I am very good at getting myself to write. These words are not intended to be a boast. They are intended as a confession. My confession: I have an inner drill sergeant. Give me a deadline and I will meet it. Give me several deadlines and I will re-organize my time and meet those too. I can write when I am tired or when I would rather be doing something else. I can keep writing even when the more sensible part of myself suggests that maybe it would be a good idea to go on a lunch break or take a walk.

My inner drill sergeant is extremely effective. She actively fights any relaxing thought I might have. The German language has a perfect way to describe her, she beats my “innere Schweinehund”. She kicks my butt every time I am thinking about taking a break or some time off.

For the longest time, I thought that this was one of my better qualities as a writer. Writing, after all, is work and honing a skill. Writing doesn’t just happen on a whim of inspiration. Our muse is notoriously poor at meeting deadlines or doing actual work. We need to plan and practice our writing. Otherwise we are left with a thought and a blank page.

Pleasing My Inner Drill Sergeant

To be fair to my inner drill sergeant, she has proven useful. She gets stuff done, she made me highly productive. She works well for me as I was raised in a Dutch Calvinist tradition. The idea that worthwhile things should involve suffering was pre-installed in my DNA. My grandfather’s mantra was: Work hard, don’t complain, and finish what you started. My inner drill sergeant approves.

But the problem is that I have become so good at forcing myself to write that I eventually stopped noticing why I wrote in the first place. From the outside, everything was going exceptionally well. I was highly functional. But from the inside, I lost the spark. I didn’t regain it until after I asked myself this fundamental question: am I really creating something I believe in, or have I become very efficient at mass-producing words?

Beyond Standard Writing Advice

Lots of writing advice is devoted to how to deal with procrastination or writer’s block. We worry a lot about the blank page, and develop many routines to tackle it. This type of advice is extremely useful. Indeed, I have shared many of my own tips and tricks in previous Respect the Marble posts.

But recently I realised that too much focus on productivity might defeat the point of writing. We write a lot these days, on social platforms, on email, or for articles. This sometimes makes it feel like we’re writing on sort of automatic pilot. From the outside, it looks like productivity and self-discipline, but is it on the inside? We can keep producing, and meeting deadlines. We can keep saying yes to yet another piece because, because we can make it fit our schedule. But at what cost?

The Problem with Cognitive Bypassing

Every writer struggles with unpleasant thoughts while writing. Thoughts like “I am exhausted” or “I cannot think clearly any longer.” And often instead of listening to these thoughts, we just override them. We push through. I have come to think of it as a form of cognitive bypassing. That is to say, to force oneself to keep writing even when one feels that taking a break would be good.

Cognitive bypassing works because it feeds our inner reward system. We write an article, an essay, or a post, with the expectation that people will respond. We anticipate a dopamine hit. Maybe we do not only push through for future gratification, but because we think we should. Big parts of our culture, at least in Global North, are based on my grandfather’s type of Calvinist life lesson, namely that rest needs to be earned. If something is difficult, this means we’re on the right track. Indeed, there is a myth surrounding creative work. The idea that good creative work requires suffering. Creation should cost us something.

No doubt writing is difficult. Writing something we truly care about involves frustration, uncertainty and periods when we would much rather do something else. Yet, the fact that we suffer through a piece of writing does not necessarily mean it is good. In order to write well we need to think clearly and be rested. The difficulty with cognitive bypassing is that in the long run pushing through wears us out. It drains us rather than feeds our creativity.

Don’t Fire the Drill Sergeant

We have a tendency to measure writing by its output. How many words or pages have we written? How many messages have we answered? Did we finish the chapter? Did we meet the deadline? Those are reassuring measurements because they are countable. But they tell us very little about what happened while we were writing. Was there a part of the argument where our thinking became blurry? Did we change our priors? Did we enjoy writing one sentence in particular?

There are periods when we just need to write, and not every paragraph needs to become sublime. But often we write to finish and our pressure mode becomes our ordinary mode. We need our inner drill sergeant to push us through difficult moments, but we shouldn’t allow her to stage a coup and be in charge of our writing process all the time. If we do, the joy of writing slowly fleets. We start writing functionally, no longer out of pleasure. The result is that our voice slowly but steadily gets silenced.

Tiny Exercise: Ways to Tame the Drill Sergeant

Is there an alternative? Well, the alternative isn’t waiting until writing feels pleasurable. If we followed that advice, we would hardly get any writing done. Nor should we turn writing into a constant exercise in self-monitoring. Nothing can kill a morning writing burst like constantly asking ourselves whether we feel fulfilled.

My point is simpler. Start by noticing the signs our body is sending us. When we feel resistance, we can ask what kind of resistance it is, where we feel it, and why. Our current productivity culture often teaches us to just push through, but what I’m suggesting is to observe why we feel the need to push through in the first place.

Next time when we catch ourselves “just pushing through”, we can try these three things:

Treat physical needs as information, not as interruptions: Exhaustion isn’t evidence of insufficient commitment to our craft. Often the most useful thing we can do for a paragraph is take time to eat lunch or go for a walk.

Stop before there is nothing left: A good writing day doesn’t have to end when we have extracted every usable thought from our brains. Leaving something for tomorrow often helps continuity and allows us to tackle an issue with fresh energy.

Protect some writing from becoming a product: In order to keep feeling the joy of writing, it’s important to sometimes just work on ideas we have without a clear purpose. Not everything has to become an article, a chapter, a post or a line on your CV.

My inner drill sergeant won’t be fired. She has gotten me through several books, articles and more deadlines than I like to remember. At this point, she’s got tenure. But what I’m trying to do is to avoid to let her take over, to reduce her responsibilities. I get to decide how I write, not my inner drill sergeant. And I like to enjoy my writing.

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Thanks for reading. If you’ve recently joined, or if it’s been a while since my last essay, I’m glad you’re here. More reflections on writing, thinking, and craft are on their way. In my pieces for The Long Carve I draw on insights from writers I admire, some of which I interviewed for my Etched in Marble series. Both series are part of my substack, Respect the Marble, which aims to be a place for everyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it or subscribing. I really appreciate it.

Growing up on a farm in the Dutch Bible Belt, I was surrounded by people who believed in the virtues of hard work. There was always another field to tend or another fence to repair. Work wasn’t optional, it was what you did. While I have never been afraid of hard work, I have been afraid of not meeting other people’s expectations of what I need to do.

I know exactly where that fear began. In primary school, my teacher handed me back a writing exercise. It was riddled by mistakes (I’m dyslectic so no surprise there). Instead of simply correcting them, he asked me to stand up in front of the class and read my text aloud. I stumbled through it. Meanwhile some of my classmates made fun of my mistakes. My teacher just stood there. He didn’t intervene.

