Bears in the woods

We have arrived at our second draft. If you are not there yet, you can carry along with the programme or come back to this page when you have.

This is where we move on from hastily translated Icelandic to something that actually resembles a coherent argument and as such can prompt fear and loathing (and procrastination). You have your shitty first draft - no more blank page. You have a nominal structure. You have gotten into the habit of sitting down to write (however imperfectly). You might be half way to your word limit or 80% there; it doesn’t matter, you probably will revise and delete a lot of this text in a few drafts time.

This is the point where you may decide, quite legitimately that there are gaps in your knowledge and you need to do a bit more reading. That is why this stage is fraught with danger. It is here that you can wander off into the research forest of shiny new things, get eaten by bears and never return. It is now that you might disrupt your writing practice.

You will of course still use use your writing sessions. You can work on short pieces of writing like blog posts to fill in the writing slots or if you really have nothing to write (unlikely) you can use your writing slots for research at this time - it is all of a piece. But cognitively, it is very different. Research is something we like, and can keep on doing ad infinitum. We can hide in research. Writing, not so much. So it takes a force of will to say, enough already, I need to get back to writing. Luckily, thanks to scheduling, you have some willpower left in the well.

The trick is to have a list of gaps (from your shitty first draft) and only research those things. Find them, takes notes, think thoughts, collect references. And repeat, until your task list is finished. If you come across something interesting, related but not central, bookmark it and return to it at a later date - get a system for collecting that information. Perhaps that will be useful in another chapter.

Set a time limit on how long you are going to spend in the research forest. You will never read all the things, so it won’t be ‘till I’m done’. Decide it. Schedule it, and then start/continue writing your second draft.

TODAY I WILL…

• Decide if I need further research, make a specific list of the things to fill in the gaps, and find those things;

• Write/or research if you are at this stage for 2 hours working your way down your list;

• Stay on task.