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This article resonated a lot with me, especially this part:
Writing is not the hardest job in the world, but it’s taxing enough that, like working out or scrubbing the baseboards, I’ll subconsciously drift over to any other task that requires even a little less effort.
Anyone who’s ever had to write more than a few pages know how interruptible an activity writing is.
I was extremely worried about this when I had to write my PhD thesis many years ago. The Internet wasn’t quite there yet but computers were already replete with enough distractions that I was concerned I’d be constantly sidetracked and I would never see the end of it. So I made a radical decision. Well, two.
First, I decided I would not tell anyone on the team that I started writing my thesis. This was a reaction to seeing so many PhD students over the years getting engulfed in the process of writing to the point that it was all they could talk about. Morning coffee, lunch, random moments during the day: everything was about how many pages they had written today, their struggle with their word processor, how deflated they were, thinking they’d never make it. I decided I would do none of that.
Not only did I stay silent about it, I also made the decision to not work on my thesis during the working hours. At the office. I knew it would be a lost cause anyway, so I just focused on either work related tasks or some personal projects. Needless to say my teammates never missed an opportunity to make fun of me for not working on my thesis, but I was smirking inside.
But the crucial decision that I made was that every night, I would spend a few hours at home writing my thesis, and more importantly, I would write my entire thesis on a simple text editor. I can’t recall if I used Notepad or something like that, but I can assure you it was a very barebones text editor that could not even format in bold or italics.
My goal was to “write miles of text” and not be distracted by anything else. Especially not formatting (which can take such a long time), let alone arranging chapters or sections, or rereading what I wrote. I allowed this cursor to go forward only, and nowhere else.
I am not the right person to ask if my final thesis was of good quality or not, I leave that to my then advisors, but I can assure you that I was able to put together 200 pages in probably the least amount of time I could. And ever since, I have made a point of following this simple guideline whenever I sit down at the keyboard to write a sizable amount of text and I strongly recommend it to anyone who’s ever faced the dread of an empty page.
Separating the content from the form. It’s worked pretty well for the web, and it turns out, it works splendidly for writing too!