I vividly remember this moment like it was yesterday. I remember what I wore, where I sat in the classroom, and how I was feeling. It wasn’t just embarrassment, it made me feel helpless. There was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t stop reading, but I couldn’t make the mistakes disappear. I just had to carry on while many judged me.

Perfection as Protection

For years, I thought that experience had made me strive for excellence. Looking back, I think it made me strive for something quite different. It made me connect mistakes with shame. And once you believe mistakes will be judged be others as failures, you start wearing the cloth of perfection as a protective shield. So I did.

The strange thing about resorting to perfectionism is that it plays a mind trick on us. By rewriting our first sentence twenty times, waiting until we have “read one more paper”, or convincing ourselves that next week will be better, we don’t only postpone our work. We do something more fundamental: we try to postpone the judgement of our work by others. If the work never leaves our desk, it can never disappoint anyone.

Fear Disguised as Perfectionism

We often believe wanting to perfect our work is a sign of discipline, but what if it also a sign of fear. Fear of rejection, fear that people will discover we’re not nearly as clever as they thought. Academia is particularly vulnerable to this. Unlike many professions, writing is inseparable from the scholar. Our name is allover the piece! When people criticize something we’ve written, it rarely feels as though they are evaluating a product. It feels as though they are evaluating us. No wonder that so many promising ideas never leave our laptops.

For a long time, I thought the solution was simply to become better. I just needed to work harder, read more and prepare more thoroughly. Eventually, I would become good enough to stop feeling afraid. But of course this moment never came. Perfectionism doesn’t remove fear, it just feeds it.

Respect the Marble

My breakthrough came from an unexpected source: a sculptor. While living and working in Italy, I read a book about Michelangelo. The sculptor who famously believed that every block of marble already contained the sculpture. His task was simply to remove everything that wasn’t part of it. Whether or not he actually said these words doesn’t matter, it’s the metaphor that stayed with me.

Respect the marble. There is something inside it. Our job isn’t to be perfect or to be ready from the start. Our job is to believe that there is something inside that is worth uncovering and then doing the work to uncover it.

Many of us misunderstand what this means. We imagine Michelangelo standing before a block of marble and producing his most famous statue the David through a burst of genius. But he became Michelangelo because he carved. As far as we know, he carved a lot. Thousands of pieces of marble probably ended up on the sideline before anyone saw his masterpiece.

We Often Forget the Dust

Yet, what we remember is the David. We forget Michelangelo’s dust. This is the trap perfectionism sets for us. We compare our rough first attempts with someone else’s finished masterpiece. Or some idea of perfect lives in our heads. Really, what would a perfect piece of writing look like anyway? If we only strive for perfect, we are bound to feel inadequate.

Almost nobody creates great work on the first go. This is why “respect the marble” has become a mantra for me. When I sit down to write, I remind myself that there is probably something worthwhile hidden inside all the words that are on paper. I don’t know exactly what yet, but there is only one way to find out: keep at it.

Great writing rarely comes from authors who waited until they were ready. It comes from those of us who were willing to show our imperfections in public. Let’s face it, most of us won’t become Michelangelo’s in out lifetime, but that’s not the goal to be begin with. What Michelangelo’s alleged words teach us, is that we need to keep trying. We need to keep carving to find out what’s inside the marble.

Tiny Exercise: Train Yourself To Embrace Imperfection

So, next time when we catch ourselves waiting for that perfect piece, we can ask ourselves these questions:

• Am I waiting because I want to be perfect, or am I simply waiting to postpone judgement?

• Then ask someone you trust to read your piece and ask for advice. Do this earlier then you are normally used to.

• Then publish before you feel completely ready. This is to remind yourself that writing is a way to discover what you think, not how you prove you have all the answers.

• Finally, seek out active criticism and incorporate it. This way you teach yourself that you become a better writer when you embrace your own imperfection and let others read and respond.

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Thanks for reading. If you’ve recently joined, or if it’s been a while since my last essay, I’m glad you’re here. More reflections on writing, thinking, and craft are on their way. In my pieces for The Long Carve I draw on insights from writers I admire, some of which I interviewed for my Etched in Marble series. Both series are part of my substack, Respect the Marble, which aims to be a place for everyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it or subscribing. I really appreciate it.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into two groups, foxes and hedgehogs. While foxes are drawn to complexity and multiple explanations, hedgehogs view the world through one central idea. What Berlin was describing was not a writer’s intelligence, but their temperament.

The hedgehog looks for a single explanation. Whatever the topic, there is usually a focus on one central cause: identity, class, technology, etc. There is something deeply appealing about this. Simple explanations turn complexity into a coherent story. But they also risk to simplify the world around us in a way that is no longer be useful.

Foxes look for complexity. They notice exceptions, competing causes, or inconvenient footnotes. They resist grand explanations, because they think reality rarely is that straightforward. The tension between the hedgehog and the fox, between the risk of oversimplifying and the risk of overwhelming the reader, is at the heart of a writer’s dillema. To write is to simplify, but every writer knows that every simplification risks thinning our argument.

Identifying as a Fox

I tend to identify as a fox. Like many foxes, I know my weakness. Complexity can become an excuse for hedging. The temptation for me has always been to add one more caveat or one additional footnote (my co-authors can attest to this!). At its worst, my fox-style writing becomes too difficult to follow. At its best , however, it leads to rich insight.

Hedgehogs risk to become so committed to simplicity that nothing else matters anymore. The danger of a commitment to one single view of things is that the writer loses sight of uncertainty.

The problem is that both instincts are probably necessary. Most phenomena are too complex to be reduced to a single cause, but in order to explain anything at all, we have to simplify. No article or book can contain every qualification or every contributing factor.

Public Conversations Often Reward Certainty

Recently, I was reminded of Berlin’s distinction. I spent several weeks discussing a popular book I wrote in interviews, podcasts, and at public events. After spending years researching, thinking, writing and revising, I found myself having to answer questions about complex topics in a span of minutes. What surprised me was not how difficult it was to explain my ideas in a concise way, but how difficult it was to try to introduce uncertainty.

The discussions focussed on complex topics, such as political dissatisfaction, public services, inequality, immigration, and the rise of the far right. These are subjects I, and many of my colleagues, have spent years researching. The more we have learned about them, the more aware we have become of the limits of our understanding and the idiosyncrasies in our data.

But public conversations rarely reward complexity. They focus on answers that can be summarised quickly and remembered easily. They reward simplicity and confuse it with confidence. They risk falling into the hedgehog's blind spot of filtering every new idea or new piece of evidence through the prism of already held beliefs.

Engaging with The Strongest Version of an Argument

Complexity slows down the conversation. Another viewpoint complicates the story. Admitting uncertainty risks being interpreted as not knowing when, in reality, it’s likely the most honest response to important questions about how the world works.

