How to Become Smarter (42 page)

Finally, the mental state most conducive to productive writing is slightly depressed mood and moderately increased emotional tension. To be precise, this mental state is crucial for good self-control, which is important for productive writing. The emotional tension is synonymous with a mild worry or mild anxiety. This somewhat “unhappy” state is bearable and does not cause significant suffering; therefore, it is not the same as clinical anxiety and depression. It is possible to write with the normal state of mood, but in my experience, the aforementioned mental state is most conducive to writing. It is unknown if this observation is applicable to all people, and there is not a good explanation of the possible mechanism at work here. The converse is also true: a happy and carefree state of mind is least conducive to school- or job-related writing. We already saw in an earlier section that elevated mood and low anxiety can contribute to procrastination, and this mental state also interferes with writing. To be precise, even if I am able to get started on my writing, I am not able to write a lot in this state of mind. In contrast,
reading
can be productive when mood is normal or slightly elevated. One possible explanation is that writing is difficult, lonely, and boring work. Therefore, a person in a happy state of mind will see no reason why he or she should subject oneself to this unpleasant experience. In other words, elevated carefree mood may contribute to a lack of motivation for a difficult type of work such as writing. Conversely, if mood is lowered and the fear of the future (anxiety) is increased, then the motivation for difficult work will be sufficient.

• Job- or school-related writing is a difficult type of work.
  
• Productive writing requires strong self-control and attention control. Based on my experience, strong self-control requires increased emotional tension and slightly depressed mood.
  
• Productive writing does not require good alertness, creativity, and mental clarity, although creativity is necessary during the planning phase.
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We saw in the previous section that successful writing requires several mental abilities: strong self-control, attention control, and good knowledge of the topic in question. If you do not know what you are going to write about, creativity is necessary during the planning phase, before you start typing. Pages that follow outline sequential steps of a writing project, how I do it. At the end of this section, we will discuss how to deal with writer’s block.

Let’s say they assigned you a sizable writing task, 20 pages single-spaced, but you have to choose the topic yourself. A typical writing project includes four steps:

1. brainstorming/planning;
   
2. reading up on the subject;
   
3. adjustment of plans and setting up a schedule;
   
4. typing up the text according to the plan and schedule.
   

1) P
LANNING
.
The brainstorming/planning step requires active imagination (creativity) and nothing else. The creativity regimen from
Chapter Four
can serve this purpose well. To remind you, this approach includes the antidepressant diet (
Chapter Four
and
Appendix II
) and twice-daily adapted cold showers, in the morning and in the afternoon (
Chapter Two
). This regimen activates thinking and behavior. You may experience a flood of ideas and elevated internal mood if you were a healthy person with normal mood before starting this regimen. You can also try using the fruit-and-vegetable diet (
fifth section
of Chapter Three and
Appendix II
) with adapted cold showers. The latter approach will make you unable to perform most types of work and it does not have the antidepressant effect, but it produces a sharper wit (Chapter Six). Once you come up with the ideas for your writing project, don’t forget to jot them down. Even if you had a good idea what your writing was going to be about, the above method can improve and enrich your preexisting ideas. Because this regimen improves mental clarity, you may start seeing shortcuts that you can take in your previous plan. These shortcuts will save you time and effort during later steps of your writing project. The duration of this brainstorming step is from one to three days. After completing Step One, you will have a brief outline of your future text, which may be in the form of an abbreviated table of contents or a summary of key points.

2) R
ESEARCH
.
Now you have to do some research and reading on the subject matter in question. You can read the latest review articles or encyclopedia articles on this topic or you can read abstracts of academic articles or do other types of research. If you want to produce a high-quality text, you need to have good knowledge of all aspects of the topic that you will be writing about. Research involves a lot of reading. In order to make the reading easy and productive, you can avail yourself of the techniques from the
section
on reading comprehension above.

3) A
DJUSTMENT OF
P
LANS
.
If you worked on Step 2 in good conscience, you now know a lot more about the subject matter than you did during Step 1. In light of your new knowledge, you will want to make changes to the previous plan or outline of your text. You can repeat Step 1, which will take another 1-3 days. Now, in addition to the outline of your text, you need to draw up a schedule for the writing proper. You can create a “to-do list” that describes the sequence of your writing activities. This list can include such items as “write up key points of each subsection,” “write section X,” “rewrite section Z,” “insert all references,” and so on. You need to decide on the amount of writing that you will do every day and to enter some benchmarks into your calendar.

4) T
YPING
.
This writing step is the most difficult part and you should try your best to comply with your plan/schedule. The typing phase does not require intellectual brilliance. All it requires is the brute force of self-control and the ability to maintain attention on writing for several hours a day. This step involves nothing but typing on your computer or typewriter many hours a day. The following is a list of tips that can make this step easier.

