on below the existing joined-up text, in the rough sequence
you want the unwritten sections to follow. Then as you write up
new bits of joined-up text, you can delete the appropriate notes
or organizing ideas, so as to give you a sense of progress and to
keep focused on what is yet to be completed.
You also need around half an hour at the end of today’s writing
to leave off in a proper fashion. It is important to finish in a
controlled and chosen way, rather than just depleting your stock
of ideas, evidence and argument to nothing and going away
hoping that ‘something will turn up’ in time for your next ses-
sion. Try to finish a writing session by gathering together all the
materials you may need for the next day’s piece of writing, like
quotations, references, data or other attention points, bits of
argumentation or especially juicy or telling phrases that have
occurred to you. Type sufficient notes into your PC file or a pos-
sible skeleton of the next passage of text to get you quickly
restarted again whenever your next session is scheduled. Some
people find it helpful to print out and pin up these elements on
a big noticeboard next to their writing desk, where they can
be seen as a whole, and also physically moved around and
reorganized if need be. The longer the gaps between writing ses-
sions the more care you will need to take over this prefiguring
exercise. It is also very helpful to sustain your sense of making
progress by printing today’s new pages and putting them in a
file or pinning them on the noticeboard for editing outside the
writing session itself, in some smaller or less useful slice of time.
For the main body of each writing session you need enough
time (perhaps two or three hours) to rack up several hundred
words at least, such that you will see a distinct accretion of new
text by the end of the session. Once you get stuck in to writing it
is a good idea to keep plugging away at it for as long as possible,
resisting the seductive idea of having a break and a cup of coffee,
because you will only need to warm up all over again. But it is
not a good idea to make writing sessions too long, because as
with all other kinds of work there will be diminishing returns to
effort after a while. You need to check how good your endurance
is, and also what times of day or night are most productive for
you. Keeping a log may help you to find this out more clearly.
However long your writing sessions are, it is critically impor-
tant to remember to energetically flex your arms and hands
150 ◆AUTHORING A PHD