Thomas Dylan Daniel, 2019

This story initially appeared in Bulletproof Writers, at Medium.

Writing during times of stress is a sure-fire way to get clear about what’s bugging you, and in general, this seems to lead to relief.

In this article, I’ll walk you through my routine. I’ve written and published three books at this point, with another one slated for release soon, and a fifth in the works. I’ve done a patent, as well as a whitepaper, and almost 50 articles here on Medium this year alone. I hold a certificate in Professional Ethics from Texas State University as well as a Master’s of Arts in Applied Philosophy and Ethics. I sit on an editorial board and recommend for or against publication for different books. I’ve started a Medium publication called Serious Philosophy. And I write, literally every day, something like 2000 words.

The key concept in writing every day is not simply putting words down, willy-nilly. Instead, it helps to have a problem in mind that your words are centered around and designed to solve. The bigger, more timeless your problem happens to be, the more you’ll be able to write about it, but the less actual resolution you’ll be able to find.

Going with the flow

One trick I’ve picked up, which comes from a lifetime of immersion in texts — find my reading list for 2020 here — is to mentally structure a work and produce a first draft with one stream of consciousness. This is something you can do for a scene, a poem, or an essay — but likely not a whole book.

The trick is to avoid writing about the subject for a few hours. Do your chores, go shopping, socialize, and then when you sit down in front of your keyboard, shift gear. Get into the headspace of the thing you want to do, now that you’ve diligently eliminated your distractions, and engage your process.

Sometimes it’s best to write from an outline. What that looks like for me most of the time is a single paragraph that says everything I want to say. I’ll go back and press Enter on the keyboard between each thought, with no regard for where the sentences begin and end. I’ll come back and fix them later, and as a rule of thumb, each Enter results in a paragraph or two of explication.

Sometimes you’ll just have a good stream of consciousness you want to record. These generally take some work after they’re written — you’ll want to come back and cite sources or at least place links so that your reader understands the web of other writers you’re engaging with. If you’re telling a story, you may want to come back and edit for perspective, description, or plot. You can always come back later and look back over your work, make a few changes or corrections where necessary, and publish when it’s ready.

The main thing is to focus on quantity, and write every day — you can come back and pick out the things you end up liking for publication later, but you will have a hard time remembering thoughts you never wrote down.

Where the flow comes from

When you’re sitting down to write, sometimes your mind will be blank. In my mind, this is a sure sign that I’m not reading enough. I’ll need to pick up a book or flip to an article and follow the bread crumbs until I’ve essentially proven my thought to myself, and at that point it becomes a matter of proving this to the reader in an objective way as well.

I tend to read philosophy books a lot, because that’s my area of expertise. Yours may be quite different, but the process shouldn’t vary overmuch. I’ve successfully applied my method to everything from narrative fiction and nonfiction to scientific concepts and startup manifestos — once you have a solid method down, you’ll be good to go wherever you need to.

Don’t believe in expertise

Sure, experts exist. There are certain facts that lead one to a better grasp of a situation. But experts are not infallible, especially about the big stuff. Writers who do their job well can contribute to a wide range of topics meaningfully simply by reading the work of the field in which a given question resides and then applying this new knowledge in pursuit of the question.

In some sense, this is the origin of expertise in the first place. Think about it. Before there were experts, there were driven people who really wanted to figure out how things worked. These people studied hard and eventually became experts because they knew more than others in whatever the given field turned out to be.

All an expertise really involves is becoming one of those people and being up to date in the mechanics and particular jargon and logic of a given field. This frequently takes years of school, but a writer and an expert are not the same thing — an expert lives in the house; a writer peeps in through the window to see what’s going on, or shows up at the front door to ask the expert a question or two.

Now, a bunch of uneducated people pretending to be experts can, sure enough, yield absurdities like the flat earth movement, but it’s easy to avoid such tropes if you’re capable of participating in real scientific inquiry. Science is rooted in self-critique; that is, the ability to admit when you’re wrong about something. In fact, science often contains more questions than answers — scientists love to learn that they’re wrong because definitively disproving a hypothesis always produces new knowledge.

To write about something important, you need to recognize that you don’t have to be an expert to see what’s going on — but you do, definitely, need to actually know what’s going on.

The scientific approach to writing

As lovely as it would surely be to just be right from the outset about everything, it’s relatively plain to see that this is impossible. So when you write, ask others to review your work critically. A good reviewer will be able to ask questions of your work without tearing it down.

I sit on the editorial board for philosophy at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and anyone who has had me review their work over the years will probably appreciate the challenging criticism I tend to provide. This involves testing core theses of the works and pushing back against assumptions made by the authors — not always with the aim of preventing their books from being published, but often simply to engage with these works in a deep way, if possible! A good philosophy book isn’t always right about everything it says, but will always provide the reader with a variety of jumping-off points from which to think about a given issue or a handful of issues.

Philosophy is a particularly scientific field, which is to say that it was the birthplace of scientific inquiry, sure, but also that the scientific method — conjecture, hypothesis, confirmation, and finally proof, are all integral parts of it. We want to show why a given train of thought is valid, but also where the problems are for it.

How to know if it’s ready

Unfortunately, the simplest answer is that you can’t. You can have others read it and gauge their responses, you can try it with different audiences, you can proof until your hands are covered with red ink and your eyes are glazed over and you just sit, catatonic for hours…

But nothing you do will ever make anything you’ve written perfect. That’s why they say the perfect is the enemy of the good. It’s better to start with crap — believe me when I say crap is an integral part of doing anything good — and go for finished projects, which mean what you wanted them to mean when you started. That way, you’ll produce quantity, which will ultimately help you start to produce quality.

What are you waiting for?! Get to it! You are a unique person with unique thoughts to share with the rest of us, and we can’t wait to hear them!