This is part of a series of posts I’m calling “manuscript recipe,” where I try to distill advice from my favorite pieces of writing on writing into a set of guidelines for how to actually get a manuscript over the finish line. This one is about the need to keep writing. The previous post is here.

Momentum, writing to think, and notes

My favorite piece on how to maintain momentum is Lynn Hunt’s 2010 essay “How Writing Leads to Thinking (and Not the Other Way Around),” published in the American Historical Association’s magazine Perspectives.

The title of Hunt’s essay, of course, isn’t about momentum, but about the essential role that writing plays in clarifying one’s thoughts about a subject. Yet the bulk of the essay focuses on the roadblocks on the way to the first draft and how to get past them.

When you think about it, that actually makes sense. One big roadblock definitely is the misconception that your argument should be crisp and clear before you start writing. That’s commonly not the case, especially not in the humanities. More often than not, it’s only in writing a first draft that I realize all the things I do not really know or do not fully understand. Then I have to go back and think things through again before I can proceed to the second draft.

So to gain momentum, it’s helpful to think about writing as a part of the thinking process.

But careful! Only writing counts as writing. Reading and research do not count as writing and will not produce a manuscript on their own!

And in fact, one important piece of advice in Hunt’s piece is: Do not look at your notes. You will get lost and never write a thing.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly have had many a writing session derailed by increasingly anxiety-ridden perusal of notebooks filled with all kinds of detail about (marginally) relevant scholarship and ideas. When I’d emerge from the notebook reading session, I tended to feel both that my manuscript was worthless and that I really didn’t know the first thing about the relevant scholarship.

Don’t go there.

Grow your manuscript one page at a time

So, remember, only writing counts as writing. Indeed, the key piece of advice in Hunt’s essay, I think, is the “radish rule.” This was always a favorite among the students in my class on writing in the historical discipline.

Every summer, Hunt says, her grandmother would call her mother daily and report how many radishes there were in her garden that day. That number kept growing through the season. In the same way, “you want the number of your pages to increase steadily over time, culminating in the completion of a first draft.”

There is a lot of wisdom in that simple statement. How many times have you thought “I can’t concentrate now, I need a longer stretch of time to really get into it?” How many times have you tossed out a stretch of pages entirely as a lost cause? How many times have you edited the same five pages for five days and not written a single new one?

I thought so.

The most important rule in writing, especially writing something as long as a book, is to keep on keeping on. You’ll only get to a full draft if you turn down the volume of your inner critic sufficiently to be able to actually hear yourself think—and to let yourself write.

As Hunt says, “what really counts is momentum, not momentum as in a jet racing forward to the completion of its route but rather momentum as in three steps forward, two steps back.” Lynn Hunt has written nearly twenty books, so we might do worse than take her word for it.

The mid-to-late stage of the manuscript is the moment when the determination to just keep writing is at a special premium. At least for me, the early part is full of excitement: there are so many possibilities! The end is also rather fun: you are done with the difficult writing parts and can concentrate on polishing sentences, finding nice epigraphs, and hunting down references in the footnotes. All those tasks, if sometimes tedious, are much less stressful than trying to formulate your key arguments.

The middle, though, is often a slog. It’s where you don’t really know if the work is going to be what you envisioned it or something completely different. It’s easy to lose focus.

When you find yourself stuck in worrying mode, remember the radish rule. Keep the number of pages growing and you will eventually get out of the bog.

Of course, you might then be faced with the new frustrations of having to pare back an excessively long manuscript—but at least those are a different set of frustrations. And with those, too, you can deal with by keeping on keeping on.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash