Speaker 1: So there's this age-old piece of writing advice, and I keep on coming across it in every, like, writing manual, not just for academics, but also for, like, fiction writers and anybody who writes, basically. It's just, like, so universally promoted, I figured I might as well give it a try. I was really skeptical at first, like, it took me a while to even, like, get myself into doing this, because, I don't know, it's kind of, like, weird. It almost feels, like, antithetical to, like, the product that I want to create, but here it is. The piece of writing advice that is so universally promoted, I see it everywhere, is basically, it goes like this. Write. I know. Um, I was skeptical too at first, but honestly, I've been trying it out lately, and it's surprisingly effective. To coax myself into actually enacting this surprisingly effective writing technique of just writing, I decided I would give myself prizes when I reached certain word goals. When I googled it, it looked like a dissertation was probably supposed to be around 50 to 60,000 words, and I'm probably going to have to write a lot more than that so that I can edit it down later, so I decided I would give myself a prize every 10,000 words. Last week, I reached my first 10,000 words, and I bought myself a skull shaver so that I can have a perfectly bald head with ease. My next goal for my next 10,000 words is going to be a pair of barefoot running shoes, and I'm going to Toronto this weekend where there is a minimalist running store, so I really want to get these shoes while I'm there, but I have to write 10,000 words before I can buy the shoes. So that means this week I am going for a 10,000 word week. It's Monday afternoon right now. I basically have to write 2,000 words a day for the next five days if I'm going to meet this goal, because I typically don't write anything on the weekends, and I don't think that this is too absurd of a goal, because this morning I sat down and wrote 1,100 words, so today I only need another 900 words, and then I have to do that every day for the next five days. So I think that I can manage 10,000 words in this week. The place where I see myself potentially bumping up to problems is as I'm writing, I like develop ideas about things that I don't yet have notes in my obsidian about, and so I have to like go back to the books, or it's drawing me to an idea that I know will be in this book I've never actually read, and so I need to go and read that book, and that's going to take up a day or two, and I don't have time for that. So instead what I figure I will do, and what I have been doing, is I'll just write like, oh refer to x book to flush this bit out, and so it's like I know there's going to be like maybe another 500 words there about this book, but for now we're just going to say refer to this book, add a little hashtag pencil emoji, so that I remember to go back to it and flush that section out, because I'm writing in obsidian, and then I'll keep writing. So by the time I've done 10,000 words, honestly it'll probably be about 15,000 words worth of dissertation stuff, it's just you know 5,000 of those words are words that haven't made it in yet, because I still need to do more research before I stick it in, and that's good because it gives me stuff to write in future writing bursts. I don't know what it is about just writing that makes it such a hard piece of advice to follow, because like in theory it should be the easiest piece of advice ever, right? There's no restrictions, write anything, just write, right? But no, I sit there looking at the blank page and I get all these fears in my head about what I don't know already, or what my entire dissertation is going to look like. I don't just start writing somewhere. So it's like the easiest, most vague piece of advice ever, right? There's no right or wrong way to do it as long as you are putting words on the page. All of the barriers to writing come from my own head. Barrier number one, I tell myself that I have to know what my dissertation is about to start writing. That's a lie. Just start writing. That's how you find out what your dissertation is about. Point two, I feel like I have to start writing from the beginning of something, like the first, you know, chapter, or the introduction, or whatever. That's a lie too. How can I know what the sections are unless there's already writing on the page? Barrier number three, I feel like I need to have read every single book in the universe before I can put my own thoughts onto the page so that I don't end up writing something somebody else has written, for example. Also, absolutely makes no sense because I can't do that. So I put up all of these barriers to writing and then I don't actually do the writing. Lately I've managed to get over those barriers. Some of the ways that I've done that is, one, by awarding myself prizes for certain word counts because then I'm like, get over your fear Morgan, you want those minimalist running shoes. Or two, something that I'll often do is like pick a quote from a book that I've read or an interview and just like use that as my jumping off point for a section of my dissertation. I don't need to know where that section is going. In fact, it doesn't have to go anywhere. It's just a way to jumpstart my writing process. Another one that I'll use is the idea of Anne Lamott's one-inch picture frames. She would imagine a one-inch picture frame like around something, like say I put