This is a guest post by Neil Levy, Senior research fellow at the University of Oxford
I’ve published a lot of articles – more than 200. So it seems like I should have some tips worth sharing on how to write them. I’m not sure I do. I thought of calling this post How to write a philosophy article, but I’m not sure I know how. I also thought of calling it How I write a philosophy article, but I’m not even sure I know how I do it. What follows is a description of how I tend to generate ideas and turn them into papers. Perhaps something in what I laughingly call my process will help others. Or perhaps the lesson is that you have to find your own.
Most people (I gather) generate the argument, more or less, before they sit down to write. Writing is a craft for them. The thinking happens in conversation with others, in the shower, in teaching, while running, or whatever. This sometimes happens for me too (though usually when reading). That’s nice when that happens. But it doesn’t happen all that often for me. I don’t tend to sit down with a clear idea of what I want to say.
Rather than a craft for me, writing is thinking. When I sit down, any idea I have is incredibly vague and very fragile. I really don’t know whether it will amount to anything. I try to sneak up on it, rather than express it. I often begin by describing the problem I’m concerned with, rather than jumping straight into it. I will often write (what I hope will become) a first section, describing the terrain of the debate as it stands. Only then do I really try to develop my idea. I try things out, on paper (well, on the screen). I write the ideas as they come, as fully and carefully as possible.
The advantage of doing things this way is that by the time I get to trying out the ideas, I have a fairly good idea of the lay of the land in the debate. The disadvantage, of course, is that doing your thinking on paper is labor-intensive. When I try to make my vague thought a little clearer, I sometimes find that it melts away. Vague thoughts are often confused thoughts. Because I write on a lot of topics, at the germ of an idea stage I often don’t the debate well enough to know if the idea is novel, or whether there are obvious objections to it. The result is a lot of abandoned papers. I have lots of paper fragments floating around on hard drive. Sometimes, they’re not unsalvageable. I abandon the paper because the idea evaporates, but I come back to it months later (maybe after reading something that suggests a different way of approaching it). Sometimes, they’re complete dead ends.
Maybe this method of working requires more time than most people have, because it results in lots of half- or quarter-assed papers that get abandoned. So maybe it wouldn’t transfer well to the lives of most people. But it works for me. One reason it works for me is that it helps with one of the hardest parts of writing (for me, and other people I’ve spoken to). Writing can be fun, once you get going. But starting is hard. Writing the way I do helps with that. It’s much less forbidding to start by setting out the debate as it stands rather than go straight to the idea. You don’t have to go out on a limb, yet. By the time you get around to your idea, you’re in the flow and you can forget yourself enough to take risks. When I return to the same paper the next day, the introductory section done, I ease in by rereading the earlier paragraphs, editing as I go. All going well, that transitions to real writing more or less automatically.
This ‘process’ may be completely idiosyncratic, and completely useless for most people. Maybe the only real lesson here is that we’re idiosyncratic beings, and what works for one person won’t work for another. Maybe we all need to generate our own way of working.
That said, there are things that are probably common to most people. Because they’re common, they’re probably already familiar to you. At the risk of repetition, here some of the things I do which I guess that lots of people also do.
Write every day. I am vaguely dissatisfied unless I manage to write 750 words. On a good day, I write three times that. Of course there are lots of bad days too.
Write at the same time every day, if you can. This helps with the starting problem. I tend to go to a café, answer a few emails and then write for an hour or two. If it’s routine, it’s easier to start.
Read widely. Ideas come from weird places. My most recent acceptance is a paper on social epistemology (with Mark Alfano) which is inspired by work in cultural evolution. Some of my work on free will arose by thinking about locational externalism in the philosophy of mind. Even if reading away from your AOC doesn’t give rise to cool new ideas (or, in my cases, fragmentary thoughts that might become ideas), sometimes you need the reset of time away from the AOC. Note, however, that there are traps in reading away from one’s comfort zone. In the bad old days (not too long ago at all), philosophers would all too often read about a cool study in neuroscience or psychology, and write a paper centred on it. Motivational externalism refuted! Virtue ethics eviscerated! I was guilty of this kind of thing myself. We’ve got more sophisticated now, and this kind of thing won’t be accepted today. Now we’ll need to see evidence that the empirical evidence is reliable and that it’s being interpreted appropriately. If you have do generate a cool idea through reading well away from your comfort zone, you need to take the time to develop some real competence in the area before you submit the paper. Alternatively – maybe preferably – enlist a co-author with real competence.
One final thing: while for me writing a paper is usually a pretty solitary affair – I don’t generate ideas in conversation much – my papers really benefit from input from others, and for me this is best done by presenting them. Obviously, y’all know that getting feedback is important, but presenting papers has extra benefits over and above sending them out. I talk my papers, with or without slides. It’s in preparing to talk the paper that it moves from the page into my head: I have to really get to know it to talk through it. I have to get its structure right. This enables me to see how it works, and how it doesn’t work. I need the stimulus of knowing I actually have to present the paper to motivate me to do this (it’s hard mental work, running through the paper in one’s head repeatedly). So presenting the paper has benefits apart from feedback.
I thought I had more to say. Turns out, I don’t. That, too, is something that can happen when you sit down to write.
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