A reader writes in:
I'm new to the publishing side of the profession. I do have projects I'm working on. What I can tell I haven't developed is a sense of a reliable writing process.
Do you (or other philosophers) get an idea and generally just start drafting the idea right away? Or do you spend time reading relevant litt first?
My worries are that I furiously write two pages worth of notes to get an idea down just to go read the literature to find out I've either been scooped (someone's already worked on that) or that it's actually just a terrible idea, and it feels like wasted time (and inspiration) to have banged out even the 2-3 pages of notes. So my temptation is to read. But then the reading feels unending. When did I read enough to feel justified that I can start writing this up?
My advisor in grad school was and is a prolific writer. So I can't imagine that [they're] poring over a lot of articles before [they] just start throwing ideas on the page. But I'm also guessing [they're] not representative either since [their] output volume is a lot higher than anyone else in my old department. I'm trying to get a sense of reasonable expectations (averages maybe?) about how the process should go.
This is a great query, and I'm curious to hear what other readers think. However, here are some of my own quick reactions.
First things first: I think it's pretty widely recognized that grad students in particular can have a bad (if understandable) habit of spending way too much time reading rather than writing. In fact, I know I made that mistake in grad school myself, at one point spending about a year and a half getting no good writing done because the more I read, the more I just confused myself. This isn't to say that one shouldn't have a fair idea of what the background literature in an area holds. It is to say that once you have a fair idea what the background literature is, there are quickly diminishing returns to reading more, and so you should probably just get moving with writing.
Second, I don't see any reason to lay out 2-3 pages of notes to get an idea down before briefly surveying the literature to see what has already been says. As the OP indicates in their own case, that seems to me like a terrible recipe for a lot of wasted time. Here's what I do:
- I get a paper idea, jotting down the thesis I'm thinking of in, like, one sentence.
- I do a Philpapers search in the area (viz. different key words) to see if anyone has defended that idea.
- If I find that someone has defended it, then (assuming the argument I vaguely have in mind doesn't seem to me appreciably different than something else already out there), I simply give up on the spot. If that's the case, I've probably wasted no more than an hour of my life on an idea that will go nowhere.
- If I find that no one has defended it, then I do a bit more of a detailed dive into the literature to see what people have defended and whether I think my idea still makes sense defending.
- Assuming I made it through step 4 and the idea still seems worth pursuing, I quickly draft up a full paper.
- If the quick draft seems promising, then I do a really deep dive in the literature to make sure there's nothing crucial I'm missing.
As someone who has published fairly productively in a teaching-intensive position, this strategy appears to have worked fairly well for me--and although I don't know for sure, I would be fairly surprised if other people who publish consistently tended to have a very different process. But who knows? I'm curious to hear what other readers who publish consistently do.
I will say that even though the process I describe above aims to "cut my losses" pretty early on (by giving up quickly on paper ideas that seem like they're going nowhere), I end up drafting up way more papers this way than I publish (i.e. at least twice as many). While this may seem like a lot of wasted effort--and, to be honest, sometimes I wonder whether I could better prune projects before 'wasting time' writing them up--my own inclination is to think that it's not really wasted time. Rather, it just feels to me like good practice. Why should every work have to work out? I mean, artists often have paintings that don't meet their standards--but I expect they think that every painting is good practice for the next one. That, at any rate, is how I approach things.
Long story short, from my own case and having talked to others who publish consistently, I tend to think that reading too much is a worse vice (for productivity at any rate) than writing too much. Yes, it is important to have a good background understanding of a given area--but in general, that seems to me what grad coursework and comprehensive examinations are for: to give you a grounding in an area so that when you come up with a promising idea, you have some idea why it's promising and whether anyone out there has defended it before (and if so, how). If you have that kind of grounding, then (or so it seems to me) for the most part you shouldn't have to do that much reading to get started with writing.
But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?
Write first, position later.
I can only chime everything Marcus said: that's my experience, too. Although I don't actually junk much; I just set it aside, and plan to re-work it later, when I have a clearer idea of how to do so.
