Office of Scholarly Publications at Georgetown University: Parking your car on the downhill slope

Monday, July 20, 2009

Parking your car on the downhill slope

Two of the nine summer book writing groups for faculty have yielded the same tidbit of writing advice that they heard "somewhere." It goes like this. When you're having a great writing day and the time you allotted for writing is up, instead of going on and on until you burn out, stop your work while you're still on a roll, and leave yourself notes for where to pick it up the next day. Then you'll be excited and eager to return to the task, and you'll have a much better time getting started.

Hmmm. Has anyone heard this before? Any idea where it comes from? And does it work?

A completely lazy web search yielded these links about it, and suggest that it may come from the book Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day:

http://www.43folders.com/2005/04/27/park-on-a-downhill-slope
http://is.gd/1FOp3

Above image for sale at art.com.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: I'm sure I've read this kind of advice (about not writing until you burn out) in multiple places. The only reference I could find was in this Guardian piece by Robert Harris: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/robertharris.writing.fiction in which he writes, "Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours."

- matt; 7/24/2009 3:28 PM

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Office of Scholarly Publications
at Georgetown University

Monday, July 20, 2009

Parking your car on the downhill slope

1 comment:

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