture. Actually crafting sentences comes last and is pretty easy by the time I get there — for my non-fiction writing, anyway.

With fiction it seems to be harder. At this point in my development as a writer I don’t yet have the knack for which details actually matter. Every little thing seems like it might have vast worldbuilding or character-building implications.

Also I feel like quite a lot of the magic in fiction writing is in the details. That’s where you see personality quirks and charm and weirdness. Skipping over that and coming back to it later is essentially just not actually doing the writing.

Maybe this will come with practice? I’m not sure.

Rettig goes on to suggest:

And now you can use a visualization tool I call the “writercopter,” a mental helicopter that can transport you to any place in your piece. The moment you feel you’ve taken a particular patch of writing as far as you can, hop onto your copter and take it to another section that looks enticing. Work there until you run dry, and then re-board and hop to another part.

What if no part looks appealing? Try writing about the piece, since your alienation from it is probably rooted in the fact that you either need to think it through more or are trying to force it in the wrong direction… In the unlikely event that that doesn’t help, set the piece aside and let it marinate while you work on something else.

I absolutely follow this advice, except I often use a random number generator rather than a subjective feeling of appeal to choose what to work on next. Otherwise I get avoidant and build up a feeling of “ugh” about the hard parts. I find skipping around very effective. It means there’s a little novelty and surprise every time I sit down to write, which goes back to hacking my own reward signal.

My personal verdict: Writing fast is great. I’d like to learn to write much faster than I already do.

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Advice: Actually Finish

This bit of advice, phrased in the worst possible way, is that there are zero points for unpublished works. Here’s Heinlein’s advice:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you start.

3. You must refrain from rewriting (except to editorial demand).

4. You must put it on the market.

5. You must keep it on the market until sold.

These rules were written in 1947. “The market” is a completely different place now, and if you look up Heinlein’s rules you’ll find plenty of rewrites and amendments for a modern age.

Still, I think these rules are probably spiritually correct. Heinlein is emphasizing tempo, he’s of the “throw a hundred pots” school of ceramics, wherein quantity leads to quality through practice and feedback.

Sometimes these rules come into tension with one another. Sometimes I struggle to write because I know I’m going to publish, and therefore I must write something good, because it will be out there where people will see.¹ My prolific writer friend Alicorn told me to abandon stories freely and just start new ones, rather than trying to squeeze life into a story that is stuck. (She said it much more poetically, but alas I cannot find her original wording.)²

Maybe one way to think about this is that the first rule is first for a reason, and must be followed to fidelity no matter what; you can’t let the other rules get in the way of that or you’ll get nowhere.

But if you only follow the first rule, you won’t get anywhere. Also, you must finish and you must publish, and as you get braver you should be doing all of those things all the time.

My personal verdict: I don’t do a good enough job of following this advice, I have erred too far on the side of solitary invisible perfectionism in the past. I am very proud of the things I’ve actually published, even the ones that felt underbaked at the time, and even the ones I wrote when I was a worse writer (which is all of them). Meanwhile I am not at all proud of the projects I shelved. Mostly I just feel shame about not finishing them.

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Advice: Cultivate your Writing Mode

This bit of advice almost-but-not-quite made the Nigh Universal Advice list due to its popularity. The gist is that you want to develop a way of being, call it “writing mode,” you want it to be distinct from “everything else mode,” and you want to be able to get into writing mode reliably. Why?

Anne Lamott says:

You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night.

There may be a Nurse Ratched–like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.

You are desperate to communicate, to edify or entertain, to preserve moments of grace or joy or transcendence, to make real or imagined events come alive. But you cannot will this to happen. It is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work. So you might as well just go ahead and get started.

How do you get into writing mode? One way, already discussed at length, is to write every day around the same time, but a lot of writers have a more elaborate ritual than that.

Robert Olen Butler in From Where You Dream:

So here’s one of those practical suggestions for getting into the zone. Find a place and some objects that you go to and engage only when you’re writing fiction. If you have only one space and one computer that you must use for all written things, then change the type font you use for your fiction or the color of your screen.

I haven’t really tried this idea because it’s so hard for me to implement. I’m frequently in different places and don’t have access to my home writing shrine. Also, my native mode is more about doing small bursts of work and then, often, switching tasks. All the magic is in defining what the bursts of work will be, concretely enough that I can execute them in one try rather than getting distracted.

I haven’t figured out yet if I will need to give up on this theory and instead write for hours at a time in order to be successful. I might. I found very few — but not zero —accounts of successful writers working in tiny bursts.