A)
  We saw in the previous section that the writing phase requires strong self-control, attention control, and lowered mood with increased emotional tension. In my experience, you can achieve these things by means of the depressant diet (
Chapter Four
and
Appendix II
). If the depressant diet does not help you to force yourself to start writing, I find it helpful to increase consumption of fried (or broiled or smoked) meat, bread, and junk food. You can increase consumption of fried meat up to one kilogram (2.2 pounds) per day, during the first few days (you can read about the risks in
Chapter Three
). In my view, large amounts of fried or broiled meat are the most effective self-control aid. Again, you can eat junk food as much as you want until you force yourself to start writing. You should still avoid or reduce dairy. After you have started writing, you can switch to the regular depressant diet (boiled meat and boiled grains, no junk food). The depressant diet produces low but tolerable mood and mild anxiety. You can stay on the depressant diet for extended periods, provided that you are a healthy person not suffering from depression or anxiety. If you start feeling stressed out while on this diet, you can replace one of your daily meals with the mixture of unsalted unprocessed cheese with low-fat cultured milk. If this is not enough, you can replace two of your daily meals with this food. Theoretical evidence presented in Chapter Four and my personal experience suggest that dairy has antidepressant properties and you should feel better. For productive writing, it is desirable that you feel
slightly
stressed. High-protein diets that do not lower mood, such as the modified high-protein diet, may also improve writing, but in the long run, the depressant diet is more effective. You need to avoid the depressant diet if you have a diagnosis of a major depressive episode or if you suspect that you are in the middle of a major depressive episode. You don’t have to and you should not drive yourself into clinical depression in order to become a productive writer. Significantly depressed mood has a disabling effect and interferes with productive writing. Therefore, if you are suffering from clinical depression or anxiety, you need to get well in order to become a productive writer. It is best to seek professional psychiatric treatment. In addition to (not instead of) the conventional treatments, you may consider the antidepressant diet (
Chapter Four
and
Appendix II
), after discussing it with your doctor.

B)
  Try to avoid cold hydrotherapy during the writing phase because it can elevate mood. The only exception is when you feel sleepy, and in this case, an adapted cold shower will wake you up and will not interfere with writing. Feeling somewhat sleepy or tired does not interfere with productive writing.

C)
  In my experience, a hot environment and hot hydrotherapy (Chapter Two) are beneficial for effective writing, except when I feel sleepy or tired.

D)
  Intensive physical exercise can induce fatigue. My experience suggests that this fatigued state, when your muscles are aching and you are not feeling so hot mentally, is conducive to good self-control. It can help you to force yourself to start writing.

E)
  To reduce boredom, you can play some quiet music in the background while you are typing away.

F)
  You can use the method of increasing detail in your writing plan. We have already seen how this method applies to reading tasks and, with respect to writing, the approach is similar. First, you write the title of the text and titles of all subsections within your text. Second, you write a brief summary of your text (300-500 words) that contains all important ideas and key points that you want to drive home. Third, you write up a list of key points for each subsection. Fourth, you will start expanding and elaborating on the key points in each subsection, one by one. Before you know it, you will have the complete text written up. You can then delete the summary and lists of key points from the text if they are optional in your writing project. The method of increasing detail is useful for both reading and writing tasks.

G)
  Some people prefer writing the text using a pen and paper first and then they type it into the computer. These people do not know how to type using all fingers, and therefore typing is a slow and difficult task for them. You need to learn how to type with all fingers. This will increase the speed and ease of typing by 3- to 4-fold, and you will never need to write anything on paper anymore.

H)
  The latest version of Microsoft Word and Windows (and there are other relevant software packages as well) have a speech recognition feature. It can allow you to create your text by speaking instead of typing. I tried using the speech recognition a number of times, but I find typing more convenient, at least when it comes to academic writing. Speaking a text into the computer requires the same amount of self-control and struggle against oneself as typing, if we are talking about writing tasks necessary for your job or coursework. Even if you create most of your text using speech recognition software, you will still have to edit the text by typing. If you have learned the proper typing technique, typing should be as easy for you as speaking. Your thoughts will be flowing onto the computer screen, and you will be unaware of what your fingers are doing on the keyboard.

If you are able to do typing for two hours per day, this is low-to-moderate productivity of writing. If you can type for 3-4 hours a day
consistently,
this is good productivity. Judging by the amount of text, if you can produce three pages of single-spaced text consistently every day, this may be considered good productivity. You can also use the Reading/Writing Productivity Questionnaire for self-assessment (
Appendix V
).

This final, fourth step of a writing project can take several days to several months depending on the intended size of your text. When the raw draft is ready, you will have to check grammar and spelling by means of software first and then by proofreading the text yourself. There is no software that can detect all typos and errors in a text. You need to proofread your text slowly
at least twice
in order to correct the majority of errors and typos. After that, you can run the computer spellcheck again. While rereading the text, you will make corrections and deletions from the text. When your final version is ready, it’s a good idea to give it to a friend or a colleague for critical evaluation, if time allows you to do so. Alternatively, you can let it sit on the shelf for one or two weeks, during which time you can forget about the manuscript and do something else. Afterwards, with a fresh mind, you will make additional corrections and modifications.