How to write a lot [Book Review]

Here’s my review of Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (APA LifeTools). I loved it so much that I listened to the audiobook three times in a row.

In short: read it, I loved it

Overall, I have to say, this is such a fun and hilarious read. It’s a short read and maybe not the most revolutionary book, such as Cathy Mazek’s Making Time to Write, that’s part writing guide, part feminist manifesto or Write No Matter What that has many very concrete tips on psychological aspects of academic writing or Joshua Schimel’s Writing Science that is more about how to write well and how to write (as a craft) in general. How to Write a Lot is more about making the act of academic writing happen more often with some general practical tips along the way.

How to Write a Lot is an extremely worthwhile read or listen, depending on how you consume this content. It was just hilarious, at least if you share this guy’s sense of humor, which I did. In my opinion, he has an extremely funny way of talking about the universal challenges of academia. It’s just very relatable and fun. A light read that will maybe teach you some more tricks but you can listen as you do something else and have a laugh.

Even if you think you already know a lot about academic writing, it’s a fun read. It does have some solid tips that I’m also going to summarise below or at least the most important takeaways for me. But overall, I can just highly recommend it, because it’s so fun to listen. Altough I must warn you, fellow epigrammetrist Astrid hated the speaker on Audible.

No matter if you’re an experienced writer or you don’t know anything about it, How to Write a Lot is a fun read. I can highly recommend it, even if you already know everything that he says. Whereas, for example, Joshua Schimel, I think, is more for someone who maybe already has some experience and is trying to hone their craft. At least I assume it would be a challenging read for a complete newbie and maybe over the top if you’re just starting to figure it out. Maybe start with our blogpost series first 😉 I mean, of course, it would have been great to have learned all that from the get-go, but I’m not sure if at the get-go I would have been able to take it in as much as I have now.

Anyway, enough blabbing. Let’s get to the content!

Key Takeaways from How to Write a Lot

Here are my key takeaways from How to Write a Lot.

Use Pomodoros for mini-goals

First of all, just as Barbara Oakley, Silvia recommends that you track your goals to using time blocking, ideally using “process, not product” sessions (see Procrastination and the PhD life), as recommended by Barbara Oakley. For example, use Pomodoros, that is 25-minute segments. For these segments, you should set mini-goals, such as “fix section 2”. 25 minutes may not seem like much, but it is actually enough to make a serious dent in something like “fix section 2”, depending on how long section 2 is, and it will hopefully cure the problem of so-called “writer’s block” (which Silvia thinks doesn’t actually exist for academic writing).

When suffering from writer’s block, make an outline

Silvia thinks that in academia there is no writer’s block because writing just isn’t like writing for a Nobel Prize in Literature. I’m not sure if this applies entirely to the humanities because while the second edition of his book encompasses all disciplines and has some very (!) funny humanities jokes in it, he does come from psychology and the book is still more geared toward science, where obviously academic writing is much more formulaic. But I do think overall he is right about his idea that if you think you’re experiencing writer’s block, you really just don’t have an outline and if you had an outline, and thus knew what you wanted to say, you also wouldn’t experience writer’s block. At least it’s worth a try if you feel stuck (Try our Article Outline Template Challenge!). And I have identified similar issues of procrastinating because you simply don’t know what the next steps are in my own writing.

You write a lot by scheduling regular sessions (4h/week) instead of the more common binge-writing

Waiting for enormous blocks of time to show up is a big waste of time, as Silvia states. Academics often fool themselves into thinking they have to wait for a big time slot to write, such as spring break. A time when even humanities scholars suddenly get into the math of how they can make up for all the time lost by writing many more pages than they had initially planned. (I loved his Humanities jokes. Let me know how you like them!)

To effectively increase writing output, the author of How to Write a Lot suggests scheduling writing sessions and sticking to the schedule. It’s as simple as that. This involves tracking goals and employing short, focused bursts of writing time, such as Pomodoro sessions with clearly defined mini-goals. The recommendation is to commit to at least four hours of writing weekly, maintaining consistency rather than allowing the quantity of hours per week to fluctuate drastically. Don’t skip weeks, it’s simply not great for forming a positive writing habit if you reward yourself with not writing. Also, the more inconsistent you are, the longer the breaks, the more you will face the issue of analysis paralysis as you don’t remember what the next steps are and get overwhelmed. This is simply less of an issue if you write more regularly.

So you schedule the writing, put it in your calendar and then actually do it. And you do that for at least four hours a week. That’s not a ton and in some weeks it might make sense for you to spend some more hours than that, but actually he’d rather you be consistent and not skip a week because four hours is plenty and you can get substantial work done in that time. When you’ve been successful, don’t reward yourself with not writing because that’s not the message that we want to send here and it would be counterproductive psychologically.

Don’t wait for inspiration

In the same vein, don’t wait for inspiration to get going. Or deadlines to scare the hell out of you to make you finally start working on your article.

Vow to stop the binge-writing cycle. Not only does it create sub-par quality output, it also makes you hate and dread writing. Following through with regular sessions may help teach you that writing isn’t something you need to be scared of. It’s simply not such a big deal if it’s a regular habit.

Treat it like a class or meeting

You should treat these writing appointments like a classes or a meetings. You don’t cancel a class for some stupid reason, like you can’t just not show up because you have other stuff to do like people often do with their self-appointed writing meetings. You can only cancel for very good reasons.

The treating it like an actual meeting (for example by scheduling it as Writing Group in your calender) is why Silvia assumes that, for example, formal writing groups work for many people, because colleagues tend to be more respectful of an actual meeting and wouldn’t interrupt you during a meeting, even though they might interrupt you during a writing session even when you put up a sign at the door that they shouldn’t. Because people just treat writing like it’s it’s not as formal an obligation as other things, even though it should be because it’s actually the most important thing in your career that your career should be structured around and not the other way around.

To foster routine and habit formation, writing should ideally be done in the same place and at the same time, echoing strategies recommended by Cal Newport and other productivity experts. Newport brings this up in his latest book Slow Productivity, which is a bit of a best of his old strategies. In particular, this recommendation was from How to be a Straight A Student.

And that’s it for today!

Have fun implementing those tips and I can only reiterate: the book is still very well worth reading even though I have already shared some of the key takeaways in this post.

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