Many public discussions no longer seem to revolve around understanding, but around upholding existing beliefs. Almost by consequence then, they become about defeating alternative views. And to do that efficiently, the alternative argument must be simplified, stripped away of its complexity. What remains is one frame, a hedgehog’s prism. That makes someone else’s writing much easier to attack.

The more difficult task is to engage with the strongest version of a competing argument. It’s to try to understand why another writer wrote what they wrote and what is good about it. It requires us to think harder about the conditions under which another perspective than our own might succeed and when it might falter.

The Beauty of Uncertainty

This is one of the reasons I’m so attracted to scientific inquiry. Science isn’t a system for eliminating uncertainty. Rather it’s a system for understanding it. Researchers spend a remarkable amount of time thinking about why other people’s arguments might work and about the uncertainty in their own work.

In many ways, that work revolves around understanding the limits of what we know. The physicist Richard Feynman once argued that “[…] it is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”

I treat my writing in much the same way. Writing helps me to explore the limits of my own thinking. The challenge for writers, especially for academic ones, is that uncertainty and nuance are often difficult to communicate clearly. Good writing no doubt has to be clear, but clarity is not the same thing as certainty. Good writing simplifies reality enough for us to understand it, but not too much so that it flattens it to a caricature of what we observe.

The Case for Nuanced Writing

The temptation is to conflate clarity with certainty. Most topics rarely lend themselves to easy solutions. They often become more interesting when we are honest about uncertainty. Not because uncertainty is an end in itself, but because understanding often begins with the willingness to see what might not fit the frame.

My recent experience reminded me that uncertainty is key to understanding. The difficult task of writing is how we bring our uncertainty to the page without losing clarity. Our inner hedgehog seeks certainty, while our inner fox seeks complexity. The writer’s task then becomes to transform both these urges into one piece of good writing. And that isn’t easy.

Tiny Exercise: Adding Uncertainty into Our Writing

Before you publish your next piece, try to do three things:

• Test Your Confidence: Look for one sentence in which your writing sounds certain. Where might a thoughtful reader reasonably disagree? Could acknowledging that in your writing make the argument stronger rather than weaker?

• Add One Caveat: Find one sentence that is overloaded with qualifications. Remove the least important one, and check if your writing becomes clearer without becoming misleading.

• Separate Clarity from Certainty: Rewrite one paragraph so that it remains clear while making room for more uncertainty. Good writing does not require pretending that we know more than we actually do.

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Thanks for reading. If you’ve recently joined, or if it’s been a while since my last essay, I’m glad you’re here. More reflections on writing, thinking, and craft are on their way. In my pieces for The Long Carve I draw on insights from writers I admire, some of which I interviewed for my Etched in Marble series. Both series are part of my substack, Respect the Marble, which aims to be a place for everyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it or subscribing. I really appreciate it.

During my sabbatical last year, I expected to write more. I had fewer meetings. No administrative deadlines. No immediate pressure. Finally, I thought, I had time to focus on the projects I had been postponing.

Instead, something else happened. I struggled to write. This surprised me. Like many academics, I had long assumed that the main obstacle to my writing was a lack of time. Remove the constraints of a busy schedule, and the writing would follow. But the opposite turned out to be true.

When Everything Is Possible, Nothing Flows

Without clear constraints, every writing session began with the same question: “what should I work on?” There were too many options: different projects, different angles, different ways of framing the same idea. And each option carried the quiet promise that it might be better than the others.

So instead of writing, I evaluated, compared, and tried to optimize. What looked like freedom turned out to be too much choice. With the constraints gone, there were no trade-offs. And without trade-offs, there was no reason to choose.

Constraint Frees Up Space

I began to realise something simple. Writing does not begin with an idea. It begins with constraint. It does not with what we find interesting, but what we decide to execute on. The moment we decide that, something shifts. Energy that was previously spent on deciding what to do, is now freed up for doing.

Constraint doesn’t limit our writing. It enables it. It removes the constant background question of “what else could I be writing?” and replaces it with something more productive: “how do I write this well?”

In that sense, constraints aren’t restrictions. They are a way of focusing our attention. They free us from the idea that we should maximise every intellectual opportunity, and go down every rabbit hole.

Inside the Box

We often talk about “thinking outside the box.” But good writing happens inside one. Constraint creates the box. It defines what belongs, and what does not. It forces us to prioritise. It slows us down in the right way, by making us decide what matters.

Writing inside the box isn’t a limitation, it’s the condition for progress. As David Epstein argues in his book Inside the Box, narrowing our options is often what makes creativity and clarity possible in the first place. When everything is possible, nothing is chosen.

A Question to Work With

If we find ourselves stuck, we should ask ourselves the question: “What constraints am I missing?” The writers of the Oulipo movement built entire works around constraints. French writer Georges Perec wrote a novel without using the letter “e.”

Others imposed mathematical rules on sentences or structure. The point was not the rule itself, but what it forced: decisions. In their view constraint is not a limitation, but a way of generating possibilities.

Without limits, writing becomes too open-ended. And when everything is open, nothing gets written. Because writing does not happen in the absence of constraints. It happens because of them.

Write the Abstract First

One of the simplest ways I found to create that box is to write the abstract first. By limiting the number of words, we are forced to choose the clearest formulation of our idea. Writing the abstract forces a decision that drafting can postpone: what is this actually about? It introduces a constraint.

It asks us to define our core claim, what belongs, and what does not. If we cannot write the abstract, the idea may not yet be ready for the page. This is not failure. It is information. It means we need to go back to the basics. Read more. Think more. Do another analysis. Ask what the claim really is, what it is not, and why a reader should care.

The abstract is where our idea first meets the reader. If that meeting feels confused, the writing is telling us something. It is not yet time to write. It is time to understand.

Tiny Exercise: Find Useful Constraints

Not all constraints are helpful. Some limit what is possible in unproductive ways. Lack of resources, precarious working conditions, mental health challenges or unbalanced caring responsibilities are not the kind of constraints that enable good writing.

But there are constraints we can choose. And these are often the most powerful. A few that I have found useful are:

1. The Act of Setting Yourself Deadlines: Set a timeline, and make it tighter than feels comfortable. Writing expands to fill the time available.

2. The Act of Trying Different Formats: Force the idea into a structure: an abstract, a one-page summary, or a presentation. Each format requires choices, and those choices clarify thinking.

3. The Act of Not Writing: Decide what the piece will not do. What question are you not answering? What argument are you leaving for another time? Constraint is not only about setting limits, but about drawing boundaries. Clarity often comes from what you leave out.

