Think before you write, but begin writing before you have finished thinking.

Writing is a discipline so it requires that you have efficient, disciplined work habits. Since you are being paid to write, you do not have the luxury of waiting for inspiration to strike. Like any professional writer, you must produce on demand. If you develop good writing habits, those habits will become ingrained and over time, you will find that writing becomes easier and faster.  

We have already talked about the importance (and bliss!) of finding the “flow” and how working on a big screen will improve your productivity. Today, let’s talk about how to organize your thoughts before you start writing.

Think First. Write Later.

Word-processing software is irresistible. It seduces us to start writing before we have begun thinking. Practice safe writing. Put your major thoughts in place—by creating a work page, a mind map or even (horrors!) an outline— before you give into the urge to puts words on paper. (Read on for more on outlining. I’ll talk about mind-mapping in a later post.)

But Begin Writing Before You Have Finished Thinking.

You will learn about your topic by writing about it. So, while you must have some plan in place before you begin writing, that plan will change as you write. Let it change. If you stay flexible and open to new ideas while you write, your paper will become deeper and more relevant. And if you wait to start writing until you have finished thinking, you may never start writing at all.

Have a Plan.

But you must have some plan in place before you begin—whether it is a scribbled work page or a detailed, numbered outline. For example, before William Langiewische wrote his 70,000 word article, “American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center,” in The Atlantic Monthly (July and August, 2002) —then the longest magazine article ever published—he created a handwritten flow chart taking up several feet of butcher paper. (A portion of Langiewische’s butcher-paper outline is reproduced in in this article from the Columbia Journalism Review.)

Outline As You Go.

Outlining works. It is a flexible, efficient tool for organizing your thoughts. But many lawyers avoid outlining, believing it requires them to have a global vision of their paper before they write. Instead, outline in piecemeal fashion while you write. Begin with the most obvious themes: What is your most important case or line of cases? What headings summarize those cases? Then work through your research, case by case, creating new headings and plugging cases into existing headings.

If you approach outlining as a tool, rather than a rigid guideline, outlining will give you control over your writing because it will keep you focused on the big picture. Again, the goal is to have a perfected outline in place by the time you finish writing.

Once you have finished writing and your outline is complete, use that outline as the master key for proofing the structure of your paper. If the outline is perfect, then so is the structure of your paper. The craft of legal writing becomes art through masterful use of structure and your finished outline is your best resource for fine-tuning structure.

Outline from Memory.

The mind is a wonderful sifting device. If you let your ideas ferment in your brain, the cream will rise to the top. So begin outlining from memory. Your best ideas are probably the ones that come to mind first.

Use Your Research Files As an Outline.

If you have filed your research carefully, your filing system can also serve as your outline. Arrange your files in a logical order and order the cases or statutes within each file. The resulting order will resemble the dreaded linear outline and involves only a fraction of the effort involved in creating a linear outline from scratch.

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I’ll post later about mind-mapping, creating a routine, and writing from the middle out. So stay tuned.

-Marie

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P.S. I did lots of thinking and outlining before I wrote my book, The Lawyer’s Essential Guide to Writing.

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Good Writing Habits That Will Make Your Writing “Flow.”

My clients often complain to me about how long it takes them to write their papers. I remind them that good writing takes time and care. But we all want to be faster, cleaner and skinnier—both in writing and in life. So this week we are talking about the discipline of writing. What are the habits that will help us to write more efficiently? Yesterday, we talked about Working On a Big, Clean Screen. Now that you are sitting calmly in front of your giant screen, what’s next?

Find the “Flow”

Writing is a solitary activity. Writers and other creative people are often most productive—and most happy—when all other distractions are shut out so that they become totally immersed in their work. In his groundbreaking work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the influential psychologist, Haly Csikszentmihalyi, describes the feeling of “flow” that accompanies total absorption in work:

Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted. An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult or dangerous.

Carve Out Time for Writing

Because writing is so demanding, you must set aside time to make it happen. Shut out the world, if only briefly. The essence of writing is reflection and a single block of uninterrupted time will make you productive and focused.

Try working in 45-minute segments, with a 15-minute break as the hour ends to turn to other tasks. 45/15 works like a charm for me.  I can always focus my wandering mind for 45 minutes and email (and life) lose their hold during those writing minutes, because I know I have 15 minutes coming soon to turn life back on. When the next writing hour starts, I feel refreshed and sharp and I see things that I didn’t see when I stopped writing.

Don’t try to push your writing time much beyond and hour and a half. It’s hard to keep a sustained focus for hours and hours. And, in our busy professional lives, it’s not always wise or professional to expect the world to leave us alone for hours on end.

Avoid Multitasking While You Write. (That means no email.) 

Yes, your colleagues expect you to check your email constantly unless you are Asleep or in a Tunnel and your employment contract prohibits sleeping anyway. But switching between tasks makes you less efficient, particularly with complicated tasks such as writing. A 2005 study, No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work,  found that office workers were interrupted an average of every 11 minutes and that, after each interruption, it took 25 minutes to return to the original task. Twenty-five minutes!

After being interrupted, you may not remember where you were in writing a paragraph or dissecting a case. Do you really have a half hour available to get back in your groove? Are minor interruptions, such as email, worth a half hour of your time? Turn off the incoming sound on e-mail so that you feel less like you are on call. Check email if you must, but limit yourself to once an hour. Try holding your phone calls and shutting the door.

And if you really can’t ignore the juicy little ping of email, use a program that shuts the damn thing down and saves you from yourself.

Stop Surfing

The Internet is irresistible. Resist. Resist. Resist. Disconnect while you write. The world will still be there when you return and no one will have even noticed that you were gone.

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In my next posts, I’ll share more tips for whipping your writing life into shape. Stay tuned!

P.S. from the Shameless-Self-Promotion Department: My book is brimming with tips like this.

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