One piece of advice turns up in this archive so often that it starts to look like a house rule: write first, before anything else gets a claim on the day. Angela Sutton said it about her dissertation in 2016 and about her day job in 2019. A professor of French quoted in a 2019 post called it “give to yourself first.” Bryna R. Campbell built her mornings around three longhand pages. Even Lauren Collins, the New Yorker staff writer who answered the blog’s questions in 2019, said she likes to write early, though taking her daughter to school meant she now wrote from around nine to four. Here is what the writers did with that hour, and what they did when an hour was not enough.
Finding the hour
In Three Tricks to Finishing that Dissertation Sutton reports what she told a roundtable of Vanderbilt history students. They did not want to hear about organizing sources or framing an argument; they wanted the things nobody tells you. Her first trick was arithmetic. Count the pages you still need, count the working days left in your funding, divide. It usually comes to a page or two a day, which fits in an hour. She wrote hers first thing, before getting dressed, so the evening could not swallow it and the guilt could not keep her awake.
Three years later, in Writing With A Day Job, the hour was still there, now competing with a postdoc, friends, family and bills. What had changed was the honesty about it. She had more ideas than one hour a day could carry, so she picked the projects she loved and stopped expecting each to pay. Paid writing moved into the workday. The personal hour stayed for the passion project, and, she notes with some amusement, more of those projects were published once she stopped demanding that they would be.
Three pages of nothing much
Campbell’s Journaling and the Morning Pages explains the practice she took from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness writing every morning, no rereading, no standard to meet. If you have nothing to say, you write that you have nothing to say. She admits that the first half page of many entries was cranky sputtering, and that ideas for books, classes and a business came out of the rest. Sutton took up the habit as well and describes it in her day-job post as a way of clearing the clutter before the real work.
The morning pages work because they lower the stakes. Nobody reads them, so there is nothing to perform. That is also their limit. Sooner or later a draft has to be read by somebody, and the writers in this archive had their own ways of getting there.
Someone to answer to
The Writing Buddy System is the low-tech answer. Tanya Roth and Campbell lived two time zones apart, so they kept one shared document with a heading for each week, posted check-ins, commented on each other’s, and talked by video once a month. By late August 2016 the document ran to twenty-one pages. Campbell is specific about who makes a good partner: someone with what she calls an attitude of abundance, who roots for your progress instead of measuring it against their own.
Not everyone has a Tanya. Writing groups help, and one of the scholars in the dissertation-to-book post describes the several she belonged to over the years, from a twice-a-semester accountability group that ended in a sleepover to a chapter-review group that met monthly for five years. When none of that is available and a deadline is real, some writers pay for structured feedback instead. A writing coach who works through your draft with you rather than rewriting it is a version of the same accountability, with a calendar attached.
Quotas, stopping points and footnotes
The most detailed working method in the archive is in From Dissertation to Book, where Raquelle K. Bostow collected advice from Régine Michelle Jean-Charles and Annabel L. Kim, both of whom had turned their dissertations into books published by Ohio State University Press. Kim set a quota of 500 words per writing day during her postdoc and found it never took more than two hours. Once she was teaching, she cut the target to 150 or 200 words in 25-minute Pomodoro blocks and was surprised how much piled up. She also stopped each day in the middle of a section, so that the next day she had to rebuild the connection fresh. Her other rule will save anyone hours of grief: never leave a citation incomplete, and use a reference manager such as Zotero from the start.
Jean-Charles adds two habits that sit at the other end of the process. The first came from her own mentor, Farah Jasmine Griffin: start every new project with a fresh notebook and record what you are thinking as you write. Years later, rereading one of those journals, she found the wish to write a book about rape culture that she had once feared was too narrow for publishers, and that wish became her first book. The second is about voice. A senior colleague once told a friend of hers to move every quotation of other scholars into the footnotes, and see what was left. What remains, as she puts it, is what is absolutely essential to your argument.
Hearing the sentence
Collins, in her interview with the blog, describes a different temperament. She types up her notes, highlights what she needs, puzzles it into an outline, then drafts from start to finish and cannot move on until the words before are right. That is close to the opposite of Kim’s habit of stopping mid-section, and the contrast is useful. There is no one method. There is the one you will actually keep doing.
Sutton’s post on nonfiction voice, written after she taught a family-history writing class for older adults at the Nashville Public Library, gets at what all these routines are for. Voice, she says, cannot be taught in a day. It grows out of the things you were teased for, the things your parents tried to change and the things that got you into trouble. Sutton does not prescribe a test, but a practical one is to hear the sentence. Reading a draft aloud catches the stiff phrase and the borrowed jargon faster than rereading it silently, and if you would rather not perform for the cat, a tool that reads your draft back to you out loud does the same job.
A routine you could start on Monday
Put the archive’s advice together and you get something modest. Pick an hour, preferably early, and protect it from email. Spend the first few minutes emptying your head onto paper. Work to a small, countable target, a page or a few hundred words, and stop while you still know what comes next. Keep citations complete as you go. Tell one person what you are aiming for and report back every week. Now and then, read what you wrote out loud.
None of that is new, and the writers would be the first to say so. What makes these posts worth rereading is that they show the routine failing and being rebuilt: under a heavy teaching load, after the 2016 election, with small children at home, in the first weeks of a pandemic. The hour kept coming back because they kept bringing it back.
The posts in this essay
- Three Tricks to Finishing that DissertationAngela Sutton · October 17, 2016
- Writing With A Day JobAngela Sutton · January 14, 2019
- Journaling and the Morning PagesBryna R. Campbell · October 31, 2016
- The Writing Buddy SystemBryna R. Campbell · August 29, 2016
- From Dissertation to BookRaquelle K. Bostow · January 28, 2019
- Sparkling Water and Chocolate Eclairs: An Interview with Lauren CollinsRaquelle K. Bostow · May 13, 2019
- The Elusive Nonfiction Writing VoiceAngela Sutton · August 13, 2018