Looking back, the problem during my sabbatical wasn’t that I lacked ideas. It was that nothing structured my time. There were no meetings to prepare for. No pressing deadlines looming. No fixed blocks that required me to write. I simply had too much time to write.

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Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. In my pieces for The Long Carve I draw on insights from writers I admire and interviewed for my Etched in Marble series. Both series are part of my substack, Respect the Marble, which aims to be a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it or subscribing. I really appreciate it.

I recently went on a short hiatus from writing here to focus on something else: talking. For a few weeks, instead of writing, I was explaining what I wrote. Summarising my written words in interviews, podcast conversations and lectures. What had taken years to think through now had to fit into a few minutes

I found the experience surprisingly difficult. I love writing because it forces me to be concise. Those who know me will recognise that being concise isn’t exactly my strong suit. Left to myself, I tend to just keep talking. Now I had to mince my words. I had to do my book justice in very little time. My discomfort about talking about my book revealed something I had only partially understood while writing: how much depends on how we communicate an idea, not just the idea itself.

A Book About My Father

I wrote a popular book about my father, and about the political phenomena I had been studying for years: how the erosion of public services fuels political alienation and, in turn, support for the far right. Writing about someone who’s close to you isn’t easy. It asks for a kind of honesty that feels exposing.

This is especially scary for academics. We are taught to keep our distance. Distance signals rigor. Clarity, we are told, comes from detachment. For a long time, I believed this to be true. But over time I have come to realise that the questions we choose are rarely distant. They are shaped by our experience. They are part of how we show up in the world.

Becoming closer is uncomfortable, and often feels risky. It asks us to give up some of the distance that makes us feel in control. But distance also changes what we are able to see, and what others are able to recognise in what we write.

The lesson I take from my recent experience isn’t that distance is wrong, but that it’s only one tool in our toolbox. Sometimes, the work asks for something different: the willingness to be honest about the reasons why we pay attention to certain questions over others.

When Distance Breaks Down

My conversations with my father gave me access to experiences I couldn’t have reached otherwise. Closeness didn’t weaken the writing. It improved it. Trying to remove ourselves from our questions doesn’t always clarify our writing. Sometimes it makes it harder for readers to recognise themselves in it.

Sometimes we lose something essential when we keep our distance. The journalist and writer Simon Kuper, in my conversation with him for the Etched in Marble series, reminds us that the aim of writing isn’t only to simplify reality, but to make something alive on the page. This is how we draw in our readers.

“There are no novels without characters, no films without characters, and yet so many academic books try to do without them,” Kuper observed. “If you want to keep readers for longer than a thousand words, you need people to carry the story.”

That observation stayed with me, because it points to something we rarely discuss: how we grab the attention of our readers. We tend to assume that if our argument is strong enough, the readers will follow. That readers will stay with us, because of our ideas. But readers don’t engage with ideas in the abstract. They engage with them through people, through situations, through examples. Readers keep reading because they relate to something that brings our idea alive.

Writing for Others

When I began working on my book, I approached it as I would any academic project. I knew the literature. I could trace the patterns. I could explain how the erosion of public services shaped political dissatisfaction and far-right support in Europe.

What I couldn’t yet do, was to write it in a way that drew readers in. That only became possible when I allowed my own experiences into the argument, not merely as an illustration of a pattern, but as a way of seeing the argument itself.

What I began to understand, was that I had been writing more for myself than for the reader. The point of writing wasn’t to display what I knew, but to understand what was at stake so that others could see it. That shift in perspective changed my writing.

Make Readers Think

The experiences my father spoke about, the difficulty of reaching a doctor, the administrative burdens, the sense of being overlooked, weren’t simply anecdotes. They were part of a broader pattern I was studying. Writing became a way of holding those two things together: the abstract and the specific.

Readers may not necessarily recognise themselves in every single detail, but in what they represent: families where political differences had become harder to navigate, conversations that repeated without resolution, or family tensions that were managed rather than solved.

This is what writing can do when it stays close enough to the real world. It can make visible what is already there, but is rarely articulated. Not by offering conclusions, but by expressing something others recognise and think about.

Writing Shapes What We See

If there is one thing this writing experience clarified for me, it’s this: writing isn’t only about what we know, but about how we choose to see. Distance can be useful. It helps us organise, compare, and generalise. But it can also be a liability. It keeps us at a level of abstraction even when understanding demands something more specific.

Closeness, by contrast, isn’t the opposite of rigor. It’s a different way of arriving at it. It forces us to be precise in another way. To attend to detail. To stay with the friction of experience long enough to understand what is really means. And, perhaps most importantly, to write in a way that allows others to enter our argument.

What This Changed About My Writing

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that every piece of writing should be rooted in experience. The lesson isn’t that we should abandon distance, but that we should be more deliberate about when we use it. And to be intentional about it, we need to think about a few things.

First, the questions that matter most to us are rarely neutral. They come from somewhere. Acknowledging that doesn’t weaken our work. It gives it direction.

Second, readers rarely engage with arguments in the abstract. They engage with something they can follow: people, situations, examples that carry our argument forward. Form shapes what our content becomes.

Third, writing isn’t about displaying what we know. It’s about understanding something well enough so others can see it as well. Good writing is written for the reader, not the writer.

And finally, the hardest part of writing isn’t finding the right words, but deciding how close we are willing to get to our topic. Because that choice determines how we draw readers into what we have to say.

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Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. In my pieces for The Long Carve I draw on insights from writers I admire and interviewed for my Etched in Marble series. Both series are part of my substack, Respect the Marble, which aims to be a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it or subscribing. I really appreciate it.

Most writing advice, including much of my own, focuses on how to begin. How to keep writing. How to build a routine. Far less attention is given to a quieter skill: knowing when to stop.

Stopping sounds like the opposite of productivity. But in long writing projects it’s often the condition for returning. If we stop too late, we exhaust our work. If we stop too early, the momentum never builds. Somewhere in between lies a small but important judgment: knowing when to leave the page in order to keep our thinking alive.

The Courage to Pause

I had never really thought about the importance of deciding when to stop, until my conversation with political theorist and writer Lea Ypi for my Etched in Marble series. When I asked her about writing routines, she said something that stayed with me.

She admired the advice often given to writers, things like write at least half an hour every day. But, she admitted, that rhythm is almost impossible to maintain in real life. Teaching, travel, family, and the ordinary interruptions of life rarely cooperate with neat routines. What matters more, she suggested, is something else entirely: stop writing when you still have something left to say. This allows the through line in our work to remain intact. And when we return, the path forward is waiting for us.

Protecting Our Future Work

Anyone who has embarked on a long writing project recognizes the difference. Some writing sessions end with a satisfying sense of continuation. Others end with the feeling that the well has run dry. The difference often doesn’t lie in how we start, but in how we stop.

