I added one tweak to the Boice-Gray program. I ask participants to begin each 15–30 minute session by writing new words, for 5 to 20 minutes, and only doing other writing activities, such as taking notes or editing previous text, after the new words have been produced. I request this because composing new text is, for most writers, the most difficult task they face and the one most commonly postponed.
One of the common laments of people using this program is “I don’t know what to write,” often accompanied by “I’m not ready. I need to do more reading, or thinking, or investigation.” This is an indirect expression of the familiar formula of researching first and then writing up the results. Boice and Gray want to turn this on its head. Their motto: “Write before you’re ready!”
This means starting writing even though you don’t know enough about the topic, you haven’t read all the background material and haven’t done the experiments or fieldwork or interviews. Indeed, you’re just starting work in a field that’s entirely new to you. How can you write about it?
One approach is to write about what you’re going to do. Describe the things you know and the things you need to find out. Tell about the experiments you’re planning and how you’ll set them up. Tell how you’ll analyze the data.
Another approach is pretty similar: start writing the paper that you’d normally write at the end of your research. When you come to any part that you don’t know or don’t understand, just do as well as you can and keep going.
This feels very strange at first. Here’s how it works. By writing, you stimulate your thinking. In order to make progress on your project, you need to think about it — and writing is an efficient way of making this happen. Even after you’ve finished writing for the day, your unconscious mind will be working away at the topic, trying to address the matters you expressed.
Of course it’s quite possible to think about your topic without writing about it. Writing is just a reliable way of sustaining and focusing the thinking process. How many people schedule 15 minutes per day of concentrated thinking about a topic? If you’ve tried it, you’ll know it’s not easy to sustain.
Unconscious mental processing — during the time you’re not writing — is one thing that makes daily writing more efficient than bingeing. When you do a long stint of writing, you’re attempting to do all the thinking in one burst. This intensive effort can be exciting, but despite appearances it’s not as productive as harnessing the mind over longer periods. The brain is like a muscle; it responds best to sustained, incremental training.
There’s another, more practical reason why writing first — before doing all the research — is more efficient than writing only at the end. Let’s say there are ten major books in the area you want to write about. The normal approach is to read them first, and probably you’ll want to read even more books and articles just to be sure you understand the topic.
When you write first, before doing all the reading, you find out exactly what you need to know. You find gaps in your argument, points where you need examples, and places where you need a reference. So when you turn to the ten books, you don’t need to read them in full. You know exactly what you’re looking for, so you can just check the relevant bits.
Does this mean you learn less? Not at all. When you read a book or article with a purpose, you’re much more likely to be able to remember crucial information because it fits within a framework you’ve developed.
