THREE FLAVORS OF WRITING GROUPS Goals and Accountability Groups

The goal of text generation is to throw confused, wide-eyed words on a page; the goal of text revision is to scrub the words clean so that they sound nice and can go out in public.

Picking the right days and times is most of the battle. The actual days and times don’t matter much, as long as they are defensible and biologically realistic.

If you pick writing times when your brain is perky, wearing its running shoes and retro headband, you’ll write more easily and creatively.

Our group focuses on accountability and goals, the two big motivational forces that keep people on schedule.

Writing is more than typing words. For me, writing’s endpoint is sending an article to a journal, a book to a publisher, or a grant proposal to a funding agency. Any activity that gets me closer to that goal counts as writing.

When you find a nice place, stick to it. Habits come from repetition—doing the same behaviors with the same stuff in the same place at the same times.

Keep Track Humans are both frail and forgetful, so you can guess what happens if you don’t write down everyone’s goals. The next week, a certain convenient ignorance descends upon the members

Instead of finding time to write, allot time to write. People who write a lot make a writing schedule and stick to it.