Stopping at the right moment protects our future work. It preserves the unfinished sentence, the unresolved question, or the small piece of curiosity that pulls us back to the page. In this sense, stopping is not the same as stalling. It’s what allows the work to keep moving.

Long projects unfold in phases. There are periods of intense focus, when the work absorbs all of our attention. And there are moments when the work needs to meet the world beyond the page.

Taking A Break

For me, one of those moments is arriving now. Tomorrow my Dutch-language book De Symfonie van Onvrede (“The Symphony of Discontent”) will be published. The book grew out of years of research into public service provision and political discontent, but also from something more personal: the story of the village where I grew up and how it shaped my father politically.

Bringing that book into the world will require my attention: time, travel, and conversations across the Netherlands. For that reason I will take a short pause from writing new pieces here on Respect the Marble for the next five to six weeks. In the spirit of Lea Ypi’s advice, I’m stopping while there is still something left to say.

Until We Return

The Long Carve series will continue afterwards, with essays on revision, structure, and the strange moment when a piece of writing finally becomes ready to share.

Until then, thank you for reading, sharing, and thinking along with these reflections on writing. Sometimes the most important part of the writing process is knowing when to step away from the marble, leaving the next cut waiting for when we return.

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Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. In my pieces for The Long Carve I draw on insights from writers I admire and interviewed for my Etched in Marble series. Both series are part of my substack, Respect the Marble, which aims to be a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it or subscribing. I really appreciate it.

Some ambitions are build for display. They generate visible outputs, things we can list, rank, and update. They seem to register as progress almost immediately. Others are different. They take place outside the scoringboard. For long stretches they look like nothing much at all: a question we keep circling, a draft that won’t settle, or an idea that refuses to form.

This second kind of ambition, something I call slow ambition, is at the heart of the writing process. Most writing requires long bouts of uncertainty, revision, false starts, and pauses. From the outside this may look lik drifting, and from the inside it feels like doubt. While embarking on long writing project we need to learn to take enough time.

The Loneliness of Slow Ambition

We increasingly live in a culture that focuses on the first type of ambition, the fast kind. Progress is expected to show itself immediately. It’s supposed to be measurable and sharable. What can’t be displayed is easy to misread as stagnation. In such a climate, ambition only seems to “count” if it moves fast enough to be seen.

This is where the loneliness begins. We watch other people post the milestones while we sit with the messy parts, the half-sentence or the paragraph we deleted three times. Much of this work can’t be measured. But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening. It simply means progress is unfolding in ways metrics cannot easily capture.

And I’m not arguing against visible success. Of course it matters. I’m arguing that it has a habit of crowding out what matters more in writing: the slow accumulation of understanding or the joy of getting one sentence exactly right. None of that fits neatly on a scoreboard. But it’s the point.

The Importance of Friction in Thought

Artificial intelligence intensifies this tension. Ideas move quickly into sentences. The distance between thought and language grows shorter. But the promise of efficiency and convenience comes at the cost of friction. When coherent language can be generated instantly, the labor of forming thought risks disappearing from view. The temptation is not merely to write faster, but to believe that speed signals competence.

The novelist Hanif Kureishi wrote about the importance of friction: “There should be some friction in your method between you and your subject matter… frustration and difficulty are integral to the process.” That line points to something we often forget. Resistance isn’t a sign that we’re doing it wrong. It’s often the point at which the work becomes truly our own.

Writing needs friction. It’s the way our thinking gets shaped. The resistance we encounter while searching for the right word or discovering that an argument doesn’t yet work, isn’t wasted effort. In fact, it is the work.

Embracing Slow Work

Speed doesn’t just change writing, it reshapes how our ambition appears. When expression becomes effortless, we begin to expect thinking itself to unfold smoothly. Work that develops slowly may start feeling suspect. Difficulty might start to look like something is off.

Many people internalize this judgment. They compare their invisible progress to the visible momentum of others, and conclude they are falling behind. What they rarely consider is that they may simply be working from a different type of ambition. Slow ambition isn’t the absence of drive. It’s ambition oriented toward the long haul. Milestones may arrive late, or not at all, but it’s the process that counts.

To work slowly in a culture organized around speed is to move slightly out of sync with our surroundings. Much of this effort must be sustained without external reward. But there is freedom in this. When ambition is no longer tied to constant visibility, our attention can return to the work itself. We can return to the long carving through our ideas.

Tiny Exercise: Protect the Slow Work

The goal isn’t to eliminate friction. It’s to stay with it, knowing that others are doing the same, even if their struggle isn’t visible. Sometimes the most collective thing we can do is keep carving, even when doing so feels lonely.

Try this for your next writing session:

• Choose one paragraph you actually care about: Rewrite it slowly, once, without polish.

• Stop early. Leave the last sentence unfinished, so you know exactly where to pick up tomorrow.

• Let it rest: Walk away for at least for a day. Then reread and ask: What did I understand better after writing this?

• Measure progress differently: Don’t count words. Count the things you clarified.

The point isn’t speed. It’s allowing yourself to take the time to let your ideas flourish.

Subscribe to Respect The Marble

Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. In my pieces for The Long Carve I draw on insights from writers I admire and interviewed for my Etched in Marble series. Both series are part of my substack, Respect the Marble, which aims to be a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it or subscribing. I really appreciate it.

Every long writing project reaches a moment, and it tends to arrive sooner than we think. We finally begin. The idea is there. We’ve ringfenced it. We sit down to write. And then, almost immediately, it feels like it’s all falling apart.

The confidence we had when the project lived in our head seems to vanish the moment words appear on the page. Sentences feel clumsy. The structure disappears. What felt coherent now looks incomplete and shaky. This moment is so common that many of us mistake it for a warning sign. We assume that something has gone wrong.

In reality, something has gone right. We’ve moved from imagining the work to actually doing it. And that meeting, in my experience, almost always feels disappointing. Writing teaches us, again and again, that the sentence is always smaller than the idea that produced it.

The Shock of the First Draft

Ideas are generous when they live in our heads. They feel elegant, convincing, and almost finished. They exist without resistance. Writing changes that.

The moment we begin to write, the idea has to confront language, structure and logic. The gaps we couldn’t see before now become visible. The edges look rough. What felt like clarity doesn’t look like it any longer on the page.

This is why beginnings often feel like we’re regressing. We expect the act of writing to make things clearer. Instead, it makes complexity visible. But that visibility isn’t failure. It’s the first real contact with our project.

Working the Marble

In sculpture, the first cuts don’t reveal the statue. They remove material. They establish proportions that can barely be recognized as the final form. Writing works much the same way. Early drafts aren’t performance, they’re excavation.

