Because I'm in the middle of a lengthy draft, I'm extremely attentive to what people say about writing. For example, on the Ezra Klein podcast, the host and guest were discussing the use of A.I. in writing, Ezra explaining:

But almost always when I am stuck, the problem is I don’t know what I need to say. Oftentimes, I have structured the chapter wrong. Oftentimes, I’ve simply not done enough work. And one of the difficulties for me about using A.I. is that A.I. never gives me the answer, which is often the true answer — this whole chapter is wrong. It is poorly structured. You have to delete it and start over. It’s not feeling right to you because it is not right.

Maybe, taken out of context, this quote doesn't mean much, but I like how it exposes the kind of things I struggle with.

The guest (Ethan Mollick) in his answer said:

And I think a lot of us think about writing as thinking. We don’t know if that’s true for everybody, but for writers, that’s how they think.

It was a fascinating episode on A.I.

It reminds me of this part in Virginia Valian’s essay “Learning to Work” wherein she explains how she taught herself to tackle her thesis writing by committing herself to work on it for 15 minutes a day.

The first rule was that the fifteen-minute period had to be spent solely in working. My feeling of accomplishment depended on having a chunk of time that I did not fritter away in any way. I also had to learn that losing myself in my work was not dangerous. Most important, I noticed that I tended to stop working the minute I hit a difficult problem. Working in fifteen-minute chunks meant that occasionally I hit such a difficult problem in the middle of the required fifteen minutes and had to learn how to deal with it. Sometimes it simply required a little more thinking; sometimes it meant I would have to read something or talk to someone; sometimes it meant a lot more thinking. What I learned, though, was that I could deal with problems and didn't have to give up whenever I encountered them.

To me, it’s not the 15 minutes that matters so much (although I do find it very helpful to think about). It’s that encountering a “problem” and learning how to fix it, is just as valid a use of time as writing 250 words unimpeded. It has helped me dispel the idea that I was failing my productivity goals if I hadn’t set an impressive word count at the end of the day. Writing is dealing with problems. Dealing with problems is the hard work of thinking.

Since hearing this podcast episode several weeks ago, Derek Thompson’s comparison has stuck in my mind as an encapsulation of how I feel writing this thesis. Here’s the quote, lightly edited:

One thing I learned writing my first book [...] is that writing changes so much as the length of the work changes; that in a way, blogging is pure writing and by the time you get to a book, writing a book is actually not entirely writing, it's almost more organizing, than it is writing. One way that I thought of it is like if you're writing an article, it's almost like shopping for one shirt. I'm just looking for one data set about Americans hanging out less. And once I find that data set, I've found my shirt, I can write the article. Writing a column sometimes, like a 3000 word column, is more like buying furniture for a room. It's a lot of buying stuff and when you buy it, you have to lay it out and once you've laid it out, you're like ok, now the room is together. Writing a book is like buying a new house and outfitting it with furniture. I mean, yes, it is about buying stuff, but the biggest job for a new house is figuring out where all the damn stuff goes. And that's the major challenge with a book, so that's how I think about it at a conceptual level.