The whole calamity of man comes from one
single thing, that he [or she] cannot keep quiet
in a room.
Blaise Pascal^21Our thinking subject is not corporeal.
Immanuel Kant^22The mind/body way of picturing difficulties in writing is far
too crude, though. Normally problems in concentrating and
focusing, getting up steam and then keeping going, are the
results not of physical resistances to being chained to the key-
board or the desk but of mental cross-pressures. Your progress
will depend most upon your intellectual morale (itself closely
reflecting how the work is going) and the level to which other
worries and business impede upon you. These are the influ-
ences which tend to generate displacement behaviour instead of
writing (such as overperfecting earlier bits of text, refiling your
notes and papers, or breaking off for a cup of coffee and some
light-relief daytime TV). Making an effort to persist with writing
for your full session length is usually a worthwhile response to
such pressures. Taking some small steps can also strengthen your
morale by giving you more perceptible indicators of progress
and better incentives to continue. For instance, find the start-
ing number of words in your chapter (using the ‘Tools/Word
Count’ buttons in Word or the ‘document information’ button
in Wordperfect), and then type it into the beginning or end of
your document file. Then update the word count at the end of
each session, and perhaps keep a record of the words racked up.
Comparing these figures with your target level also guards
against overwriting, otherwise an important source of potential
extra delay for hard-working people.
Keeping up your intellectual morale can be very difficult
while working up a chapter on your own. Planning the struc-
ture of a new piece of text tends to be an optimistic stage,
because you are still shielded from difficulties of implementa-
tion. But writing up raw text for the first time tends to be inher-
ently dispiriting, especially if you subscribe to the ‘writing
equals one-off creation’ myth and hence do not take account of
the multi-stage nature of the authoring process. In looking at
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