We aren’t yet trying to write beautifully or persuasively (yet). We’re trying to see what the material actually looks like once it exists outside our heads. This phase feels messy, because it is! It’s discovery masked as confusion.

Many projects die here because writers interpret this discomfort as a signal to stop. They wait for clarity to arrive before continuing. But clarity is the result of writing, not its precondition.

Why It Feels Worse

There are at least three reasons why the beginning feels harder than expected:

1. Our idea loses its illusion of perfection: What felt brilliant internally now has to survive our sentences.

2. Our inner critic arrives too early: We judge the work using standards meant for finished writing instead of discovery.

3. We mistake exploration for failure: We forget that the purpose of early drafting isn’t to prove that we can write, it’s to figure out what we actually think.

The project hasn’t gotten worse. We’re simply seeing it more honestly.

Discovery Before Presentation

One of the quiet misunderstandings about writing is that we think we should already know what we want to say before we begin. But long projects rarely work that way. Instead we can think of the early stage of writing as belonging to the logic of discovery: writing that exists to test ideas, to shape our arguments, and to reveal problems we didn’t even know were there.

Only after comes the logic of presentation: the polished argument readers will eventually see. Confusing these stages makes the beginning of writing feel unbearable. Expecting finished clarity from exploratory writing is like expecting a sculpture to emerge after the first strike of the chisel.

Staying with the Mess

The paradox is this: the messiest stage is often the most important one in writing. Because this is where we discover:

• what our idea is actually about

• where the tension lives in our thinking

• which parts need to be kept and which might need to go

The work begins to teach us what it wants to become. If we stay in this stage, endure the discomfort without trying to rush to completion, our project starts to grow and to really hold its own.

You Are Not Your First Draft

In other words, first drafts are supposed to be bad. They’re our raw attempts to write something into existence. John McPhee writes in Draft No. 4 that writing is never done once but three or four times over. Anne Lamott puts it even more bluntly: all good writers write messy first drafts. The mess isn’t the problem. It’s the beginning of the work.

And yet we often take the mess personally. We look at clumsy paragraphs and think: this must mean I’m not very good at this. Let me put this plainly: you’re not your first draft. The draft isn’t the verdict, it’s the start. It exists so you have something to work on. Without the messy draft, there is nothing to improve.

Tiny Exercise: The Ugly First Cut

Next time you sit down to write, try this:

1. Set a timer for 15 minutes.

2. Write one messy page explaining your idea to yourself, forget the reader.

3. Don’t edit while writing.

4. When time is up, underline one sentence that you think is good.

5. Keep it and start your next writing session from that sentence.

The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is returning.

Subscribe to Respect The Marble

Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. In my pieces for The Long Carve I draw on insights from writers I admire and interviewed for my Etched in Marble series. Both series are part of my substack, Respect the Marble, which aims to be a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it or subscribing. I really appreciate it.

Beginning a long writing project can feel like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Except this time the box has no picture. We pour our pieces onto the table. We turn them over, one by one. We might sort them by colour, or by shape. We desperately look for edge pieces, basically anything that could give us a hold. Yet, nothing seems to work.

From the outside, this might look like we’re going nowhere. From the inside, the doubt creeps in. But we often forget that this is the slow work of not yet knowing. The uneasy feeling that comes just before our ideas take shape.

Long projects often collapse way before we reach the writing stage. They fall apart when the idea we’re working on turns out to simply not be strong enough to hold our attention once the early excitement wears off. We often assume the hard part begins once “we have an idea.” In reality, the hard part is figuring out which idea is worth working on.

Ideas Need Friction

We like to tell stories about ideas as lightbulb moments, as bouts of inspiration. In my experience, ideas don’t arrive with that much glamour. They start with an itch: an issue that keeps nagging at us, a pattern we can’t unsee, a gap between what we’ve been told and what we observe.

That itch matters. It’s often the first sign that the idea is genuinely ours. When an idea is ours, it rarely comes out cleanly at first. It can feel too awkward to explain, so we stumble. We reach for words that don’t quite fit. We worry our idea is too obvious, too naïve, or simply not good enough. But when the itch is truly there, we return to our idea, during our commute, in the shower, or while scrolling through our social media feed.

Other ideas feel different. They seem to arrive almost ready for publication. They come in seemingly ready-made language. They impress other people faster than they truly engage us. They might be an extension of the ideas of our advisors or other people around us. They can be good ideas, but they might ultimately belong to other people, and are therefore difficult to make our own.

The ideas that sustain real work aren’t necessarily the ones that make us seem clever at first. They’re the ones that unsettle us a little, that introduce friction in our thinking. We need to figure out what’s really going on. Long project survive on this friction.

Ideas Iteration

Our early ideas may also feel limitless at first. Everything seems connected. The project could become ten different contributions at once. This is where many projects break down, not because they are too small, but because they are too large to hold. We aren’t solving a jigsaw puzzle, we are just compiling a pile of pieces.

A useful rule I’ve borrowed from idea generating practice is simple: generate many versions of the idea first. Not one, but several. Then criticize each of them. Test them in your head. Keep the one that survives your own skepticism, and let the others go.

Ringfencing Ideas

What I’ve learned is that, at the start, two things matter more than anything else: finding an idea that genuinely moves us (see my previous post), and then giving it a boundary. Without that boundary, the project risks to become “about everything,” which is just another way of saying that it becomes impossible to handle. This practice is what I call ringfencing our ideas.

Ringfencing is the moment we draw a boundary around our idea. Without boundaries, the project swells until it collapses under its own weight. With boundaries, it becomes something we can actually shape. We get traction, and can begin to build our project.

Ringfencing our idea is even more about deciding what our project isn’t about. It’s the decision to crop. To keep what makes our idea sharper, and cut what makes it blurrier, even if the cut material is interesting. We don’t have to write the bible on every topic, to reshape the entire field. Ringfencing our idea doesn’t shrink it, it makes it workable.

This is an under-appreciated part in our writing process: ringfencing our idea isn’t only about sharpening what it’s about, but being equally clear about what it isn’t about. The limits aren’t a constraint. They’re what make our work possible in the first place.

Incubating Ideas

At this point, our writing process may not look like “writing” at all. It might look more like reading with a pen in our hand. Like underlining quotes that grab our attention. Like collecting fragments in a notebook. Like rearranging sticky notes on the floor until a shape begins to appear.

At first glance, this may even look like procrastination. Yet upon closer inspection, it’s more like pattern recognition. It’s us teaching what needs to stay and what needs to go. This is doing the jigsaw: not solving, not finishing, but just learning what piece might go where.