a one-inch picture frame around my leg and then I have to only describe what is visible within that one-inch picture frame. And so I just write about that, which eliminates everything else, the big wide world of stuff, and makes it really concrete what I'm doing. Except instead of my pant leg, I'll be describing maybe an aspect of juggling because my dissertation is on hobbyist juggling. Or I'll describe what happened in one minute of an interview that I conducted, for instance. Just start somewhere, start small. Another thing that I'll do is I will write to myself, basically, or I'll write to the perceived reader like, next we are going to do this. What happens if we do this instead? I don't think that's the style of writing that will end up in my dissertation because once I've written the dissertation, I will know what happens, presumably, in the dissertation. But that style of writing, while I'm in the writing process, has been really helpful for me because I don't need to sound like I already know what has happened. So it gives me this voice to, like, draft in that is ultimately going to be hopefully different from the final voice in the dissertation, so that I don't have to be that person that knows what the dissertation fully is about already. Because I'm not that person and so if I try writing from that person's perspective, I'm never going to get anything written. Because the only way to become that person is to have written the dissertation. All this to say, this is a writing week. I'm going to take you along for the ride a little bit and we'll see if I can make that 10,000 word goal by Friday night. Wish me luck. Yesterday went very well. It was successful. I wrote 2,100 words and hopefully we can repeat that today. Before I get into my work for today, I wanted to talk about a couple more writing practice techniques that help me get into the groove of writing each day. Yesterday we talked about four different writing practice techniques, the first of which being just write. I think that I probably read this first in Stephen King's book on writing. Stephen King writes so many books, and how does he do that? He just writes. Every day. All the time. The second tip just comes from myself and something that helps me, which is to give yourself prizes for certain word goals. The third tip would be something I found in Ann Lamott's book, Bird by Bird, which is the idea of one-inch picture frames to try to reduce the overwhelm of the entire project to just what you can see within this little square. And the fourth tip is just something that I have been doing naturally as I write my dissertation, which is to write in my voice right now, not try to pretend that I'm the person that has already finished the dissertation. Because again, I'm not that person, and it makes the pressure too intense. Today I want to talk about three more techniques that I realized yesterday I was using and didn't mention. So yesterday I started my day off with a 1,100 word chunk, and when I sat down to write that chunk, I didn't have nothing on the page. I already had 5,000 words in the document that I was writing in. So this first tip comes from Ernest Hemingway, and it's essentially to finish writing at the end of the day when you're still going strong, so that when you pick it up the next day, you immediately know what you were supposed to be writing about. This next tip also comes from Hemingway, which is to read what you wrote the previous day before jumping into your writing for this day. This is just going to jog your mind about where you were at from the previous day, so that you can jump right into the writing groove in the same like voice and style and content that you were in the day before. So all of that prep work takes maybe five minutes before you start writing, but it will speed up the process of writing so much, or at least that's what I found yesterday. And this next tip is also found in Ann Lamott's Bird by Bird. She calls it the shitty first draft, but Joan Bolker in the book How to Write Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day calls this the zero draft. And this is something that I have found incredibly helpful when writing my dissertation, is the idea of a zero draft. Throughout like high school and university, I was never taught about a zero draft. I was taught about maybe an outline, and then I was taught about a first draft. And then you would make like as many drafts as necessary until your final draft. But this idea of a zero draft is the thing that comes before the first draft. The zero draft doesn't even need to make sense. The zero draft is just getting everything you might use in this project onto the paper in maybe some kind of order, so that when you do go to write the first draft, you can actually write it. I find this super useful to do in Obsidian because I have all of my ideas on the left hand side in the form of like various tiny notes. So as I'm writing in my document in Obsidian, I can just link to those notes. It doesn't have to make sense to anybody else. It doesn't have to be full sentences. It can just be links or bullet points or partial sentences or thoughts to myself. But then when I go to write the actual first draft, I've got everything in there. All my links, all my potential sources, all my thoughts that might go in. So I'm hoping that that will make my writing process a lot faster than it would be if I was stressing over the sentence structure in the first draft