How to be a productive writer

Note: This article was first written in Chinese on August 1, 2017 and translated into English in 2022.

A while ago, I read Haruki Murakami’s My Profession is a Novelist. Despite differences in the type of writing we do for our careers (him as a novelist and I as an academic), his book profoundly resonated with me. With the inspiration that came from reading his book, I would like to share with everyone some writing insights. 
 
The part I found most touching in My Profession is a Novelist was in Chapter 6 "Befriending Time— Writing a Novel." Despite the chapter focusing on how to write novels, I feel as though there is much to be learned and applied to writing academic articles as well. 
 
When it comes to writing novels, there is a popular misconception that novels are just made-up stories and they are written when inspiration strikes the author. Many people blindly worship inspiration, falsely believing that inspiration is the main driver of an author’s words. But what actually goes into the writing process of authors like Haruki Murakami?

When writing a novel, I make myself write ten pages a day, each with about 400 words…Even if I feel like continuing writing, I will stop at ten pages. On the other hand, even if that day I don’t feel up to it, I will push myself to fill up ten pages worth of writing. I do this because in long-term projects, consistency makes the biggest difference. If you write only when it comes easily to you and stop when you feel like it, it is hard to maintain a consistent writing schedule over time. As such, I write every day as if I were signing in for attendance, never breaking my daily routine of writing ten pages.

Haruki Murakami’s words deeply touched me. Almost all of the productive scholars I know consistently write every day. 

I’ve heard before that an assistant professor in a top American university had a blackboard in her office that she used to record how many words she wrote each day. The result of this was that not only was she a productive writer but every article she wrote ended up being published in top journals. She has since been recognized as a leading scholar in her field. Not surprisingly, she went from assistant professor to associate professor and was soon promoted to full professor. 
 
Similarly, one friend of mine used an Excel sheet to track how many words she wrote each day. She felt most clear headed in the morning, so she would go to a cafe without wifi and write for three hours, completing about 600 words a day. I’ve seen her Excel sheet before. When there were two zeros in a row (meaning that she did not write for two days), she left a comment beside the “zeros” that said “cut my fingers.”
 
Another friend is also an extremely productive scholar. During her non-teaching days, she spends every morning writing. She does this because she believes that writing is a very draining task; by doing the hardest work in the morning, when her mind is the clearest, she produces better results. When I first knew about her daily routines, I felt admiration and also confusion because I often felt as though I had nothing to write. Therefore, I was curious how she was able to write so much every day. On the contrary, she felt as though she always had something to write about: starting a new paper, editing an existing paper, writing a response memo, beginning a new project, taking notes on articles related to her papers, and summarizing said articles (which would often be useful later on when she wrote her own papers). By now she has made it a habit to write every morning. So long as she doesn’t have teaching scheduled, she would turn on her laptop and instantly be in her “writing mode.” Thanks to the habit, writing every day has become a process that doesn’t require much thought. How can we write every day? Below, I share with you her tips and tricks that have inspired me a lot.

For me, I can only write in the morning. My brain literally stops working after 12pm, at least the part governing writing... I think one way that might help is to spend some time in the evening thinking about the paragraphs you're going to write the next day: the main point, the papers you're going to cite, the supportive evidence, examples, etc. Then the next morning, you just write them out. I know sometimes we just don't know what to write. In situations like those, I just write anything in my head, which may not make any sense at all, but can occasionally give you intuitions.

​I conceive a paper as one consisting of about 20-30 paragraphs. Ideally, we could list an outline specifying what each paragraph is about, and then spend half an hour to an hour on each paragraph. I don't know about you, but thinking this way helps me greatly in alleviating any stress resulting from writing, because it seems more manageable now. Instead of keeping in mind the whole paper, all I have to focus on is this particular paragraph, and all I have to do is to spend two to three hours each day writing 2-4 paragraphs.

Relatedly, having an outline helps me a lot. But sometimes it's hard to know what you're going to write in advance, and even the best outline is subject to constant modification. Still, the times I write mostly efficiently and effortlessly are without exceptions the times when I have a good outline in hand.

To put it simply, plan what you want to write tomorrow. Break up an entire paper into 20-30 paragraphs. Don’t let the thought of writing a 9000-word English paper scare you into inaction. Reframe your thinking to focus on smaller goals such as writing 2–4 paragraphs or 600 words. In addition, having an outline is especially useful. 

Then how does one concentrate when it is time to work? I am lucky in that as soon as I begin working, I won’t be distracted by my phone or the Internet. The only website I really open when I’m working is Google Scholar. A colleague of mine uses the Pomodoro Technique to help her focus during her morning writing sessions. She installed a Pomodoro timer app on her laptop that counted down in 25-minute increments, during which she would write and then take a timed five-minute break in between. If this cycle of working for 25 minutes and then resting for 5 is repeated 7 times, that totals nearly 3 hours of concentrated work. This technique is great because it breaks down a large project into digestible work periods while also allowing us to balance rest and productivity. 
 
Well, some people may say: “Despite hearing a lot of sensible advice, I still can’t implement it in my own life.” I used to also be paralyzed by inaction and caught up in thoughts of “should I write or should I not?” (of course, even now I still have such moments). But after hearing what my friends had to share, I decided to slowly try and incorporate those methods into my own workflow. For instance, in May of this year, I started keeping track of word count in my Word documents and taking note of the words I had written each day. At the same time, I divided my papers into different, smaller sections such as the introduction, literature review (1, 2, 3, etc.), data, sample, variables, methods, descriptive results, regression results, and discussion. Then, before each writing session I would brainstorm a general idea of what I wanted to write that day as well as how much I aimed to write. Now, when I revisit the document I had worked on in May, I can still see the word count records I made at the time, which indicated that I had written 6,561 words in 7 days. I can recall very clearly the sense of accomplishment I had while I was writing that paper and seeing the word count grow day by day. 

Making a habit of writing every day is very difficult. It can sometimes take several years of consistent effort and self-discipline. It is also important to consider that everyone has different routines and lifestyles, so a process of trial and error is necessary in finding the most suitable way for you to develop a habit. The process of producing a paper is long and difficult, and waiting to write until the moment inspiration hits will not allow you to produce your best quality work. Here, I’d like to further share with everyone a passage from Haruki Murakami’s book My Profession is a Novelist: 

At the end, it is my personal opinion, but novel writing is very tedious, slow work. Seldom will you find it exciting or glamorous. I spend entire days sitting alone in a room with back-and-forth thoughts of 'this isn’t right, but neither is that,' racking my brain in search for the right words to form sentences or improve on them even the slightest bit. During this, no one will acknowledge my effort spent putting words on a page or walk over to pat my shoulder in encouragement and say ‘good job.’ It's just myself, celebrating my small successes with short inner dialogues of ‘hm nice.’ After the book is published, maybe no one pays attention to that sentence I meticulously composed. Novel writing is at its core, work. It is extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive, and it can be under-appreciated and discouraging.

Then why do we still write?

In answering this question, I’d like to share a quote which was used as a concluding sentence in Gengwang Yan’s book Essays on History:

Writing is not only critical for publishing and contributing to society but it is also the most crucial and serious stage of research. If we don’t write, research efforts will remain incomplete and our contribution to the field is rudimentary…Writing is the epitome of comprehension, a demonstration of the most rigorous thinking, and the most serious final stage of scientific research. If it is not written, it cannot be regarded as a completed research project.

Author Note:
Here is the link to the original article in Chinese: "'写写写'的心得分享: 将每天写作变成生活习惯." The author, Yue Qian, would like to thank Evalina Liu for her assistance with translations from Chinese to English.