During their recent episode, Tobias Carlisle and Anne-Laure Le Cunff discussed The Power of Shifting Between Different Modes of Thinking. Here’s an excerpt from the episode:
Anne-Laure:
No, but I did even worse than that. [Tobias chuckles] I did them both at the same time. [laughs] So, yeah, I wrote my thesis and wrote my book at the same time, which I know how crazy that sounds. But in a way, it actually worked perfectly fine for me because I really liked having those two very different types of thinking and creativity in my life. Whenever I felt some resistance or I felt a little bit stuck creatively or intellectually on one of the projects, I could go and spend a little bit of time on the other one. And so, in a way, each project always felt like an amazing refuge for me to go to [chuckles] when I was very tired of the other one.
But it did create some tensions in the sense that it was a different way of thinking and writing. Scientific writing is quite jargony, actually, and you’re really trying to condense a very long research project into just a few pages. A lot of journals have a word limit, so you have to be concise. Whereas with a book, you have more space, but you also have the temptation to go off on tangents and include more than necessary. So, it requires a different kind of self-discipline.
So, yeah, that’s how it happened. Not one after the other, but the two projects at the same time. And yet, one of them is 100,000 words, which is my thesis, and the book is about 70,000 words.
Tobias:
It makes total sense. Isaac Asimov, one of the most prolific science fiction writers of all time, had an extraordinary output. I once pulled up his Wikipedia page just to see how much he had written. I was curious about his process, and one of the ways he managed to write so much was by working on 10 or 11 projects at once.
If he got stuck on one, he’d just move on to the next thing where he had some inspiration, and then he’d be able to write volumes again. And then, when he ran out, he’d move on to the next thing. He kept his creative energy flowing by cycling through different types of work. It seems like that would be a great way to take a break from one kind of thinking and engage in another.
Anne-Laure:
Yeah, absolutely. I didn’t know that about him, actually. I love his books, so this is great to know.
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