Rebecca Foote recently invited me to a part of an ACH panel on publishing in digital humanities along with Jojo Karlin and Nat McGartland. You can find other posts related to that conversation here.

During the recent ACH panel on DH publishing, Jojo Karlin commented on the sheer quantity of public writing that the Scholars’ Lab puts out into the world. In the moment, I flippantly referred to that volume as a kind of sickness that we couldn’t turn off. But I followed up with a more serious answer: as I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been making a concerted effort to write every day lately as a response to the cataclysmic political times that we live in. The real truth is that I believe it would become much harder for me to write if I were to slow down. Sharing things publicly is really an accountability mechanism more than anything else, a way to force myself to keep writing.

There’s an old saying among music teachers that practicing for one hour daily is more useful than practicing for seven hours once a week. There are a few thoughts behind this. For one, you actually damage your muscles beyond a productive state if you work yourself to the point of exhaustion. By contrast, the same amount of time measured out equally across a week yields a consistent and healthy amount of stress on your muscles, recovery time, and rest to build up the neural pathways in your brain that you ultimately want to get from practicing. The once weekly seven-hour approach is also less likely to yield useful practice time. With a big stretch of time like that you will, at best, need breaks. At worst, you will find yourself distracted, pick up your cell phone, or your brain will wander. It’s difficult to imagine what you would practice for seven hours in a row, let alone the degree of concentration that would be required to sustain it. You’ll be better at deliberate, intentional practice every day.

I’ve been approaching writing the same way. I’ll share a follow-up post about some different tools and tactics I use to keep the pace, but the underlying idea behind all this is that writing is a muscle, a skill that you can practice. If you do it every day, writing ultimately becomes easier whenever you sit down to do it. The approach is akin to what Twyla Tharp calls “the creative habit,” and I have had to get creative to keep it going. Somedays I will have a substantial chunk of time, but those days are rare luxuries. It’s more common for me to be scrambling to find a way to fit writing in however I can. Even five minutes at the desk matters—it’s a way to shake off the rust. I only have ten minutes while walking? I can spend it dictating into my phone. Two minutes before a meeting waiting for others to arrive? I can make some quick notes.

Therein lies the real secret: the daily approach is a way to save time in the long run. I learn how to write regardless of whether inspiration is striking. Since starting this practice, my voice is much easier to find when sitting down to write. The editorial process feels easier to navigate; I’m much less given to endless tinkering. I need writing to be as natural and easy as possible, and the daily practice is essential for that. Sitting down to a blank page is always frightening. It would be immeasurably scarier if I weren’t facing it down everyday.

In short, I don’t write every day because I have oceans of time. I write every day because I don’t have time to waste, and the muscle needs to stay loose to confront that reality.

If you’ve ever hung out with me for more than a few seconds, you know that I’m obsessed with process. I’m always talking about some new thing that I’m trying. I’ll do X thing over Y number of days until I reach some milestone goal. Cleaning, reading, listening to music—they’ve all been the subject of some program I’m trying out. Obviously not all of these schemes stick. My latest goal has been to blog every week, though, and I’ve been doing a pretty good job so far this semester of keeping up with it. This impulse to write consistently is my own way to try and deal with the political climate we’re living in. After all, if writing didn’t matter, the powers that be wouldn’t try so strongly to silence disagreeing voices. Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song has a great quote to that effect that has really stuck with me: “We have a choice— to be on the side of creation, or surrender to the powers that destroy.” I’ve been trying to cultivate this practice of creation for myself. My long-term goal is to make progress on my book project, something that often gets kicked to the back burner. To make this happen, I’ve decided to spend some time each day writing in whatever capacity I can.

At the same time, I’ve also been trying to get back into exercise, something I have never been fairly attentive to. When I was a kid, I was the least athletic person possible. As an adult I’m a bit better but only just. I’ll run for a bit, push too hard, then stop for a while. I’ve been trying something different lately. Rather than running until I hurt myself, as I usually do when I try to get back into it, I’m working through a couch to 5k program. I’m honoring the real needs of my body, starting basically from nothing and building up to a healthier lifestyle.¹

In this context, I’ve been thinking about writing like a muscle. How can I exercise my creative skills such that, when I sit down to write, I’m not waiting for inspiration to strike? What would it mean to build daily writing up in a sustainable practice? What would a writing plan that asks you to create every day look like if it was modeled on a running program?

I set about putting together a writing plan with this framing in mind. In running, conventional wisdom is that you only want to be adding distance or increasing speed any given week—not both. Applying this to writing, I aimed to produce a concrete number of words each day as opposed to, say, writing for a specified amount of time. This meant that I could fit my work into the cracks between things, typing on my phone or dictating while driving. I developed a plan for myself modeled on running programs that start out with small, set intervals—e.g., run for 15 seconds, walk for two minutes, run for 30 seconds, walk for two minutes. The proportions change, and the amount increases week by week.

Without further ado, here is the plan that I wrote and executed for myself in April:

• Week 1:
  • Write one book sentence every workday.
  • Write one sentence of creative work each day on the weekend.
• Week 2:
  • Write two book sentences every workday.
  • Write two sentences of creative work each day on the weekend.
• Week 3:
  • Write three book sentences every workday.
  • Write three sentences of creative work each day on the weekend.
• Week 4:
  • Write four book sentences every workday.
  • Write four sentences of creative work each day on the weekend.

My goals were very modest starting out: just craft one sentence. Each day, I added pebble by pebble to my final product, a mound that grew over the course of the month. This might feel ridiculous. What is the point of writing one sentence? How can you even get into that mindset? Fair critiques. It depends on how you work, but this is also part of the point. I treated it like an exercise by warming up. For me, this most often meant that I would spend five minutes while driving just thinking and then ten minutes dictating. At first, I intentionally stopped myself after the target number of sentences, but I would make a note of the upcoming topic for the next day’s work. Hemingway famously suggested that you stop writing in the middle of a sentence, and I similarly tried to make sure that the next day’s work would be ready to go. The pivot to creative work on the weekends was a way to keep my momentum going while adopting a restful mentality, a way to tie in something enjoyable while still respecting work/life boundaries. The creative work has been incredibly nourishing, and the practice has really helped push my writing muscles.

I’ve been very satisfied with the results of this program, and I’m going to keep it going as long as I can. Writing aside, I found that I was in a much better mood each day this past month knowing that I was creeping along. By the end of the month, I was writing nearly a full paragraph each day, and I abandoned my goal to stop writing after reaching my target. I found that I kept finding new ways to fit words in—five minutes here, five minutes there. Huge chunks of time are a luxury; I need to be able to grab the words when I can. All those sentences will accumulate. Slow progress still goes forward.

Gotta start walking.