How to start writing

Do you find it difficult to start writing a paper for a project you have done last year? Do you find all sorts of inventive ways for putting it off?

When you get to actually focus on the project, do you find you don’t know where exactly to start? Are you delaying with the project because of this?

For many of us it is a big question: How to start writing a paper? Procrastination can often be a huge obstacle and dealing with procrastination can be difficult.

You might experience that you are not entirely sure what exactly you want to say in this paper. In other words you don’t know what the “story” in this paper will be.

You might also feel that this particular project is not so urgent, so you constantly find other things to do instead of starting writing this paper.

You might find yourself looking for some relevant papers on internet and reading them, but the actual writing of your own paper never happens. You never find yourself writing anything.

This can feel frustrating, even overwhelming.

In fact I used to experience exactly the same thing during my own PhD studies 10 years ago. I wished someone would come and just tell me how to deal with this situation!!

During a workshop with 6 PhD students that I held last month we discussed this problem that one of the students raised, and here are the practical solutions that we came up with.

1. Give yourself a time of 15 min and isolate yourself completely from distractions, meaning switch off your mobile phone, e-mail alerts and eliminate other disruptions. During this entire time – just write, don’t stop!

And what you find that after 15 min you’ll get a chunk of writing done, 3 pages or so. You can use this later to start creating a story of your paper. Next time you work on this paper you’ll have these 3 pages and not just a blank sheet of paper; it’s a good start!

2. The biggest problem is to start with a blank piece of paper. Start writing anyway, start writing despite of everything! Do it imperfectly! You will get a chance to do it perfect later.

3. Build up your momentum by working during small amounts of time of 15 min to start with. Put a timer for 15 min, focus entirely on creating the content for the paper – no more browsing for useful information, this is not allowed anymore. When the time is over – STOP the activity. Congratulate yourself: “I’ve done it! I worked on my paper for 15 min”. Then continue the next day.

4. If you have difficulties to “just focus on writing” when you are sitting in front of your computer constantly getting distracted with other windows and applications check out this: http://www.ommwriter.com/ Ommwriter is a basic text editor that overrides everything on your computer and leaves you one screen to type your text in.

5. If you are getting distracted by the computer screen and the office environment (some offices can be quite crowded and loud), just go somewhere (nice) with a pen and a paper block. And … just start writing.

Find the best place for you where you can be creative. I used to write my PhD thesis for an hour every morning in my room just after waking up (we did not have wireless at that time, I did not own a mobile phone, and my house mates were still sleep at that hour – so there were no distractions).

It is all about eliminating distraction and finding the best place where you can be creative.

6. If you have previously given a talk on this project then go back to your ppt slides and try and “translate” this talk into some kind of text.

7. Start creating your paper by making figures, plugging them into a word document. Then write figure captions, and after that start writing the text by plainly describing what you see on those figures. This cannot really go wrong! And this is exactly how I start working on any of my own papers.

8. Remind yourself that you are the expert on this project in the whole building or even the whole department! If you cannot do it  – who else can do it? This thought can help you to build up your momentum!

9. Get an accountability partner. Report to a friend what you plan is and at the end of the day tell them that you have done your 15 min writing. This commitment to accountability will help you build up momentum and make working on this paper a routine.

Pick one of the above suggestions and start writing now 🙂

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