{"id":42,"date":"2009-11-23T17:13:24","date_gmt":"2009-11-24T01:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=42"},"modified":"2009-11-23T17:14:06","modified_gmt":"2009-11-24T01:14:06","slug":"some-more-writing-tips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/some-more-writing-tips\/","title":{"rendered":"Some (more) writing tips"},"content":{"rendered":"

My last post<\/a> contained one of the tricks I use when writing \u2013 how I use iteration when I\u2019m writing. It\u2019s one technique I use to make steady progress and avoid writers block. Although that post was about iteration in general, it reminded me that I have a few other tricks that I wanted to share.<\/p>\n

Before you eagerly read on, please remember that I\u2019m not an expert writer. I have some experience<\/a><\/em>, but I don\u2019t claim to have it all figured out. I think it takes much more than a handful of magazine articles and part of a few books under your belt to claim you actually know<\/em> how to write or are anything remotely close to an expert, so please take my advice with a grain of salt. That said, there were a few other techniques I used when writing both hwtsam<\/a> and my chapter in Beautiful Testing<\/a> that help me<\/span> a ton when writing.<\/p>\n

First \u2013 if you want to write, dedicate some time for it. I found that I needed at least an hour to be effective, and would often block off 2-3 hour chunks of time on weekends. In one prolific stretch of writing, I took a week off of work, and wrote every day from 9-12 and again from 1-4. In my hour \u201coff\u201d I would go for a run and grab some food \u2013 the break was very energizing. I think I wrote 3 full chapters of hwtsam that week.<\/p>\n

My next trick was to employ the (10+2)*5 trick<\/a> (I wrote a windows sidebar javascript applet to help with this). The idea is simple. Write for 10 minutes \u2013 don\u2019t stop. If you feel blocked, move to the next section (see my last post on iteration<\/a> for more details). Refuse<\/em> to be distracted by anything during those 10 minutes. When 10 minutes is up (my applet sounded a bell and changed color), do something else. Sometimes I would stare at the ceiling, sometimes I would check email, and sometimes I would glance at my rss feed. Even if you\u2019re \u201con a roll\u201d, stop and take a break. When the 2 minutes is up, repeat. Then repeat a few more times. Once you\u2019ve gone through five of these 10+2 minute cycles, an hour is gone (and if your experience is like mine, you made a heck of a lot of progress). At this point you can launch straight into another hour, or you can do what I did and take an extended stretch and refill the coffee break. I have no idea if this will work for anyone else writing about testing (or any other subject), but I can tell you that I don\u2019t recall ever<\/span> having writers block \u2013 in fact, I sort of believe it doesn\u2019t actually exist, but I\u2019ll save that discussion.<\/p>\n

Final tip (and also a sure writers block stopper) is something I picked up from Hemingway (not directly, but through the Paris Review). The tip is to stop writing every day before you\u2019ve run out of ideas (I couldn\u2019t find the actual quote where I read this, so bear with me). Think of this scenario: you\u2019re cranking out some prose at the end of the day. You have a fantastic idea for a sample, story, or exposition \u2013 something that you\u2019re ready to crank out and know what you want to do. My advice is to NOT write it. Instead, jot down a few notes that will help you get things going the next day and then call it a night. Otherwise, if you write your brilliant work at the end of the day, you\u2019ll have to start from a clean plate the next day, and starting writing from a blank page is hard. I find it so much easer to get in the flow of writing if I already know exactly what I\u2019m starting with in the morning. Sometimes a night of sleep also helps to vet the idea a bit more. Again, ymmv.<\/p>\n

Hope there\u2019s some useful stuff in here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My last post contained one of the tricks I use when writing \u2013 how I use iteration when I\u2019m writing. It\u2019s one technique I use to make steady progress and avoid writers block. Although that post was about iteration in general, it reminded me that I have a few other tricks that I wanted to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}