Avoiding writer's block

By -
One of my Facebook friends mentioned that he had trouble getting going on writing projects, because he wasn't able to picture how to structure them. I advised him that I thought he was going about this backwards. I told him:

Just start writing. Don't worry about structure at all. Chuck ideas into a document. Once it is full of ideas, print it out. A couple of days later, take it to a café or diner, and look at it while you have a coffee. Make arrows to show where one idea should be moved earlier or later. Then go back to the computer and move the paragraphs where your reading showed they should go. Pretty soon the structure will be obvious: then you just write a few connecting sentences, and you are done!

It's like flipping around the duck-rabbit picture: instead of thinking "I have to have a structure so I can write," you think "I have to start writing, so I can discover what the structure is."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more