In his book, Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing (1990), Boice built upon his empirical research on how successful academics wrote. This important work was one of the first books on academic writing (if not the first) to advocate for shorter writing sessions based upon what successful academic writers did to be productive.
While this work was an extremely important development, there are a few things missing. First, being a productive scholar does not mean a writer is happy, and that writing was not cognitively benign for many, let alone joyful. Second, many of his writers were actually writing in much larger blocks than what I advocate — normally a 45-minute session — and were therefore very productive but not necessarily thriving. One can be successful by banging their head against the wall — there are many ways of doing better. Third, extending this point, there are many tools one can use to build out a healthy, sustainable writing session, such as ritual, clear entry points, good self-talk and other positive mental tools, considering how to optimize collaborations, creating clear architectures and structures with word counts, and many more methods.
In other words, research on what works is not research into what is optimal — and that is what interests me the most. 🦄
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