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Writing Ritual

This post summarizes how I go about my academic writing. It outlines the specific workflow that I use to go from a vague idea to published article. The process that that I’m going to describe grew out of the coaching I received from Rich Furman.

It works for me but that doesn’t guarantee that it will work for you. I’m going to describe my process in hopes that the description will be helpful for you in creating your writing own ritual. There are three major components: the magic paragraphs file, the progress chart, and the writing session. That’s a lot of jargon.

The Brief Jargon Free Version

1. Write down ideas for projects in the form of short paragraphs, meant for your personal use, which give you a high level overview of the project.
2. Develop such a paragraph in to a detailed outline for a specific journal with a target word count and goal for each section.
3. Write in short timed sessions, at most an hour, with a specific place to start for each session.
4. Keep track of your writing sessions in a spreadsheet, logging the time spent on task, where you started, and where you ended.
5. Always end a writing session by creating the starting place for the next writing session.

This sounds like a lot of work; but it’s not. This note is a bit over a thousand words, but the process it describes is actually very simple. The overhead of maintaining a spreadsheet is minimal. If I had to estimate, maintaining the spreadsheet takes about a minute to each writing session. The whole ritual only takes five minutes per writing session.

If you’re curious about what this looks like, here is a video of a little writing session. You should probably skip around in that video because most of it is just me writing.

• 03:10 – End of music and start of free write.
• 05:11 – Bell for end of free-write and start of actual writing.
• 13:18 – End of writing. Wrap-up.

The Magic Paragraphs File #

A magic paragraph is a high level overview of an idea of a project that I want to write. It describes what the ideal reader would take away from the piece. It is written for internal reference purposes and doesn’t usually get shared publically. To take a concrete example, here is an old magic paragraph. It led to this short article.

Public Space Office Hours (Written and submitted to College Teaching 2020-06-18)

Magic Paragraph: In this teaching teaching commentary, we describe a re-positioning of office hours from the private space of professor’s offices to public spaces such as student centers and cafes. We argue that this shift promotes faculty-student interaction, lowers barriers to help seeking behaviour, and facilitates collaboration among students. We highlight the power dynamics of private office hours, and argue that public office hours support Engligh language learners and other marginalized populations

I want to point out a few features of this paragraph. First, it is a bit rough. There are some spelling errors. The punctuation is a bit off. It doesn’t hang together well as a paragraph. No problem; it is not intended for public consumption.

Second, this is not an abstract. This is a description, for myself, of what I think I want this piece of writing to do. It only needs to makes sense to me. It does not need to be scholarly or publishable.

Last, it makes specific, rather terse, statements of what I want to say. For example, “power dynamics of private office hours”. This is rather brief. There is a lot more that I could say about space, access, safety in numbers, and so on. This point will eventually be built up in the article.

A magic paragraph gives me a high level overview of the piece. It is small enough that I can keep the whole idea in my head at once. I can play with, rephrase things, try out different orders. Producing magic paragraphs is not especially hard, so I don’t feel bad about writing one and never using it. (I’ll say more about collecting magic paragraphs later on.)

Using Magic Paragraphs to Develop Architectures #

Once you have got a magic paragraph for a project, how do you use it? You use it to develop an architecture for a piece. Well then, what’s an architecture? It’s a section-by-second breakdown of a piece with word counts and a target journal. For example, I developed the magic paragraph shown above to create the following architecture.

College Teaching: “Commentaries, up to 1,200 words, provide thoughtful reflections on teaching.”

Introduction (200 words)
Goal: We describe our context and implementation

Interaction (200 words)
Goal: We argue that this shift promotes faculty-student interaction

Help Seeking (150 words)
Goal: We argue that this approach lowers barriers to help seeking behaviour

Collaboration (150 words)
Goal: We argue that open space office horus facilitates collaboration among students.

ELL (150 words)
Goal: We discuss how public office hours support Engligh language learners and other marginalized populations.

Conclusions (200 words)

Notice that I wrote this with a specific journal in mind. You should always have an actual journal (and some fall back options¹) in mind when you start writing a piece. I included a quote from the journal’s homepage which explains what they want from teaching commentaries. Notice that the quote gives me both a genre and a word count to aim for while writing. This is invaluable in developing an architecture.

Each section of the architecture has a word count and a specific goal associated with it. The list of goals comes almost verbatim from the magic paragraph. As I write, I know what amount of writing I need to put in each section. Once the whole piece is done, I can go back and assess whether I’ve met my goals or not.

Collecting Magic Paragraphs #

This is a bit of a tangent, so feel free to skip it and proceed to The Progress Chart.

One of the nice things about magic paragraphs is that they are easy to generate and store. I keep a Google Document full of magic paragraphs for projects that I’d like to write some day. That document also has a list of titles of potential projects. If I finish a project, I can do go back and look over the magic paragraph file to see what I want to write next. Sometimes, a project will linger for several years before I start working on it.

