Momentum

A big part of writing is momentum. It’s important to take breaks, of course, and writing when you don’t want to can be a quick road to demotivation. But it is important to write more often than not.

What can hold that back is worry about quality. The time you take to write can be considerable, and if at the end of it what you’ve produced is less than good… well, it can just put you off and drain that momentum.

So, what do I do? The big thing I learned in the PhD process- and something many writers I follow¹ have said- is you can work to make bad writing good, but you’ve got to have that bad writing in the first place. As long as you start with an idea of what you want to write about, getting something down that’s even half good helps you feel like you’re moving forward. You’ve got something to edit, which gives a break from writing whilst keeping that forward movement.

With that in mind I fired up the dictation machine… ahem, opened Word… and got down some thoughts on Streetlaw in school. Definitions of Streetlaw, what it’s for, why schools are a common site for such works, the challenges of evaluation… It shook out some thoughts and reminded me of some things I want to follow up on, so it was a good session, and I feel happy to go onto the next bit where I’m going to cover School Tasking.²

1. e.g Gareth L Powell (https://bsky.app/profile/garethlpowell.bsky.social) Tade Thompson (https://bsky.app/profile/tadethompson.bsky.social) Premee Mohammed (https://bsky.app/profile/premeemohamed.com) ↩︎
2. https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/?newsItem=8a1785d88c5ec9b5018c6e5842731d62 ↩︎