It might surprise you that the famous psychologist B.F. Skinner offered some advice on writing.
When I was a student, Skinner was the behaviorist. He thought that thinking is simply a behavior and that it’s better to exhibit looking-at-it behavior in these terms: our verbal responses are the ideas, rather than expressions of ideas, which suggests something “deep inside us” — a self, a soul, a spirit, a mind — that simply isn’t there.
You can see that he’s not going to offer any advice about finding our center or going deep inside ourself for story ideas.
I’m not competent to say anything about psychology and so will not.
What I found interesting about the advice is that it’s conventional. Skinner’s views on fixing a time and place to write daily are shared by artsy people who try to find their center and try to find something deep within themselves.
But of course Skinner would see the value in habits. If you write at the same time, you’ll take advantage of an organic tendency to establish and maintain a circadian rhythm.
I don’t know how to resolve the paradox that some of Skinner’s conventional advice strikes me as original. We’ve all been told that we should encourage ourselves by writing in a place we like. But if anyone else has mentioned the importance of writing in a place that smells good, I haven’t seen it.
One point that was fascinating to me was his casual comment about private verbal behaviors aimed at reinforcing the production of verbal behaviors to be shared with other organisms. I love this calculation: If you write 50 good words an hour for two hours a day, you’ll put out 35,000 words a year — a book every two or three years.
• Source: B.F. Skinner, “How to Discover What You Have to Say — A Talk to Students,” The Behavior Analyst, 1981, 4, No. 1, (Spring), 1-7. It can be found here:
https://userpages.umbc.edu/~catania/ABACNJ/bfs%20how%20to.pdf
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