Choosing an idea isn’t just an intellectual decision, it means deciding what deserves months or years of our attention. What we’re willing to read about again and again. What we’re willing to think about when we’re tired. What we’re willing to return to when nobody else seems interested. The only ideas that endure are the ones that continue to ask something of us. They change us as much as we change them. They deepen as our understanding deepens. They resist closure long enough for us to grow alongside them.

A Curiosity Mindset

One of the biggest dangers at this stage is explaining our idea before it’s ready. Premature exposure can flatten an idea. We end up defending something we haven’t yet fully understood. The social pressure to sound coherent arrives before our thinking has caught up.

Most ideas need a protected phase. Not because we want to be secretive about it, but because our idea needs an incubation period. This is harder than it sounds, especially in academia, where feedback is constant and judgement arrives quickly. Advisors have opinions. Reviewers have their own frameworks. Even our own inner critic wants the idea to justify itself too soon.

But early ideas are fragile in a specific way: not because they’re weak, but because they aren’t yet fully shaped. They don’t yet have edges. They can’t hold their own weight in other people’s expectations. Allowing our ideas incubation time is crucial in cultivating a curiosity mindset: a habit of relentlessly asking questions without rushing to answers. The point isn’t to have an answer yet, but to stay interested long enough for the right question to emerge. We don’t “have an idea”, rather we shape one.

Tiny Exercise: Shaping Your Idea

If you’re at the beginning of a long project, try this before you start writing:

1. Put all the pieces on the table: Write down several possible ideas, not just one. Let them sit next to each other without deciding too quickly.

2. Look for friction: Read the list slowly and ask yourself: Which idea keeps pulling my attention?

3. Choose one: Write that idea down in a single sentence. Keep it simple. Don’t write to impress, just put the idea on paper as clearly as you possibly can.

4. Ringfence your idea: Now write three things this project is not about. This is the beginning drawing the boundaries of your idea.

5. Sit with it for a while: Return to the sentence a week later. Do you still feel curious about it? If yes, you might have found something worthwhile.

Subscribe to Respect The Marble

Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. In my pieces for The Long Carve I will also draw on insights obtained during the Etched in Marble series that features conversations with writers I admire. Both series are part of my substack, Respect the Marble, which aims to be a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it or subscribing. I really appreciate it.

Last year, on sabbatical, I started this Substack partly as a way to keep writing while my main project stalled. I had started writing my first book in Dutch (my mother tongue), built on my research into public service provision and support for the far right. I had the material. I had the arguments. I even had a structure. And yet every time I opened the document, the beginning felt wrong.

What I didn’t admit to myself at first was that the book wasn’t only about my research. It was also about experience: my own and my family’s. The inspiration for my research was the story of my father, and the village that shaped him. Because I tried to keep that second layer hidden, I couldn’t really begin. Only when I acknowledged what I was actually trying to do on the page, and why it had to be in Dutch, did the project start to move (see the end result here).

That experience taught me something simple about writing: it begins with intention. Before structure, before routine, there is the quieter question that makes all the other decisions possible: why am I writing this in the first place? It sounds obvious, but it rarely is. In a culture saturated with advice about how to write faster and better, we often skip this question. Yet for long projects, intention is not a nice-to-have, it’s essential. It’s what carries us when momentum stalls and the destination looks out of reach.

There Is No Single Way to Write

One of the most helpful books I’ve read about writing recently is Written by Bec Evans and Chris Smith, a birthday gift from my former PhD student. Its central claim is refreshingly simple: there is no single way to write.

What matters is awareness of your own process. As they put it: “One simple idea drives our work: noticing how you write and taking a more mindful, experimental approach to what works for you and what doesn’t is the most powerful thing you can do.”

In other words, writing improves not by sticking to a system, but by becoming more intentional about how and why we write. Through noticing what draws us back to the page, and what quietly drives us away from it. This matters even more for long projects, where imitation breaks down quickly. We can borrow someone else’s routine for a week, but we can’t borrow them for months or years. Eventually, we have to develop our own.

Outcomes Crowd Out Intention

This is harder than it sounds, especially in academia and journalism, where writing has become increasingly commodified. Outputs are counted. Speed is rewarded. Competition is constant. It’s easy, almost inevitable, for our intention to drift towards external outcomes we don’t control.

Under pressure to publish or perish, especially before tenure or a stable contract, readers might think: this sounds great, but it doesn’t apply to me. I need results now. That reaction is understandable. But it rests on a false premise. Outcomes were never fully under our control to begin with.

Reviewers, editors, markets, and timing are all external forces. They shape outcomes, but we don’t control them. What we do control is the process: how deeply we think, how honestly we write, and how much justice we do to the idea we are working on. Reclaiming our intention is how we anchor a long project in something that actually belongs to us.

From Extrinsic to Intrinsic Motivation

At some point, every long project forces a choice. We can orient ourselves around validation, like recognition and approval, or around the work itself. The first path is exhausting. Approval, in particular, is an efficient enemy of intention. It pulls attention outward, away from the page and towards imagined audiences and competitors. Our writing becomes defensive. Our appetite for risk narrows. Our joy of writing thins out.

The second path isn’t easier, but it is more rewarding. It asks different questions: What are we really trying to understand? Why does this matter to us? What would it mean to do this topic justice? Writing in this sense is also a collective practice. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, not to repeat them, but to extend, challenge, and recombine their ideas in ways that open new perspectives for our readers.

Letting Go of Perfection

One of my PhD advisors, Gary Marks, once jokingly told me that the argument already existed, fully formed, in his head. The task of writing was simply to get it onto the page. But that, of course, is where the real difficulty lies. What feels coherent in our thoughts can never be fully transferred into language. His goal in writing, he told me, was to minimize the distance between what he understood and what the page could hold.

This conversation stayed with me. It made me realise that my writing will never be perfect, and whether the final version is praised, cited, or ignored isn’t something I can control. What I can control is whether I gave the writing my best shot.

Long writing projects are almost always disappointing at some level. Clear writing exposes gaps in our thinking we didn’t even know existed. There is no mastery waiting on the other side, only the decision to keep going.

Great writing has very little to do with prestige or perfection. It’s an act of commitment: staying with the idea, problem, or puzzle long enough until we can stand behind what we’ve written. For me, great writing is the joy of putting words in the right order so that others can engage with my deepest thinking about something I truly care about. Everything else follows from there.

What Intention Holds

So before thinking about structure, goals or practices, I would start with the following question when we embark on a writing project: Why do you want to write this? Not why it would be useful. Not why it would look good. No, ask yourself why you want to sit with this idea for a long period of time.

Intention is the first cut into the marble. It determines what we remove, what we protect, and what we’re willing to return to when no one is watching. Writing is messy. It’s inherently going to disappoint. But when it is driven by intention, it’s also unmistakably ours. When intention disappears, writing becomes about something else entirely: performance. The question, then, isn’t only how we write, but why we do.

