This post isn’t particularly poetic or profound. But that is also the message. A lot of writing comes down to planning. You have to create a container that you can fill with inspired work, but the work itself is gradual and methodical. Successful writers plan.

When I was a young assistant professor I sat down with Don Worster, the most senior and most accomplished member of the department, one of the most prominent environmental historians in the nation. Don routinely produced lengthy well-regarded books, such as his biography of John Muir. Curious about his process, I asked him a question I’ve asked many accomplished historians: How do you do it?

Unlike many writers, Don didn’t write during the school year. “I’m busy teaching,” he said. But when the summer came, he wrote seven days a week. “I like doing this,” he said. “I don’t take breaks.” And, most notably, he pre-planned the entire summer, including what he would write every day. More impressively, he stuck to his plan; if the calendar said he would spend two days on a topic, he would, and at the end of two days he would move on to the next topic, without fail. He was so prepared that he would even have all the books he would need checked out from the library before the summer began. As a result, Don accomplished a tremendous amount and never turned in a book late.

Writing is a creative act, without doubt, but it can also be an improvisational one. It takes a lot of practice, of course, but the idea that writing must be agonizingly difficult or slow is just an idea, and not a very good one. It takes practice to hone your skills, but when you sit down to write it can flow, particularly if you do not have a preconceived idea that you can only write a very small amount every day.

I have found that the first way I put words down is often the best way. It has the most movement and life. I think there is a connection between the pace at which you write and the pace at which your writing will be read. When you can write quickly, your writing becomes an improvisational act. The way you write and what you write becomes influenced by your mood, your wakefulness, and all the imagery that you put into your brain in the course of your life—vistas, films, poetry, art, and the day-to-day of life—gardening, farmers’ markets, cooking, raising kids, or whatever inspires you and feeds your soul.

The first thing to know about the things we call metaphors is that they usually are similes. Why we mislabel them is somewhat puzzling. Perhaps metaphors just have a better P.R. firm. Most everyone knows what a metaphor is, or thinks they do, whereas most Americans could define similes about as well as they could find Iran on a map. Google reports that there are over a billion references to metaphor on the Internet, but only a hundred million for simile. And yet simile does so much more work than metaphor in most writing. Like Rodney Dangerfield, similes can’t get no respect (itself an example of litosis, a double negative).

In a story that was no doubt apocryphal, someone once asked Michelangelo how to carve a horse out of marble. “Easy,” he said. “Just remove all the marble that is not a horse.” The joke works because there is obviously a lot more craft to sculpting, especially for the greatest sculptor the world has ever seen. But it is also a good metaphor for the fact that in writing, what you leave out is arguably more important than what you leave in. Nonfiction writers, and especially academic ones, invariably only write a tiny fraction of what they know about both the scholarly literature and the primary sources they have assembled on a given topic. Sometimes the difference between a good writer and a great one is not what they include, but what they leave out.

When I was a young assistant professor, I attended a talk by James Campbell, a seasoned historian who wrote Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 and many other books. He said something very interesting about the craft of writing: he said as a writer, you have to find your camels. The camels, for Campbell, are the figures that engage your reader so much that they will follow the camels across vast and sometimes dry terrain. If you attempt to give a detailed background about subjects and processes without introducing your camels first, readers will tire and wonder, “Why should I follow this author, and where is he/she/they heading? Why are we on this journey in the first place?”

Growing up, everyone called me Jacob, even though I was named for my great grandpa Jack, who was technically also a Jacob. How come he got the cool nickname, and I was stuck with the Biblical name that, like orange, rhymes with nothing?

All that changed in the tenth grade when I started writing for the high school newspaper, and I chose the name “Jake Dorman” to run as my byline at the head of each story. I well remember the pride I felt when I saw that new name, my self-given name, on the front page of the newspaper. And with that simple act, everyone started to call me Jake, not Jacob. Even my own mother adopted the new moniker.