Paul J. Silvia, in his 2007 book, ‘How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing’, only really has one point: writing is the result of discipline, not inspiration. It’s simple, direct, and leaves little room for argument. The rest of the 110 pages provide practical tips across the entire writing process from developing these schedules to editing grammar and submitting the article. I would be surprised if there was anything in here the average aspirant academic didn’t already know, but it is helpful to be reminded of it every now and then. The humour is dry, the sarcasm aplenty, and I came away from it feeling a lot more in control of my output.

The idea is to sit down and write on a predefined schedule, whether you feel like it or not. 8 years before Cal Newport came out with Deep Work (link when I review it), Silvia introduced the same concept. Although Newport was the one to call it “time blocking”, Silvia encourages the same explicit definition of sacred, scheduled “writing time” to be defended from yourself and others. You show up for writing time, and you sit there in front of your desk, with no distractions or other tasks. If you have a project, you write about it; if have nothing to write, you plan out future writing; if you don’t want to set and stick to this schedule, “gently close this book, clean it so it looks brand new, and give it as a gift to a friend who wants to be a better writer” (15).

His target audience is mostly those who think writing is a mood, or a magical trance that only comes of its own accord, but are also extremely stressed and upset about the mountains of work piling around them. He has little time for their self-pity and dispenses it caustically.

Complaining is an academic birthright. The art of complaining develops early, when undergraduates complain about their professors, their textbooks, and the cosmic unfairness of 9:00am Friday classes. In graduate school, complaining approaches professional levels. And, of course, professional faculty raise complaining to a refined, elegant art.(49, Paraphrased)

While I don’t think the catharsis of the kind of complaining Silvia is talking about is unique to academia, I recognise the point. As a PhD student just coming into this new world I am like a formative sponge, mimicking and learning from the adults around me, and I had begun to pick up the habit. Silvia is a trusted adult who told me to cut it out.

Let everyone else procrastinate, daydream, and complain - spend your time sitting down and moving your mittens. (8)

Silvia, continuing in the role of trusted adult, also provided wisdom about rejections being nothing more, nothing less, than a natural stage in the process of iteratively improving a manuscript. Although this section was tongue-in-cheek, it felt true enough to take to heart.

[Academia’s] most prolific writers get more rejections per year than other writers get in a decade. I find the base rates of rejection [that most papers get rejected] oddly comforting. I feel less uncertain about what will happen, I don’t feel so bad when my paper is rejected, and I prevent myself from indulging in fruitless fantasies of imagining my work in print before I finish the manuscript. (99)

Rejections are like a sales tax on publications: The more papers you publish, the more rejections you receive. Following the tips in this book will make you the most rejected writer in your department. (100)

While the key message of the book was on attitude, the back half gives a lengthy section on grammar. Silvia’s explanations were surprisingly clearer and more helpful than even some explicit grammar books I have read (yes, my poor writing is not from lack of education). I wrote down most of his tips and have added them to my editing checklist.

Where the book is weak, however, is in considering alternative working styles and productivity techniques. He proposes a hypothesis —scheduled writing alone is enough to produce prolific, better writing —but lacks a way to test and compare this to alternate methods. There are some studies cited in the book itself on how scheduling helps, and I don’t doubt it at all, but I do doubt how it is measured, and I do doubt that it is enough.

The knowledge sector productivity movement (as I have read it) is yet to define or meaningfully measure productivity. If you accept the general premise that knowledge work does not have a linear relationship between input and output, the traditional definition of productivity — “the rate of output per unit of input” — isn’t quite helpful. When world-changing papers can be rejected, flawed work is looped into the media cycle, and fields advance in fits and bursts, how does one, on a day to day scale, measure impact over lifetime? Silvia has to choose something, and he chooses subjective stress levels and words per day.

It needs no explanation that with a consistent, guaranteed schedule for writing, one is less stressed about when they will be able to get the writing done. It is the words per day I am less a fan of. When proposing this metric, a nuanced Silvia likely would prefer the ideas be good than words be numerous, but since quality, for many, can be an emergent property of quantity, words per day can function as a good-enough proxy. I, however, have not found this to be true at all. From my experience, the better I understand a topic, the more briefly and clearly I can communicate it. After the first draft, the more time I spend working on the piece, the more text is turned into figures and tables, and the shorter the word-count becomes. I am not convinced that optimising for words per day literally (as he does, in a tracked spreadsheet), will result in a high quality and clarity of writing.

Perhaps this is because Silvia is a psychologist writing for psychologists. This guide is endorsed, or perhaps even commissioned by, the American Psychological Association. While most academia resources I have come across seem to be functionally field agnostic, this one leans heavier into psychology and perhaps the words per day is more helpful for this target audience. From my perspective, tracking words doesn’t take into account that every 5000 word paper (shorter the better!) is backed by 3 months of data collection, a repository of code, and 10 experiments which altogether take 10x the time and effort of the writing. While Silvia generously broadens his definition of writing to anything that contributes to the process of producing a manuscript, the emphasis on words per day doesn’t translate beyond the actual writing. I don’t have a replacement metric, I’m just raising that flag.

Overall, this book was like a cold shower first thing in the morning. You’ll probably only stick to it if you’re already a disciplined person, and it’s not going to change your life, but it’ll wake you up and get you motivated in that 1% better kind of way. Interestingly, this book was directed at faculty not grad students, which was a timely and refreshing reminder that me and my cohort are far from the centre of academia and that my supervisor’s job is way harder than mine. As a PhD student that rarely has anything better to do than writing and deep work, I am unbelievably lucky to have the luxury to not need to militantly schedule narrow blocks of research — it’s often the only thing I do all day, and this book reminded me to be grateful.

This book was fun, thought-provoking, and appropriately short. I would recommend it as a pick-me-up for those feeling bogged down or stressed out, but it’s not the panacea Silvia thinks it is. As Druker says, we manage what we measure, and I am not convinced that pure word count is the most appropriate metric for knowledge work, though it is probably a good enough start.