(2022-06-26) Johnson Timing It Right

Steven Johnson: Timing It Right. A few days ago, I was having lunch with two friends, both of whom are working on long-form writing projects (using Scrivener naturally, thanks to my evangelism.) It came up in conversation that they were trying to organize their writing time using the Pomodoro Technique.

It occurred to me as I drove home from the lunch that the rhythm of creative work has been mostly neglected so far in this ongoing conversation about workflows.

I tried to keep to a goal of writing 500 words a day.

And the thing about writing 500 words a day is that if you stick with it, by the end of six months or so, you’ll have enough words to make a book. Will they be the right words? Absolutely not. But you’ll have a draft of a book, and having a draft changes everything.

Over time, though, I have drifted away from the 500 words goal

Instead of a fixed word count, I think about each day’s creative work in terms of finite tasks. Sometimes the task takes the form of writing a section of something that I’m working on that will end up being roughly 500 words. But there are many creative tasks as a writer that take quite a bit of thinking before they generate any words

When I’m starting a new chapter, for instance, I’ll often give myself an entire morning just to figure out what the opening sentence should be

There’s also the question of the overall rhythms of the work day. (Dan Pink wrote a terrific book a few years ago about these issues called When.)

I tend to cluster my work into three distinct sections, neatly organized around different cognitive enhancers: morning espresso, late afternoon tea, and a shorter session after dinner, usually with a glass of wine in hand

let’s get back to tools! Or at least tools that help you think about timing…

the conversation also turned to one of my longtime complaints about writing/research software, which is the lack of a good tool for creating timelines.

one of my lunch companions sent me a link to Aeon Timeline.

If you happen to be writing a novel or teleplay or historical nonfiction, I think you’ll want to download it and give it a test drive

There’s a “mindmap” mode as well for those of you who are into those kinds of visualizations—and it seems to have excellent sync integration with both Ulysses and Scrivener. My favorite little feature is a customizable “zoom range” for the main timeline: you can set it so the default scale is billions of years, for those of you working on a book about the evolution of life or cosmology, or you can work with a timeline that defaults to seconds, in the event that you’re writing a sequel to 24.