Writing, fast and slow

On Wednesdays since the beginning of January, I’ve been doing an exercise from a lovely little book, Creative Writing for Researchers. Taking five months to get through a 160-page book might seem extraordinarily slow. Some of the twenty-odd exercises took twenty minutes. Others took a lot longer. Sometimes I honed a haiku, other times I scrawled out pages and pages. But I often had time to draft redraft the same short bit of text, first on paper, and then if I thought it was worth saving, typed up on screen. That slow process made my writing a lot better, and I’ll use those exercises again, alone and with others.

On Wednesdays from the beginning of September, I’ll be doing an exercise from a useful big book, Writing Your Article in 12 Weeks. Taking three months to get your article submission-ready might seem extraordinarily fast. But we did it before, in 2023, and now we’re doing it again. To make it work, you need a first draft and the commitment to set aside a chunk of time each week to work on it. Accountability helps. If you can’t make the weekly meetup, you can post your goals and outcomes.

On Wednesdays, we need both the slow and the fast. Our hour a week on Zoom is where I move my writing forward on a conceptual, structural level. In that short time, over a long time, tectonic plates shift.

If you’d like to move your writing forward, but know you can’t do it alone, all you need is someone else to write with and a regular, brief slot to meet. If you want to join us to Write on Wednesdays, hop on our mailing list. If you speak Finnish, you can join us to write our articles in 12 weeks with Tohtoriverkosto. If you don’t, hope you can join us for a retreat soon. Keep writing, fast and slow, and feel those tectonic plates shift…