A reader writes in:
I'm new to the publishing side of the profession. I do have projects I'm working on. What I can tell I haven't developed is a sense of a reliable writing process.
Do you (or other philosophers) get an idea and generally just start drafting the idea right away? Or do you spend time reading relevant litt first?
My worries are that I furiously write two pages worth of notes to get an idea down just to go read the literature to find out I've either been scooped (someone's already worked on that) or that it's actually just a terrible idea, and it feels like wasted time (and inspiration) to have banged out even the 2-3 pages of notes. So my temptation is to read. But then the reading feels unending. When did I read enough to feel justified that I can start writing this up?
My advisor in grad school was and is a prolific writer. So I can't imagine that [they're] poring over a lot of articles before [they] just start throwing ideas on the page. But I'm also guessing [they're] not representative either since [their] output volume is a lot higher than anyone else in my old department. I'm trying to get a sense of reasonable expectations (averages maybe?) about how the process should go.
This is a great query, and I'm curious to hear what other readers think. However, here are some of my own quick reactions.
First things first: I think it's pretty widely recognized that grad students in particular can have a bad (if understandable) habit of spending way too much time reading rather than writing. In fact, I know I made that mistake in grad school myself, at one point spending about a year and a half getting no good writing done because the more I read, the more I just confused myself. This isn't to say that one shouldn't have a fair idea of what the background literature in an area holds. It is to say that once you have a fair idea what the background literature is, there are quickly diminishing returns to reading more, and so you should probably just get moving with writing.
Second, I don't see any reason to lay out 2-3 pages of notes to get an idea down before briefly surveying the literature to see what has already been says. As the OP indicates in their own case, that seems to me like a terrible recipe for a lot of wasted time. Here's what I do:
- I get a paper idea, jotting down the thesis I'm thinking of in, like, one sentence.
- I do a Philpapers search in the area (viz. different key words) to see if anyone has defended that idea.
- If I find that someone has defended it, then (assuming the argument I vaguely have in mind doesn't seem to me appreciably different than something else already out there), I simply give up on the spot. If that's the case, I've probably wasted no more than an hour of my life on an idea that will go nowhere.
- If I find that no one has defended it, then I do a bit more of a detailed dive into the literature to see what people have defended and whether I think my idea still makes sense defending.
- Assuming I made it through step 4 and the idea still seems worth pursuing, I quickly draft up a full paper.
- If the quick draft seems promising, then I do a really deep dive in the literature to make sure there's nothing crucial I'm missing.
As someone who has published fairly productively in a teaching-intensive position, this strategy appears to have worked fairly well for me–and although I don't know for sure, I would be fairly surprised if other people who publish consistently tended to have a very different process. But who knows? I'm curious to hear what other readers who publish consistently do.
I will say that even though the process I describe above aims to "cut my losses" pretty early on (by giving up quickly on paper ideas that seem like they're going nowhere), I end up drafting up way more papers this way than I publish (i.e. at least twice as many). While this may seem like a lot of wasted effort–and, to be honest, sometimes I wonder whether I could better prune projects before 'wasting time' writing them up–my own inclination is to think that it's not really wasted time. Rather, it just feels to me like good practice. Why should every work have to work out? I mean, artists often have paintings that don't meet their standards–but I expect they think that every painting is good practice for the next one. That, at any rate, is how I approach things.
Long story short, from my own case and having talked to others who publish consistently, I tend to think that reading too much is a worse vice (for productivity at any rate) than writing too much. Yes, it is important to have a good background understanding of a given area–but in general, that seems to me what grad coursework and comprehensive examinations are for: to give you a grounding in an area so that when you come up with a promising idea, you have some idea why it's promising and whether anyone out there has defended it before (and if so, how). If you have that kind of grounding, then (or so it seems to me) for the most part you shouldn't have to do that much reading to get started with writing.
But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?
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