It is nice to have a dedicated place for projects. I don’t need to keep them in my head, hoping that I’ll remember the idea years later. If a project idea occurs to me, however vague, I note down its title and potentially spin up a magic paragraph for it. This is as simple as: open up the file, jot down the idea, and close the file.

You can also “polish” up a magic paragraph. It is just a short paragraph, so you don’t need to do much work. Sometimes, when I browse through the file, looking for a project, I notice that I could improve an existing paragraph. A new angle emerges, or a new perspective.

You can also pitch a magic paragraph to a friend. If you’re having lunch with someone, you can talk to them about the project at a high level. You don’t say “I am going to read you a magic paragraph” but rather, just talk about the idea conversationally. Sometimes, I’ll go back and revise magic paragraph based on this sort of informal feedback.

The Progress Chart #

The next component of my writing ritual is the progress chart. I learned about this idea from the first² edition of Paul Silva’s guide “How to write a lot: A practical guide to productive academic writing.”

People who write a lot typically do some kind of monitoring. There are different ways to do this; in this section I describe how I monitor my writing. When I tell people about my system they give me an odd look, as if I had just said that I make quilts out of Bernese mountain dog hair. The system sounds nerdy, obsessive, and weird, but it helps me stay focused. — p.40

Silva has a spreadsheet that he uses to keep track of his writing sessions. I use the following structure for my spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet does a couple of things.

First, the spreadsheet provides a mechanism for starting my writing session. I know what project to work on and how long I will write. The most important thing is that I have an “entry point.” In the example above, my entry point just says: “Help-seeking behaviour. Race gender of instructor.” The entry point provides a very short description of what I intend to do. I hop in to the document, go to the appropriate section, and start writing. An entry point elminates blank page syndrome.

Second, the progress chart gives me a notion of accountability. If I set a writing goal, I can check the spreadsheet to see whether I’ve met it or not. If I intend to write every week day, then I can look and see whether I am doing that or not. At present, in June 2025, I know that I’ve written for 450.92 hours since 2020-02-27. This makes me feel confident that I’ve some a bit³ of writing over many sessions.

The Writing Session #

A writing session is a limited chunk of time decidicated to writing. I start every writing session the same way: I open up my document and go to the entry point. I read the following prompt.

Are you cozy?
Got some water?
Do you have the document open?
Do you have your notebook, pencil, eraser, etc?
If you’re on a laptop, is it plugged in?
Is your phone off / muted / far away?
Do you have an entry point?
Have you updated the Progress Chart?

After reading the prompty, I listen to a short song, This Present Time by Paulette Meier. To get warmed up, I free write for two minutes. I check the clock to see where my writing session will end. And then, I actually write.

The point of all this infrastructure is to support writing sessions. The infrastructure exists to make writing almost automatic. By the time I’m in the writing session, I’ve eliminated a bunch of distractions, I know what I need to work on, I am warmed up and I am ready to go. The cursor is blinking at the spot where the words need to go. It is all set up. The clock is ticking.

The time limited nature of writing sessions is essential. If I’m struggling to get words down, or the whole project feels doomed, I only have to endure so much. Once the session is done, I can go about the rest of my life. During the session, if I’m giving myself a hard time, I can say: “Listen, this will only last a half hour. Just stick with it. Only 20 minutes to go.”

I recommend writing for less than an hour. Somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes is ideal for me. If you’re on task, hitting the keys, you can get a lot done in 30 minutes. According to my progress chart, my average writing session is 37.79 minutes long.

Acknowledgements #

This piece wouldn’t exist without the tremendous coaching I received from Rich Furman. Becca Carter noted that I should write up my writing ritual at CMESG 2025. Jimmy Pai asked for some writing advice at the same conference.

Building Blocks of a Writing Ritual #

As shown in the writing session video above, I have whole computer program for running my writing ritual. You don’t need to be this crazy! If you wanted, you could just use the materials at the bottom of this page to run your own ritual.

The Checklist #

Are you cozy?
Got some water?
Do you have the document open?
Do you have your notebook, pencil, eraser, etc?
If you’re on a laptop, is it plugged in?
Is your phone off / muted / far away?
Do you have an entry point?
Have you updated the Progress Chart?

This Present Time #

This Present Time by Paulette Meier

The lyrics are a quotation from George Fox in a letter to his parents.

Dwelling in the Present Moment #

Dwelling in the Present Moment by Laurence Cole

The lyrics are a quotation from Thich Nhat Hahn in Being Peace.

Published: Aug 23, 2024 @ 12:50.
Last Modified: Jun 22, 2025 @ 15:30.

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• Week Notes 19
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