I ever write. I'm also probably going to be sending my supervisor some of my zero draft work, even though it's not like good writing and that's kind of embarrassing and she can't like edit the writing, because that's going to introduce her to my project. So that when I do get to writing the first draft, I already know and she already knows what will probably be in that draft so that there's no surprises later on and I have to add a bunch of time to my dissertation because something came up that I now need to research. So I hope all of these techniques are going to speed up my writing process. They're certainly making writing a bit easier and taking the pressure off a bit. So hopefully you can use some of these too, but for now I'm going to go write and I will see you later. Woo. It's not even noon and I've already written 2,000 words today. Yesterday though, I did not fare so well. In total, I only added about a thousand words to my document and they were not good words. They were mostly like, I'm going to put this here sort of words. So today, a lot of my words were rewriting what I wrote yesterday. So there was a lot of taking out words and then putting the words back in, in like a more manageable format, which probably means I wrote a lot more than 2,000 words, but I added 2,000 words to the document. So today I wanted to give you some writing advice that corrects the mistakes that I made yesterday. First of all, write first thing when you wake up. I usually wake up around 8am, but yesterday I didn't start writing until about 3pm. And by that time in the day, it was kind of hard to get myself motivated to do the writing. And then my brain was already a bit tired from everything that had already happened that day. So it was hard to keep writing. If you start writing as soon as you wake up in the morning, before your brain has even really turned on, you can sort of like jumpstart your writing day. If it's going well, then you could be like me today and reach your writing goal before lunch time and have the rest of the day to kick back, relax, and reset your brain for the next day of writing. Unfortunately for me, I'm probably going to have to keep writing this afternoon because yesterday I didn't reach my goal. So today we're going to try to reach the goal that I should have been at by today. If you can't write first thing when you wake up, if that's just not for you, at least try to turn writing into a habit that you can like pair with another activity. For instance, do it right after lunch. Pair it with another activity that happens in your day to make sure that you're always getting writing in. If writing becomes a habit, it's going to be harder to not write than to write because you're just so used to getting writing in. It starts to get uncomfortable if I haven't written in a day if I've been writing every day leading up to that. So that's like another tip that would come from Stephen King. He writes I think six days a week. He never takes more than one day off each week and he does that to keep the momentum going. Personally, I take two days off a week because I only work Monday to Friday and then on the weekend I don't worry about it because there's too much other stuff that I've got planned, but that works for me. The next tip I have for you based on my errors of yesterday is to have all of your materials prepared in advance. And really where this tip comes from is literature on the Zettelkasten and specifically Sanka Aron's book How to Take Smart Notes. Aron talks about how if you're writing all the way through your preparation, then when you actually sit down to write, most of the work is already done. So part of the reason I'm able to write so quickly is because a lot of these words are already in my obsidian software and I just need to remember that that note already exists and go check out that note and either write it in fresh words for this document or straight up copy and paste what I've already written into my document. So when I say have all of the materials prepared before you write, what I mean is as you are reading and doing interviews and whatever else you do to conduct your research, that entire time you should be writing down those thoughts and ideas and data in usable format so that when you actually go to write you already have all of the information to just like pull into this document. So yesterday instead of writing because I hit sort of a block because I didn't have all my materials prepared, I went to these two different books that I haven't managed to get notes into my obsidian for yet. They were the Stage Life of Props by Andrew Sofer and Social Works by Shannon Jackson and I just went through each of those and flagged every time they mentioned the word prop because I wanted to sort of define what a prop was on stage before defining what it is in juggling. So this afternoon when I go back to do the writing I actually have my materials prepared to be able to write about props because I've got all those bits flagged in those books and at some point yes I will also put them into my obsidian so that I have them for future projects as well. These next two pieces of advice come from Stephen King's book on writing. The first is to always tell the truth. