Good advice....

Dammit.

//Thinking of oneself as a virtuoso is a great part of the appeal, on top of simple human cruelty. You’re exercising your craft and you’re doing it well, and to applause from readers — admittedly those who enjoy watching blood sports, but still, they’re happy and you’re doing something for them few others can do. And your targets: They’re big boys, they can take it, and anyway if they can’t stand the heat they shouldn’t have gone into the kitchen in the first place. They deserve what you give them, and heck, maybe they’ll learn from the experience.

The thinking runs along those lines: I’m doing what I’m supposed to and it’s a fair fight and, if you must talk about the good, what I’m doing is really an act of charity to reader and target too. Which is an entirely worldly way of thinking. The Christian should be asking: What specific and concrete good does this do? Who does it help? If it helps anyone, how does it help them? Does it edify the reader or tempt him to uncharity? Does it correct the target or hurt him? Will it make reader and target better men? The writer has to be a kind of virtuoso of kindness.//

Writing and Thinking.

George Leef at NRO opines:

This is a problem that has been growing for decades. In his marvelous 1979 book Less than Words Can Say (re-released in 2004), Richard Mitchell, an English professor at Glassboro State College who was once known as “the underground grammarian,” argued that clear writing is evidence of clear thinking and that sloppy writing is evidence of sloppy thinking.

He wrote:

The logic of writing is simply logic; it is not some system of arbitrary conventions interesting only to those who write a lot. All logical thought goes on in the form of statements and statements about statements. We can make those statements only in language, even if that language be a different symbol system like mathematics. If we cannot make those statements and statements about statements logically, clearly, and coherently, then we cannot think and make knowledge. People who cannot put strings of sentences together in good order cannot think. An educational system that does not teach the technology of writing is preventing thought.

Although the U.S. spends more and more on “education,” great numbers of young (and now, middle-aged) citizens can’t do what used to be easy for most grade-schoolers — writing clear, well-thought-out sentences. They’ve never been taught to do that and with each passing year, there are fewer teachers who might teach them how.

The philosophy of writing in a nutshell.

I've been cranking out an opposition to a motion for summary judgment, which kept me up until 1:30 a.m. to finally grind out the statement of facts.  The key is to lose yourself in the work so that your perception of time is episodic; you look up every now and again and realize that another hour has passed and that your legs may be experiencing some kind of deep vein thrombosis because you haven't moved them since the last time you moved from the aeviternal realm back into mundane time-space.

Apparently, I'm doing something right, however, as John Scalzi notes one of the basic rules of writing:

b) like most things on the planet, thinking about doing it is a lot
worse than simply sitting down and doing it. The writing wasn’t hard
to do, you just need to plant ass in seat and go from there.

It is true that thinking about writing a long piece is worse than writing the piece, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the reason thinking about writing a long piece is so difficult is because doing it can be so debilitating.