One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever encountered was Ernest Hemingway’s suggestion that you stop writing when you’ve still got something to say. I’ve found this a reliable way of ensuring you chain together days of productive writing, avoiding the patterns of binge and bust which many academics are prone to. It was interesting to discover the psychologist Gloria Mark implicitly suggests this is a mistake, at least from the perspective of the neurophysiology of attention:
A good time to intentionally redirect your attention is when you reach a break point in a task such as finishing writing a chapter or completing a budget—natural places to pause. At break points, fewer cognitive resources are being used than when you are working full throttle. In the middle of a task, memory load is high, and interruptions are most disruptive.
Attention Span by Gloria Mark, loc 1742
If you stop at a natural break, the cognitive process won’t keep running in the background in a way which distracts you from subsequent tasks and depletes you over the course of the day. The problem with this view is that you want the process to keep running in the background when it comes to creative work. This is how Bertrand Russell conveys his experience of this:
My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. most of the unconscious consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which have now become buried. It is possible to do this process of burying deliberately, and in this way, the unconscious can be led to do a lot of useful work. I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity – the greatest intensity of which I am capable – for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered his technique, I used to to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress: I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits.
Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, Pg 49-50
It occurred to me recently there’s a parallel to the Lacanian practice of bringing a session to an unexpected end, varying lengths rather than falling into a fixed routine. In other words a more sophisticated conception of the unconscious can give us a more detailed account of where and how to stop. This is how Bruce Fink describes the practice:
A second misconception that I have sometimes heard voiced is that Lacan recommends that the analyst end (or “scand,” this being the verb form of scansion that I have adopted, modeling it on the French scander because the verb scan in English has so many other unrelated meanings) sessions arbitrarily or randomly. On the contrary, Lacan recommends ending sessions on the most striking point, when possible—that is, when the analysand articulates the most striking statement or question of the session. That should not be taken to imply that the point, statement, or question need be self-evident, transparent, or obvious in meaning. Often the statement or question on which the analyst scands the session can be understood in several different ways, and the analysand is left to ponder all of them in the time between that session and the next one. Scanding the session at such a point is designed to put the analysand to work, whether consciously or unconsciously, during the time between sessions. Not only does one remember best what one heard (oneself say) last, but an unfinished task often occupies the mind far more than a finished one (this is known in psychology as “the Zeigarnik effect”). A polyvalent, ambiguous, or enigmatic statement is often far more useful in making the analysis progress than an unequivocal, crystal-clear statement.
Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners, Pg 48
He explicitly makes reference to the same mechanism (“the Zeigarnik effect”) which leaves Mark suggesting we ought to finish at the natural break. The implication for writing is that we don’t just finish when we have something to say, but rather when we feel on the cusp of saying something important. To leave something “polyvalent, ambiguous, or enigmatic” in the mind when we conclude a writing session increases the unconscious work which will be set into motion, setting us up for the next writing session. You shouldn’t finish when you’ve said what’s important, you stop at that stage, in full confidence that your grasp of its importance will have increased by the time you write again tomorrow.
Mark Carrigan 