On Verbal Diarreah

I can't write a paper until I've written a paper. What I mean is I can't actually write down all of my thoughts in a logical format until I know everything (or almost everything) I need to know to write it all down. I don't need to have it completely organized in my head, at least not consciously. I just need a general idea of what I'm getting at and how I'm going to approach it. Once all that's done, writing is fast.

I finished my Shostakovich paper (about 8 pages) in a day, though actually really only a breezy 4 hours (with an hour of proofreading and inserting citations afterwards). I just knocked off 5 pages of my bibliographic paper in an hour. I've spent very little time actually physically writing my Ligeti paper but that's upto about 26 pages (I doubt I've spent more than 10 actually sitting down to write...most of the time I sit down, think I'm going to write, and then go off and analyze some more things instead).

Writing is easy. You just take the ideas in your head and rearrange them in all different permutations and find the one that follows some sort of decent logical path. (E.g. I have to do homework. I don't like work. I'm blue....rather than I don't like work. I'm blue. I have to do homework.) If you can say what you write and it makes sense, then you're off to a good start. If, after a paragraph, the sentences hold together to form a large-scale thought, then you're doing great. If all the entire paper holds together with the same sort of logic with which each paragraph holds its sentences, then you should go be a writer.

But I say all this because I don't like agonizing over each sentence. I don't like spending 3 hours with an output of 2 pages. I'll agonize all I want before I start writing but once I start writing, I don't want to stop for too long to think. If I do, I lose momentum. Perhaps I can take some comfort in the fact that there's a built in quality control there: in order for an idea (whether it be 3 or 30 pages) to flow quickly from thought to typed words, it's got to be a well-structured idea in the first place. Otherwise, it's going to get stuck in your own mind. Or so I say.

Writing is hard...