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Try not to write for other people or what you think other people want you to write. Write for yourself. Write what you find interesting. Write what you truly care about and want to be writing aka tell the truth in your document. Your truth. And the writing will be so much easier and more fun and also more legible and entertaining and interesting for your readers. Sometimes when I sit down to write my dissertation I have the voices of my committee members or my supervisor or my graduate program director or my past professors in my head giving me all of their criticisms on what I'm writing or telling me what they think that I should write and I really have to silence all of those voices to be able to get my words out. So tell the truth in two senses. I mean first of all just tell the truth because like you're an academic and that's your job but secondly tell your truth. Be honest. Put yourself onto the page. What you truly think and care about and have researched. This next piece of advice also comes from Stephen King's book on writing and that is to read a lot. Sometimes as academics we stop reading or we only read what is new in our field but that seriously restricts the type of writing that you are reading. We get better at writing by reading writing. I read widely and I think that my writing benefits from it. This is also potentially just a practical piece of advice. If you don't know what your writerly voice is yet and so you're finding it hard to write you could just imitate somebody else's writing form. Like maybe you go read Stephen King's book on writing and then you mimic Stephen King's non-fiction voice in your paper. And you can do that until you develop your own voice. Personally I recently read the book So You've Been Publicly Shamed by John Ronson. I really liked his writing style. It was really straightforward, entertaining, easy to understand and I have found myself at times mimicking his writing style in my dissertation writing. And I'll probably edit out that voice when I get to the editing phase of my writing process but for now it gives me this style of writing to jump into when I don't know how to say what I'm trying to say. Another thing that I didn't do yesterday but usually I do and when I do it I write a lot faster and more efficiently is body doubling. This comes from ADHD research and I don't think it's been like scientifically proven as an effective study habit for people with ADHD. And as far as I know I don't have ADHD but I do find body doubling super useful. What this is is simply that you are working in the same space as somebody else. Probably that other person is also doing similar work to you. And this has a couple benefits. For me it just makes writing more fun because I'm doing it with somebody else. It gives me an example of what somebody writing looks like so that I can sort of mirror and mimic that in myself. There's obviously a couple ways you can do this. You can actually actively meet up with a friend or a peer, organize a group study date online over Zoom. What I actually do though that I find a little bit more practical is I actually study with Merv here on YouTube. There's a YouTube account called Merv and she uploads study days constantly. Sometimes I'll also use that as like a writing goal. I'm doing a study with Merv that is four hours long so I'm going to try to work for the entire four hours of this video. And then I'm working alongside Merv. She's got beautiful aesthetics. Somehow that just really boosts my productivity to see somebody else working and hear somebody else working as I'm working. Even though like she recorded it seven months ago I know that we're not really working together. So that's it for today. I'm gonna go do another thousand words I guess and then I will check in with you again tomorrow. If yesterday was a good writing day then today is a bad writing day. It is 12 o'clock and I've only written about 600 words today despite having been sitting here for about two hours already. And I think most of those 600 words are going to be taken out of the document anyway because I'm kind of just flailing in there. So this afternoon I am going to have to resort to some writing advice that is arguably a little more desperate. So my next piece of writing advice for you is to remember your why. Now this is like a common piece of advice for doing literally anything and I hear YouTubers talk about it all the time, especially productivity YouTubers, and I've never like really truly understood or needed this tip. But for me it has helped to remember my why on like the more micro level. And this week in this video my why is because I want to buy minimalist running shoes. Also because I want to title this video I wrote 10,000 words of my dissertation in a week. I can't do that if I don't write 10,000 words this week. So high pressure, my big why, is what I want to title my YouTube video and what I want to buy for myself this weekend. So that is tip number one I'm resorting to today. Remember your why. Tip number two I'm probably going to resort to this afternoon so that I can accomplish this why is to steal from myself. I have written so many essays over the course of my undergraduate and graduate career and many of them have been loosely based on the same topics I'm writing about in my dissertation, like juggling and its relationship with performance. So this afternoon I'm probably going to pull up a bunch of those old essays and see if there are any paragraphs that I can like copy and paste verbatim into this draft of my dissertation. And I've basically published none of my academic essays over the years so I'm not risking