My personal verdict: Uncertain, untried, will only try out of desperation. I currently believe this advice is not really meant for me.

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Advice: Manage your Dopamine

I talked a lot in the Drive to Write article about the big picture of motivation, about whether you have only abstract, intellectual wanting-to-write, or whether you also feel a magnetic pull, a “just wanna” about writing.

(Here I remind you that I am not a neurobiologist and I don’t know what I’m talking about, and probably neither do you, so this will all be very handwavy. We’ll be talking about dopamine mostly in the vibes-based, instagram sort of way rather than with any scientific precision.)

This bit of advice is smaller in scope. It’s not about whether you “just wanna” at a high level, it’s about how your degree of “wanna” gets tweaked over time, based on how the writing is going. As we talked about before, the magnetic-pull part of the human motivational system is very complicated and has a lot of interacting moving parts, but two of them seem to matter a lot to these smaller-scope adjustments.

There’s the learning-feedback bit — the part that notices every day whether writing felt satisfying or not, and then feeds that signal back into your wanting-to-write at later times. And then there’s also the progress-monitor part, the part that notices when you’re on the right track, making progress, getting somewhere, having traction.

The advice says: attend to that. Make sure you’re learning that writing is rewarding, and make sure you have a sense of progress.

Writing doesn’t necessarily feel good by default! Anne Lamott says:

My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.

And then of course there’s the famous Red Smith crack about what it’s like to write a daily column:

You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.

It seems to me that you’ve got to find some way to make writing feel good, or you will stop doing it.

How do you do that? Again, the writing advice industry mostly lets us down. There is not much advice out there that directly, explicitly addresses this question.

I think maybe the reason there’s so little advice about reward signal hacking is that it’s so rare to try to force yourself to become a writer who enjoys writing.

The two tacks I do see in advice books are: first, don’t become a writer if you don’t natively, effortlessly enjoy it. Second, expect writing to be painful, you’ll just have to suffer through it. Sometimes you get both pieces of advice from the same advice-giver!

That seems dumb, and probably not even quite accurate. I have a strong sense that we can do better than that.

But how?

Well, that’s probably individual and personal.

Some of it is probably down to attending to your own satisfaction, when it happens to be there. If you natively enjoy the act of writing good sentences, try to notice when that happens, and savor it. So my top suggestion here is to engage your metacognition, watch yourself work, and notice what it’s actually like. If you realize that you’re digging it, sink into that feeling, and dig it more.

And some, at least for me, is about doing the right kind of progress tracking. You need to feel that you’re getting somewhere, and it can’t feel fake. I don’t like metrics like “words written” or “pages written” because they are so obviously gameable, but they work well for quite a lot of people. I prefer different kinds of milestones, like getting a specific tricky chunk of a manuscript outlined to my satisfaction, or turning that outline into a draft. When I accomplish steps like that, that feels like real progress toward publication.

I also see a lot of my friends getting daily satisfaction by blogging or writing webfics rather than writing longform content offline and editing and polishing it before sharing. If they have to wait months or years to get feedback from readers, it’s too long of a slog and they don’t make it. They crave reactions, feedback, liveblogs, comments, anything that shows that their writing is reaching someone, so they release their content in a trickle, even at the cost of making worse artifacts. The more immediate the feedback, the better this works; having the loop be small is very important.

My personal verdict: Writing is optional for me. There is plenty to do and I have no reason to coerce or force myself to do something that is painful and unrewarding. I’m not that kind of masochist. I keep trying different approaches to writing until I find one that feels good more of the time than not, that provides enough satisfaction that I feel eager rather than reluctant to write — and if I can’t do that, then I move on to more fruitful orchards. That, in large part, is why I’m mostly-foreclosing on fiction writing and sticking with the known fun of non-fiction writing.

This approach is working. I enjoy the writing I actually do. I hope for the same for you.

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That’s it, we’re through the advice about being a writer, and that concludes the second major arc of this series.

Tomorrow we’ll move into the third and final arc, the annotated bibliography. It won’t just be a list of books, it’s juicier than that. In each article, I’ll present an overview of the subject matter, and then I’ll tell you about the state of the writing-advice field in that area. My hope is that I can steer you to the books that will best suit your interests, while helping you avoid the ones that are narrow and unrelated to you.

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1. My partner Eliezer would want me to mention here that there is a solution to the quality conundrum. You can just publish under a pseudonym and it still counts as publishing! You can always claim the pseudonym as your own, later on, if you want to.

2. Alicorn was mostly talking about glowfic, and there are many reasons why glowfic threads get stuck that are outside an individual’s control. Collaboration is hard.