Rhizome

In the textbook I use for the college composition class I teach, The Bedford Reader (9th ed.), many of the reading selections are followed by short pieces about writing written by the authors themsevles. Many of them offer good advice and useful insights into their writing process.

One in particular I find to be a bit of an inspiration. It's by a guy named William Lutz. He has two good pieces of advice. The first is what he called his rule about writing in an interview with C-SPAN's Brian Lamb: "you never write a book, you write three pages, or you write five pages" (425). The trick is to write a short, limited number of pages each day. The second good piece of advice is to "never pump the well dry" (426), meaning that one should never stop writing when one is out of ideas. Always stop when you have something more to write about. Then you write a short note to yourself about what to write the next day. The next day, you rewrite what you wrote the day before, thus getting yourself primed for that day's work.

This seems like excellent advice, and one that I will try to remember to take to heart as I try to jump start my writing again.