How I Write

I've noticed that many aspiring law professors (including fellows) find writing law review or other articles, an essential part of our job, difficult at first. Here is a set of suggestions based on what works for me. I make no claim that these are best practices, exhaustive, or even something that will work for you. Still, I thought it worthwhile to share some reflections, and I invite others to do so in the comments.

NB: I have no children and am unmarried, so I've often wondered whether that is part of what makes writing work for me. I am sure it plays some role, but as I discuss below given that I stick to a pretty strict 9 to 5 schedule Monday to Friday (except once every week and twice every other week where I teach till 7 PM), and rarely work on the weekend, I suspect that this cannot explain most of what works for me.

Here are the tips based on how I write:

1. Get a big monitor: I love having a monitor big enough to show two full documents and a sizable magnification at the same time. I can have westlaw up in one and the draft article in another, or have a journal’s edits and my original article up simultaneously. Some people prefer two monitors, but either way I think this will increase your efficiency.
2. Alter your email schedule: If you can change your automatic email receive schedule to 20 or 30 minute intervals rather than every 5 or 10 minutes you will find you are less likely to get distracted. Of course, turning email off altogether is better still but for many of us that is not a great option.
3. Aim for crappy but complete first drafts, avoid perfection: I have always admired people who write perfect first drafts; I’ve never been one of them. I usually go through 100 drafts of any piece of writing, and actually save a new version on any day I make an alteration that is even mildly significant. I think for many perfection equals paralysis. I can generate a crappy and almost complete first draft much quicker, and I feel liberated knowing the final draft will be SO much better. It also enables me to share the draft earlier in its gestation and even workshop it with friends early…which leads to the next point….
4. Work on Deadlines: As an appellate lawyer at the Justice Department I basically had hard deadlines almost constantly on briefs. Indeed, the harder the deadline, the faster I would work. In a few emergency stay cases with basically a 24 hour turn around, I found that I could work two to three times as fast and produce a document that was 80% as good in terms of the quality. I think deadlines are very helpful, and you should seek them out as much as possible. Agree to give a workshop in-house or at another school at a date that feels a bit on the early side. I also use the law review cycles as internal deadlines when I should have a “very good” draft, and then work backwards to create deadlines for myself as to when I will give the draft to various people and incorporate changes.
5. Teach your draft papers: If you are teaching a seminar or even a general class in your area, consider teaching a draft paper. I have found that the students love it, and you get good feedback – especially as to whether the article is pitched at the right level for law review editors.
6. Work in 45 minute tranches, and 3 hr blocks: I have found I can work intensely for 45 minutes at a time, and I can do a 3 hour block before my brain is exhausted.  So I usually do a morning and/or afternoon session, and if I do both on a given day I schedule a full one-hour lunch in between (on every work day we either have a faculty workshop or a dining room where I can relax with my colleagues). I use the last 15 minutes of each hour for answering emails, or administrative matters or blog reading. I know this amount of time-management seems neurotic or the exact billing practices many people happily left behind when working for a firm, but it works for me.
7. Pick good times and places to write: My concentration is at my peak first thing in the morning, so I try to do my writing then and schedule my classes for the late afternoons. This also benefits my students because I am an incorrigibly fast talker, and my being “tired” actually makes me a better teacher.  I really like writing in my office at the law school, but for others a coffee shop or home works better. Find your ideal writing space and stick with it.
8. Have multiple projects of various types/lengths at once: At any given time I have 2 to 5 papers on one of the burners of my intellectual stove. I will be dealing with a journal’s edits on one paper, getting a second ready for sending out to law reviews, writing the first draft of a third, and researching a fourth.  I find this works well for me because when I am sick of or exhausted by one paper, I can switch to one of the others and feel renewed rather than having to switch off writing altogether. One of the reasons why this works for me is that I try at any time to have multiple types of papers going.  Some of this is no doubt field specific, but for me it is great to have one short paper for a medical journal audience, one or two longer law review articles, and maybe an partially empirical project where we are just working on cleaning data.
9. Split to your heart’s content: Most subjects I find interesting prove to be much more complex then when I start writing about them. I routinely cut down 48,000 word draft papers to 32,000 words – indeed I spend at least 40% of my time on any paper on this phase . . . but sometimes it becomes clear to me early on that what I really want to write will end up being more like 80,000 and have three different big ideas aimed for different audiences.  Almost always when this has happened I have been able to split the original projects into multiple parts. I have done this with my medical tourism work, and one of the nice side benefits is that even after you split you can always potentially re-join the work and still further elaborate on it as a book, as I am trying to do now.
10. Have RAs work on the piece throughout, during your “off times”:  I have a “stable” (about 9 or 10) of research assistants. Having this many is great because it means there is always at least someone available to work on something. Even when a paper is only mid-way through the drafting process, I will give it to my RAs to edit while I am busy working on another paper with the hope that they can make it better even when my eyes are not on it.
11.  Treat writing like a job: This is more a philosophy. Many flock to legal academia away from a more rigid job in the legal world, but there is something to be said for rigidity and not waiting for the muse to whisper in your ear. I try to treat legal writing as a job, come in at 9, leave at 5 on most days and work consistently throughout. This helps me be both productive and sane, but perhaps I am an aardvark in this respect.