plagiarizing from myself either. The next tip, similarly, is to steal from other people. And I don't mean steal their writing and I don't mean steal their ideas, I mean read other people's dissertations so that you can sort of steal their structure and their formatting and the way that they phrase things while in this draft phase of your dissertation. So if I'm really stuck and I don't know how to move forward, sometimes I will literally pull up one of my friend's dissertations that they've already finished and defended. I'll just like see how they organized their knowledge or how they started their section or how they framed one sentence so that I can kickstart my own writing process. Next piece of advice is something that I resorted to this morning which is to pull out the old paper and pen and start jotting down your ideas in that format first before then returning to the computer. And I got this idea from fiction writers here on YouTube, on AuthorTube, my favorite of which probably being Sarah Cannon and her HeartBreathings channel. She uses like colored sticky notes and colored pens and she all has all of this like stationery and she does the really physical act of like writing stuff down and plotting her books out on these giant pieces of paper or whiteboards with like cue cards and sticky notes and stickers and etc. And it's really fun. Sometimes when I'm getting really stuck in just like the writing on my computer, I'll start pulling out those things. I'll grab my sticky notes and my fancy pens and I'll try to plot what I'm working on so that it makes more sense in my head so that when I sit down to write, I kind of have it all laid out. I have a visual of it and I'm enjoying myself. And then my last tip is kind of related to yesterday's tip of write the truth and this one is just write what excites you. If you're not on a specific timeline for one specific topic of writing because maybe you've got a publication deadline coming up or you need to give your supervisor a particular chapter, if you're just in like the playground phase of like drafting stuff, then each day when you sit down, ask yourself what you're most excited to write about that day. And hopefully what you're excited to write about will be what comes the most easily for you. So that's another thing I'm going to resort to this afternoon, I hope, is just to write the sections that might appear in my dissertation that I'm most excited to write about right now. For me, that's probably Juggling's relationship to magic because I just read Derek DelGaudio's book A Moral Man and his show in and of itself is like my favorite thing ever and I think there's interesting resonances between magic and how he talks about theater and how I'm talking about juggling. So that's my plan for this afternoon, my desperate attempt to write about 2,500 words today because I need to get another 5,000 words in the next two days if I'm going to reach my 10,000 word goal by the weekend. And I know I wrote 5,000 words in three days earlier in this week so surely I can pull up my bootstraps and pump out another 5,000 words in the next two days. Here we go. On my final writing day of the week, I did manage to reach 10,000 words. I think I got about 10,100 words and those last 2,500 words or so are not ones I'm particularly proud of. I don't think they're particularly good, but the name of the game right now is getting words and ideas on the page. Those words do not have to be good. And that's something that I want to reiterate is that zero draft idea of just getting all of the ideas down even if it looks like absolute garbage right now. The next phase of this process is going to be my revising and my editing and my rewriting sort of phase where I can turn those sloppy sentences or point form notes into full gorgeous varied sentences that flow together in an actual order that makes sense. I can't organize those sentences though until they exist in some form and if I worry right now about how they are existing then they will not get a chance to exist at all. Before I finish off this video though, I wanted to add in a couple extra writing tips for you. The first one has to do with time management. At the end of last week, I was preparing for a trip over the weekend to go to Toronto, pick up my minimalist running shoes, which I did pick up by the way for reaching my 10,000 word goal. Here they are. I love them. I still have to think about a prize for my next 10,000 words to keep my motivation going. But when I'm so busy like that, because I was preparing for this trip, I wanted to get the words in. I had other things that I had to do that day. I didn't even get a chance to film that day, as you can tell. Because I had a lot going on, planning time for my writing was fairly easy because I just planned it around those other things or I made it a priority that I couldn't do those other things until I'd finished the writing. So that's this first tip then, is to plan your PhD writing around other things going on in your life. I've spoken to a couple different women who have had babies during their PhDs and they've actually finished their PhDs faster than I've ever seen anybody else finish their PhD in Ontario because, they said, they realized when the baby went to sleep they had to work on their PhD because there was no other time to work on it. So they organized their PhD around everything else in their life and because they only had those select moments to write it, they