Can ‘throw-up, then clean-up' work for history?

In an email message, a reader writes:

I was revisiting one of your posts on writing where you advocate a "throw it all up!" method. While I often find myself intrigued by this suggestion, I find it hard to carry through with respect to writing papers in the history of philosophy. The reason I find my history papers go slower than, say, things I have written in ethics or aesthetics, is that careful explanation of the text gets in the way. If I start the day with the goal of getting down X's thoughts about Y, I need to find some good quotes where these thoughts are conveyed, and I need to spend time explaining the passages so as not to drift too far away from the text. If I sit down and say, "I'm writing 3-5 pages today about X on Y, and I'll just find the quotes that support my view later," I find this only prolongs things. I don't think writing history papers necessarily has to go slower, but I am wondering if it might. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about this, and those of others as well. It can be hard to throw it all up on the page if you are also digging for good quotes, and wishing to explain those quotes effectively. To remedy this, sometimes I spend a whole day just gathering quotes, and then I keep them in a separate word document and take them as I need them. But even when I do that, I find that it slows things down. Maybe throw up is not for me.

Good question! As I mentioned a while back, I found the "throw up, then clean up" method to be a real game-changer...

In brief, the throw-up/clean-up method involves "free writing" the very first thing in the morning every day that you work on research, before doing anything else, without any editing, and with a clear self-imposed requirement for how you must free-write before moving onto anything else. For me, this used to be 3-5 pages each day. These days, it is usually a full section of a new paper. Before I adopted the method, it used to take me many months to write first a first draft of a paper. These days, it typically takes me about a week.

I learned this method in the most serendipitous way. I was a grad student getting absolutely nowhere on my dissertation. Then, one day, I found in my department mailbox a "how to write a dissertation" book sent to me unsolicited from a publisher...and I figured, "Well, what I'm doing certainly isn't working. Maybe I should read this!" So I did...and the very first piece of advice the author gave was the throw-up/clean-up method. I tried it. The first week I thought it was going to be a disaster, as I was producing 3-5 pages a day of total trash. Then, miraculously, at the end of the week I turned 25 pages of trash into the first 10 good pages of a dissertation. Eight months later I was done with my dissertation. I gave the book to another struggling grad student. Eight months of so later, she was done with her dissertation too. It was positively miraculous.

Why does the method work? In my experience, a big part of it is psychological. This is something the author of the book emphasized: you simply feel like you are making progress each day--so, when you wake up the next day, you actually want to keep working instead of avoiding things. My experience has been that this is exactly right. Another reason I've found the method works is that it incentivizes efficiency: instead of spending an entire day getting nowhere on a manuscript (something I used to do all of the time), the throw-up/clean-up method gets new material out of your head and onto paper quickly (since you are prohibited from editing). Not only that: the method explicitly requires you to stop and do other things. After you've free-written 3-5 page, the method requires you not to work on the project any more that day. It tells you to work on other things--which dramatically increases your efficiency (since instead of letting things pile up, which happens if you work on a manuscript all day but get nowhere, this way you spend the rest of the day getting other things off your plate!). Third, I've found it's much easier to find one's way with things--cleaning up arguments, paper-organization, etc.--after you have things on paper. I liken it to working on a sculpture or painting. It's hard to get an entire project right in your head. Rather, it's only once you have the sculpture, painting, or paper begun that you can begin to see your way through it. At least, that's my experience.

Bearing all of this in mind, let's turn to our reader's query: is there any reason to think this might work when writing papers in the history of philosophy? As I'm not a historian of philosophy, I can only speculate here--and I'm very curious to hear from people who work in the area to see if any of them use the method! However, let me say why I think it might work, and if so, how one might go about it. On occasion, I've done some work involving textual analysis, and the work I normally do typically cites a ton of sources--so I'm not sure how much different it is. When it comes to these matters, I typically do two things. First, I collect quotes and references, and develop an understanding of what I think they mean before trying to "throw anything up" (i.e. before free-writing). If haven't figured that stuff out yet, I don't begin the paper yet. Second, assuming I do have an idea of what all of the quotes/cites I have lined up are about, I put them all in a Word document organized in some intuitive way (usually by author, along with some sort of number and brief phrase/note to remind myself what the thing is about, in my interpretation). Third, when I sit down to "throw stuff up" (i.e. free-write), I will open the document I've collected quotes/cites in on the left-hand side of my desktop--opening up my draft paper on the right-hand side. What I do then is free-write my 3-5 pages (or whatever) as follows: I will explain the relevant literature/passages as far as I can in my own words, without looking at any texts--only looking at the quotes on left-hand side of my desktop to insert in the free-writing text stuff like this,"INSERT CITATION/QUOTATION #1 HERE." This way, I still basically free-write quickly while inserting along the way where I think/know certain quotes should be. Finally, it's only after free-writing in this way that I'll go back later (after I have a full draft) and clean up the mess, making sure I summarized things correctly, correcting errors, and engaging in more detailed textual analysis. The point of the free-writing, again, is just to get out as quickly as possible a skeleton for a paper...so that one can do the nitty gritty details later. 

Anyway, I'm not sure this works for drafting papers in the history of philosophy--but, for my part, I guess I don't see why not. As long as one adapts the method to what historians do (which I think the schema I've described above might do), it seems to me like the method should still work. But again, I'm not a historian, so maybe I'm way off! Any historians of philosophy out there care to weigh in? Do any of you use the "throw-up/clean-up" method successfully? 

Comments

[Michel]

FWIW, I recently wrote a paper in the history of philosophy (which, happily, was accepted!), and I did pretty much what Marcus outlined above.

I don't know if that was the most efficient way to go about it, but it worked just fine. The bulk of my real writing gets done in the editing process anyway (and, in this case, with the help of very kind and patient referees); I just throw up a skeleton paper first, and flesh it out later. I find it a lot easier to find and maintain my voice that way.