I break the project down into small sections (I hate writing long things, and if I had written my book as a book, rather than as chapters, each divided into ~1k word sections, I would not have written it). So, the first question is how it makes sense to start divvying up.
For the book, I knew what the different chapters would be (Rosary, Divine Office, Examen, etc), so I made a Freemind diagram of all the points/ideas/etc I expected to use in each of those sections. (And that just needed to be enough of a handle for me to remember what I was talking about. Seeing a sub-bullet under “Confession” that said “Tam Lin” probably wouldn’t be much help to anyone else!).
So, when I worked on the book, I wasn’t working on the whole book. I just needed to turn “Confession → Tam Lin” from notation into text.
I did a similar thing with my college thesis, where I started by grabbing references, dumped them all into a doc, moved them around so they were grouped together in categories like “Human Flesh Search” “Gov’t Using Collective Score-Settling” etc, and then worked on individual sections.
I thought of what I was doing as a very small task, just filling in connective tissue between citations and examples. This tends to help me a lot.
I think the other benefit of the “break it down” approach is that you don’t wind up with a blank document thinking “What will I do?” You sit down saying “Ok, today, I need to explain why we should approach Confession in the same spirit as Janet did her rescue of Tam Lin.” Writing and choosing what to write work better for me if they are two separate tasks.
I break the project down into small sections (I hate writing long things, and if I had written my book as a book, rather than as chapters, each divided into ~1k word sections, I would not have written it). So, the first question is how it makes sense to start divvying up.
For the book, I knew what the different chapters would be (Rosary, Divine Office, Examen, etc), so I made a Freemind diagram of all the points/ideas/etc I expected to use in each of those sections. (And that just needed to be enough of a handle for me to remember what I was talking about. Seeing a sub-bullet under “Confession” that said “Tam Lin” probably wouldn’t be much help to anyone else!).
So, when I worked on the book, I wasn’t working on the whole book. I just needed to turn “Confession → Tam Lin” from notation into text.
I did a similar thing with my college thesis, where I started by grabbing references, dumped them all into a doc, moved them around so they were grouped together in categories like “Human Flesh Search” “Gov’t Using Collective Score-Settling” etc, and then worked on individual sections.
I thought of what I was doing as a very small task, just filling in connective tissue between citations and examples. This tends to help me a lot.
I think the other benefit of the “break it down” approach is that you don’t wind up with a blank document thinking “What will I do?” You sit down saying “Ok, today, I need to explain why we should approach Confession in the same spirit as Janet did her rescue of Tam Lin.” Writing and choosing what to write work better for me if they are two separate tasks.