It took me forever to finish my book. It started out as my dissertation—and then it hung around my neck for years. I went to more archives, I read more literature, I filled pages and pages of notebooks with scribbles, mind maps, what have you.

Was that necessary? Yes, probably.

Did it really have to take that long? No, probably not.

I finally started making proper progress when I followed the advice—often heard but rarely heeded—to write every day. Write. Every. Day. I called it “forty minutes for the manuscript,” and I did it every single day, even on vacation. I set my timer, opened the draft, and wrote for forty minutes.

Did I finish the manuscript just by writing forty minutes every day? Heck no. Did it keep my mind working on it and my conscience clear(er)? Absolutely.

However. I recently asked one of the most productive academic writers I have met, Susan Kent, how exactly she does all that writing. Susan is the author of the highly enjoyable 1987 Sex and Suffrage in Britain and, most recently (in 2020), of Gender: A World History. In between, she wrote more than ten other books, so I figured she should have some sound advice.

What she said sort of surprised me. I thought that being so productive, she’d tell me what all the advice books say: just schedule time to write, don’t hold out for extended blocks, take what you can. But instead she said that she couldn’t possibly write in short bursts; she has “always needed very large swaths of time open to me to be able to write.” Luckily (for her and us!) she’s been able to arrange such swaths of time.

I think that goes to show that we shouldn’t be too dogmatic about the “right” way to be productive in writing. People are different. I found that making sure to do short daily writing sessions was essential to making any progress. But needing full days, or even full consecutive days, devoted to writing is perfectly defensible, and if you feel you need that, you should work hard to arrange it for yourself. (Indeed, I doubt that I would have finished the book without a well-timed sabbatical of sorts.)

That said, the large swaths of time are no use if you while them away in procrastination and end up not with a pile of pages but a pile of guilt-ridden thoughts. As Susan pointed out, having arranged time to write, “you have to sit down and do it.  No matter what, you have to make yourself get to your desk or chair and just write whatever you can.”

There, I completely agree. So much of writing a book is not about the brilliant ideas you have, it’s about the ability to keep on keeping on: to go through one more archival box, to write one page, to edit a messy chapter.

What’s more, the ideas and the keeping on are closely intertwined. In Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling, Philip Pullman—author of the His Dark Materials trilogy and a very thoughtful man when it comes to writing and storytelling—talks about this explicitly. He says:

The question I and other writers get asked more than any other is: “Where do you get your ideas from?” Another question from the same centre of feeling is “How can I become inspired?” And like many other writers, because I don’t know the answer to these questions I tend to be unhelpful or evasive about my answers. “Where do you get your ideas from?” they ask, and I say, “I don’t know where they come from, but I know where they come to: they come to my desk, and if I’m not there, they go away again.” Which may not be helpful, but it is true.

Brilliant. And, in fact, very helpful! Because what it says is that you don’t have to be brilliant. Or at least, that brilliance is not a state of being, it’s a state of doing. Working away at a thing is more than half the battle, and besides, working away is often a precondition for that magic of insight to happen.

Working away also happens to an extent before the writing does: when you have done the research, ideas are easier to come by. As Susan pointed out, evidence is also a good antidote to the worry about whether your work is worthy (a worry that often keeps people from writing productively). As she says, “a lot of people don’t feel they have the authority to make assertions that they set down on paper,” which “can be paralyzing.” The evidence is what gives you the authority, so doing your research carefully and thinking about your evidence thoroughly are essential for the writing to flow.

So don’t wait for insight to land in front of you. Gather your evidence, bring it to your desk, and work away—and you’ll invite it in. (Plus, in the meantime, you’ll be making progress on the mundane parts.)

Image source: Image of an hourglass posted by Birmingham museums trust at https://unsplash.com/photos/a-drawing-of-an-hourglass-with-a-bird-flying-by-BUtyiqf6ZBs