How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (review)

My path to reading this book demonstrates that I did so for pleasure, not through necessity. With a paper in need of completion to meet a deadline for the end of the month, I took two days off from work. This got me out of the office and into my study, enabling me to concentrate on the job at hand without distractions. I surprised myself by completing the task with ease on the first day, writing the discussion and adding well over 1200 words. My reward for such productivity was a morning off on the second day, browsing in some of my favourite bookshops in Amsterdam, where I bought How to Write a Lot. Virtue rewarded, indeed.

So, how do you write a lot? The secret is to write a lot. Silvia the conjuror pulls off a fine sleight of hand in telling those who don't write a lot that if they would only write a lot then they would write a lot. Simple, eh? And this only takes 132 pages of text. Much longer, and the book would be too obvious. Silvia won't make friends with those who are looking for a magic formula that generates maximum output from minimal effort, but introducing them to reality is surely good, too.

But there is much more to How to Write a Lot than is suggested by my glib assessment. Silvia is right, I'm sure, when he postulates that 'many people never learned the nuts and bolts of submitting papers to journals, revising manuscripts for resubmission, or working with coauthors' (xi). I am certain from my own experience as an editor that this is part of the trouble, but such ignorance is not the main problem. As Silvia notes, many academics do not arrange their schedules to include regular time for writing. Writing takes time, and it benefits from an absence of distractions. How do people expect to write if they don't make time for it? At the simplest level, Silvia recommends that any writer needs to close the door, take the phone off the hook, ignore the e-mail, and get on with the job. Regular writing periods are essential; 'making a schedule and sticking to it is the only way' (17). Further, I would argue that, once ineffective academics metamorphose into productive authors, they will find that writing expands outside the scheduled times because they need to get on paper the ideas that keep popping into their heads.

To give a personal example, I bought How to Write a Lot on Tuesday, finished reading it on Thursday, and wrote the first three paragraphs of this review on Friday over a coffee in McDonald's, where I took my son for a treat after school finished at noon. He ate and watched cartoons while Dad scribbled in his notebook; we enjoy each other's company and silence. Saturday was a family day. I got up at 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, typed my draft notes, and had stretched my draft review to almost 1000 words while the family slept on. Not quite Silvia's idea of regular scheduling, but my gung-ho, grab-time-when-I-can approach fits well with a busy family life and my own style of writing. Like Silvia (13), I try to write for two hours per day (or more, if I am lucky), at least five days per week, but I move it around to fit in with family and my job. An hour before 6:30 a.m. and another hour later in the day works for me.

One thing that writing academics might consider is not using the word processor all the time. I always carry a notebook in my pocket for scribbling down ideas, phrases, and so on, and I still write, instead of typing, new ideas...