Writing Process

[trouble]

I've been struggling a lot with the actual process of getting words-on-the-page for the past month or so. (It's been terrible.)

Today I had a good chat about it with my thesis adviser, where she talked about her writing process when she was writing full-time.

She described spending her morning review, re-reading, and revising her previous work, some time going over her notes and plans to make sure she had all the evidence she needed for her arguments at her fingertips, and then spending basically the last two or so hours of the day doing the actual typing.

I think this could be helpful to me, but I'm curious about other people's getting words on the page methods.

Comments

[zulu]

Having everything to hand is crucial to me. I've found that if I have a really detailed outline, including all the citations/quotes I'll potentially use in a passage, then I'm much more likely to start working. It also helps me if I make very defined work-periods, goals, and rest-periods. For instance, in each hour, I can write 500 words and have a ten-minute break for walking around and stretching. It definitely helps.

Good luck getting stuff on paper!

[berangere]

I generally write a really detailed table of contents (chapters, sub-chapters, paragraphs...). When reading the sources I'll use, I classify each part (quote... idea...) that I will use inside this table of contents, with the bibliographical reference.
When the reading is done, I take each paragraph and classify (again) all the notes inside (for exemple group the references that shares the same idea, and then just after them, group the references that absolutely reject that idea...) and then only, I start writing.

[ajnabieh]

I have had two work patterns: pre-baby and post-baby. Post-baby is basically "You have these next two hours at the cafe, WRITE LIKE A MOFO," which is probably not helpful to anyone else--but it is *very possible* to make good dissertation progress while only writing for 2-3 hours a day, provided you are hella efficient. I had my son a month after I defended my prospectus, and I'll defend my dissertation when he's 2.5, including fieldwork and a regular teaching schedule.

But, pre-baby, I relied on detailed outlines of my arguments to break my writing up into small chunks of 2-3 pages each. I'd get up in the morning, get my wife off to work, do my internets, write a chunk; eat breakfast, internets, write a chunk; lunch, CSI rerun, write a chunk, leave for campus and do my class reading on the train or, if I didn't have class, go do yard work, write a chunk before my wife got home. Repeat x5. Before my dissertation I didn't write on weekends. Oh, I remember those days.

I also keep all my notes on texts I'm likely to use go into EndNote so that I just need to pull things. I also pull quotes from my reading notes directly into a text file that I keep open while I write, so I just need to pull them. This also saves me from unnecessary rereading later, frequently.