ended up actually writing it. As opposed to me, half the time, where I have nothing going on and no real obligation to plan my PhD writing around anything and then I just do nothing. So planning the rest of your life out first and then figuring out where you have to slot in PhD work can be useful for some people. You may have noticed over the past week that I don't quite plan my PhD writing for any specific times. Yes, I try to write when I first wake up but I don't always get that in and sometimes I'll write over the course of the day in little bursts or I'll skip a day entirely and then work double the next day. There's no real rhyme or reason to it except that my time management is fairly self-organizing and this is what I really like about the PhD is because our hours are not prescribed to us. We have an opportunity to engage in all of these other hobbies whenever and however we'd like to. So I also run, I also read, I also make YouTube videos, I also love to see my family and friends, like I love to do all these things and because the PhD time is so flexible, I can do all of these things. I just have to make sure I'm also doing my PhD in between those things. So because there is so much that I want to do, including my PhD, my time management ends up being self-organizing. Now I feel like I really want to get a YouTube video in or I want to make it before the weekend so I've got to put time into that, so when does that mean that I can work on my PhD? Speaking of which, my next tip would be to have other hobbies that you can plan your PhD writing around. It can be tempting to work on your PhD writing constantly all of the time because everything else kind of feels like, well I should be writing right now though, and then you don't end up enjoying anything you're doing because you've got this guilt and pressure that you should be writing. But I find that having other hobbies helps me organize my time and it keeps my mind a bit more fresh because breaks are important. Personally, I would recommend making one of those hobbies some kind of physical activity because it does make sure that your body and therefore your brain are staying healthy and active. I find that running really also gives me a place to think through ideas so if I'm getting kind of stuck in my dissertation writing or research, I'll just go on a run and I'll think through these problems on the run and sometimes that'll loosen things up in my brain so that I can come back to the writing table with a fresh mind and lots of ideas. I personally would recommend running in particular. That's what I love to do. That's what Haruki Murakami loves to do. In fact, I think what Haruki Murakami's schedule is is five hours of work in the morning and then a 10 kilometer run. And if you want to get inspired for writing alongside running then you should read Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is actually also a book about writing. And that brings me to my final point for this video, which is read writing guides. One way to get better at writing is to read a lot of different writing. Another way to get better at writing is just to write a lot and learn for yourself. But a third way to get better at writing is to read advice on writing. Watch videos like this one that are helping you improve your writing process. Any of the books that I've mentioned in this video are a great place to start for writing guides. You've got memoirs on writing like Stephen King's On Writing or Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird or Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. And then you've got straight up guide books like Strunk and White's Classic Style Guide or just straight up the MLA Handbook has lots of great advice in it. And then there's stuff that is specific to academics or doing a PhD like Joan Volker's Writing a Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day or Helen Soren's Stylish Academic Writing or Sanka Aron's How to Take Smart Notes. So there are tons and tons of options here for what to read when it comes to writing guides. And I don't really know how you can expect your writing to come easily and quickly and effectively and sound good if you are not doing some professional development in the area of writing. That said, as academics we might not have a lot of extra time on our hands to read about topics that are not relevant to our PhD topic, although I do think writing on writing is always relevant to our work. So one app that I would recommend would be the app Shortform, which has a ton of book summaries, some of which are specific for writing guides. Sanka Aron's How to Take Smart Notes is on there and Stephen King's On Writing. And the guides on Shortform are going to give you in-depth summaries and analyses of these books. I would encourage you to read the entire book because part of what is useful about these books is the writing style of the writers of those books, because they are people that are thinking a lot about writing. But if you want to get the ideas really quickly, Shortform is the place to go. It does cost some money, but if you use my affiliate link, which will be in the description box below, you can get 20% off an annual membership to Shortform. So if you have the extra cash, then sign up via my link and I'll get some kickback as well to fund my own PhD. Now, I'm going to follow my own advice and just go write. I recommend that you do the same. And I will see you in another video soon.