I’m a professor of anthropology. This is my diary about writing. When I transitioned from writing my dissertation to my first book Shifting Livelihoods, I often felt lost in the writing. It was hard. Time consuming. Difficult. At the time, I found inspiration in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, which I devoured hungrily. Years later, I remember the mental challenges that plagued her life, but also her thoughts on her process, the books she was working on, and the challenges she faced in doing the work. I was reminded of that diary, when I came across David Smith’s Design Notes Diary. Smith is a iOS app developer who keeps a blog inspired by the slogan of the Field Notes brand of notebooks: “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.” The Design Notes Diary is a place to reflect on the work that goes into writing iOS apps. With this in mind, as I began a sabbatical year, I have begun my own diary about my writing. This to be a place were I come, most days, to reflect on my writing process. It’s about process, it’s about practice, it’s about craft, and it’s about the difficulties of writing. I am writing for a public, because having audience—real or imagined—helps me refine my thoughts, and finish them. Perhaps these notes will be useful to you.
- Writing Diary #37: Writing is Hard: Develop a Writing Practice
- Writer’s Diary #36: Deep Writing
- Writer’s Diary #35 – Craft Work, Detail Work, Steady Work
- Writer’s Diary #34 – Stop while the stopping is good
- Writer’s Diary #33 – Emergent structure, or work more; think less
- Writer’s Diary #32 – Creating Structure/Finding Structure
- Writer’s Diary #31 – Summer Doldrums, Writing, and Napping
- Writer’s Diary #30 – Retyping as a Way into a Text
- Writer’s Diary #29 – Large Language Models as Writing Assistants and First Readers?
- Writer’s Diary #28 – Anthropic’s Claude-2-100K
- Writer’s Diary #27 – Four Hour Work Day?
- Writer’s Diary #26: Kayaking, writing, and hiking
- Writer’s Diary #25 – Over coming the Blahs
- Writer’s Diary #24: A 21st Century Typewriter
- Writer’s Diary #23: Fragments as Stories
- Writer’s Diary #22: Crafting “Stone by Stone”
- Writer’s Diary #21 – Yesterday, a good day. Why?
- Writer’s Diary #20 – The Hard Part can be Everything but the Writing
- Writer’s Diary #19 – Morning Choice
- Writer’s Diary #18: Elizabeth Gilbert on Elusive Genius
- Writer’s Diary #17: On Naps
- Writer’s Diary #16 – Everything is a cut up
- Writer’s Diary #15: Programming Challenge: Ordering a book of fragments?
- Writer’s Diary #14: Wait, Slow Down, You Move Too Fast
- Writing Diary #13: Make Writing Fun, Again?
- Writer’s Diary #12: Finishing a Draft
- Writer’s Diary #11: The Synapses of Writing
- Writer’s Diary #10: Writing is like Flying: You have to throw yourself at the ground and miss
- Writer’s Diary #9: On Freewriting a First Draft
- Writer’s Diary #8: Notes on Becoming a Writer
- Writer’s Diary #7: On Starting
- Writer’s Diary #6: Writing and Routine
- Writer’s Diary #5: Write every day, maybe not?
- Writer’s Diary #4: Getting Back on the Bus
- Writer’s Diary #3: Linking Habits
- Writer’s Diary #2: About Nutgrafs
- Writer’s Diary #1: Feathering Your Nest