At least, this is my experience for papers in debates that are somewhat or largely unfamiliar to me; for stuff I know quite well (usually because I've written on it before, or because I taught it), I don't really need to search around to see if anyone else has said the same thing. If I discover, in the course of writing and researching, that someone else has been in the vicinity, then I re-position as appropriate while I work on the paper (what I call 'editing', but which is a very involved re-writing and re-structuring process). You can also look to CFPs for ideas about what kinds of perspectives might look fresh and exciting and not-too-well-trodden.
Just start writing, even if it's not very good. After you've written a little for the day, you can stop and start reading. And that reading can inform your subsequent writing. That way, you allow your writing to inform your reading, too, especially in terms of what you should read next/new directions/etc. But thinking of the reading and writing phases as entirely separate is a recipe for getting lost in the reading and never writing.
Posted by: Michel | 05/11/2020 at 04:50 PM
Maybe this is a feature of the work I'm doing (which is historical), but I generally don't start with an "idea" so much as a topic on which I have (what I think are) lots of interesting things to say. It turns out, once I write those out and then look closer at the literature, that other people have said lots of that stuff before, or at least, similar things that I can cite as support. Beautiful! Now I don't have to waste a bunch of page-space establishing this one thing, but can cite the good work done by some brilliant scholars, and can spend some time on those other interesting things I want to say. In fact, rarely has someone said exactly the thing I want to say, so contrasting their position with mine helps me to formulate mine much more precisely.
Generally, the more good work there is out there, the better. I realize now that I'm not so afraid of getting "scooped" as I was as a graduate student—we're all better off if more people are making strong arguments for true, interesting conclusions. It will only improve your paper to take account of the excellent scholarship that is out there.
I write to get clear and precise on my own formulation of something, I write a lot, and the delete button is my friend—one way in which I've matured a lot since graduate school is how extensively I "revise"; what I called "revising" in graduate school I would just call "proofreading" or "tweaking" now, what I call revising now is what I would have called rewriting back then. Keep a 'dump' file on a paper and regularly toss whole sections in there and rewrite them in the master document. You may go back to that 'dump' file to salvage an idea that seemed too precious to just delete, but chances are, it's garbage.
I'm not "prolific" by any means, but I publish about 2 articles or book chapters a year with a very busy personal life—I do that by writing first: As others say, write first, situate/revise later. The things you read will all be a mush without some concrete ideas to relate it back to—if you are reading with an idea/argument or interpretation in mind, the literature becomes much more vivid and pointed.
(And, as Michel mentions, writing on an entirely new topic having never read any literature is a bad idea—so, take this with the caveat that you should know something about a topic before venturing something in that arena. Build on what you know already; if you are interested in something outside your main field, work your way over to it from things you already know).
Posted by: Prof L | 05/11/2020 at 06:20 PM
In my experience, you're barely thinking at all, let alone doing philosophy, if you're not writing. So yes, write first and position later, but that follows from a more general proposition: do philosophy first (this just happens to require writing) and position later.
My experience is that, if you have the time for it, it's all worth investing at least a few hours into---so somewhat more than Marcus recommends. This is just because even if it turns out that someone else had your idea, you can almost certainly *either* improve on what they say (but only if you flesh out your idea a bit first) or learn from what they said (as long as you flesh out your idea enough to make mistakes).
But other than that, I'm on board with Marcus' description. Also important: you'll never get enough external feedback to reliably use that to improve your papers until they're publishable. So you need to be able to improve your papers on your own. This means you need to develop a sustainable editing practice of some sort.
Once you have lots of ideas and a sustainable editing practice, publishing is sorta easy: at any given point, you take whichever of your ideas looks most promising and either (a) crank out something paper shaped that contains the idea or (b) edit and improve the paper-shaped thing you've already built already about that idea. And then you keep doing that. And that's it.
Posted by: TJack | 05/12/2020 at 05:23 PM