Tiny Exercise: Write Down Your Intention

Before your next writing session, take five minutes to chisel your intention into a couple of sentences, by answering these questions:

1. Write one sentence that begins: “I am writing this because…” Keep going until you reach something that feels slightly risky to admit. That’s usually the real one.

2. Write one sentence that begins: “This project is not…” Name what you will not try to do. This is a way to protect the work from becoming something it wasn’t intended to be.

3. Write one sentence that begins: “If no one would ever read this, I would still want to write it because…” If you can answer this honestly, you’ve found the reason why this project moves you.

Then keep those three sentences somewhere visible so you can return to them during the writing process. A long project doesn’t survive on inspiration. It survives on returning. Intention is what makes that return possible.

Subscribe to Respect The Marble

Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. In my pieces for The Long Carve I will also draw on insights obtained during the Etched in Marble series that features conversations with writers I admire. Both series are part of my substack, Respect the Marble, which aims to be a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it or subscribing. I really appreciate it.

Over the holidays, a dear friend gave me Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks to read. I approached it the way I do books that grab, but unsettle me at the same time: slowly, with long pauses, and with the uncomfortable feeling that it was talking directly to my calendar. The premise is simple: a human life, on average, is about four thousand weeks long. That’s it. No productivity system, no calendar trick, no optimization attempt changes that fact.

Burkeman’s real argument isn’t about time management at all. It’s about attention. It highlights the uncomfortable truth that time management is ultimately about deciding what deserves our finite time, and what does not. Every yes is also a thousand no’s.

Writing Is The Work of Attention

I have been thinking about this in the context of writing. A lot of writing advice centers around abundance: how to do more with our time, which hacks increase our output, or how to optimize our drafts. But long writing projects live in a different universe. Writing a book, a dissertation, or sustaining an idea across different pieces of writing is not a matter of days or weeks, it requires years. It is not about “how fast can we go?” but “what are we willing to give up?”

Once we accept the four-thousand-weeks fact, really accept it, the question stops being about management or discipline, and becomes about something else entirely: what do we do with our weeks, and what do we try to understand through writing? It also raises a prior question, one we do not ask often enough: what makes our time feel worthwhile in the first place? For me, writing sits close to the center of that answer.

Writing Is a Way of Living With Thought

For me, writing isn’t just a way of transferring words to the page, it is where thought happens. It is one of the few practices that forces us to slow down long enough to notice what we actually believe, what we are willing to defend, and what we still don’t quite understand.

In that sense, writing is a key aspect of the human experience by making sense of the social, political, and cultural world around us. A long project is simply that practice stretched across time. It isn’t an exercise in endurance or productivity, but a sustained attempt to understand, and to make that understanding shareable and comprehensible to others.

Writing Is Respecting the Marble

Michelangelo famously said that the statue already exists in the marble, the task of a sculptor is to remove what doesn’t belong. What that line quietly reveals is the essence of real work: the years of practice required before our hands and tools are capable of revealing anything at all. The form may be there, but the skill has to be earned.

The name of this substack originated from this idea. It is what I have come to think of as skillpower: not raw talent, not motivation, but the slow practice of staying with one material long enough to do it justice. And exactly that practice is what a long project demands. It is the skillpower we need for the long carve.

Introducing a New Series: The Long Carve

With this in mind, I am introducing a new series The Long Carve on Respect the Marble. It is a series about choosing and staying with an idea long enough for it to change us. It is not about a guide to write a (best-selling) book, or how to publish more. It is about how to ringfence an idea in a world designed to fragment our attention. It is about how to write through the doubt and frustration, and how keep writing even when the outcome is deeply uncertain.

This is where respecting the marble becomes more than a metaphor. Marble is not infinitely malleable. It has weight. It gives resistance. We cannot carve everything into it. We have to respect the material. Every cut forecloses other forms. Working on a long project is the same: we are not just shaping an idea, we are shaping our attention around it, and we are deliberately casting other ideas to the side.

Writing Is a Practice of Commitment

Time management culture tells us to optimize. This series is about something far harder: commitment. The practice of staying. The art of leaning into the resistance. And the strange courage it takes to keep carving the same block when no one is watching, or shows only the slightest interest.

I will ask questions we rarely discuss:

• How do we recognize an idea that deserves our attention? And how do we stick with it for years?

• How do we sit with our idea, and ringfence it before it is ready to be seen?

• How do we keep writing when the shape of the final product is still unknown?

• How resistance and friction can help us to improve our writing?

• How do we stay with the writing when the rewards are distant and uncertain?

In a life of roughly four thousand weeks, a long project might claim a hundred of them. That isn’t a productivity problem. It’s a philosophical one: what deserves our attention in a finite human life.

Writing Is a Craft Without Masters

The Long Carve is an attempt to think through these issues slowly and honestly, and share my experiences and those of other writers I respect. Over the weeks to come, I will write about the different stages of long projects: how an idea forms, how it gets protected, how to face the blank page, how to build a structure that can hold doubt, how to choose what to leave out, how to revise without losing our voice, when to share it with others, and how to know when a day’s work is actually done, etc.

The Long Carve isn’t meant as a set of writing guidelines (no “Twelve Rules of Good Writing,” I promise), but more like a set of field notes on what it feels like to stay with one piece of thinking for a long time. After years of writing books, articles, and more drafts than I care to count, I have come to think of writing less as technique and more as a way of living with and through thought.

It is learning to sit with an idea past the point where it stops feeling clever and starts asking something of difficult from us, namely the slow work of understanding something well enough to offer it to others. And that takes time, and a lot of practice. Or, as a line often attributed to one of my favourite writers, Ernest Hemingway, puts it: “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

Subscribe to Respect The Marble

Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. In my pieces for The Long Carve I will also rely on insights from the Etched in Marble series that features conversations with writers I admire. Both series are part of my substack, Respect the Marble, which aims to be a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing or sharing this post. I really appreciate it.

For me, this has become a passion project in the most literal sense: something sustained not by incentives or professional necessity, but by a stubborn love of writing. Like many of you, I’m a busy academic, and most days are already overfull before they begin (which is my polite way of saying my calendar has stopped asking for my consent). In that context, the act of reflecting on why and how we write, the simple joy of putting words in the right order, feels like a luxury. Not luxury as an indulgence, but in another sense: time set aside for attention.

Because writing, as we all know, is not simply sitting down and producing words. It’s planning and restarting. It’s frustration and testing. It’s blank pages, bad drafts, and the slow humiliation of realizing an argument doesn’t work. But it’s also observation, watching how people speak, how arguments move, how metaphors travel. It’s listening. It’s inhabiting other worlds in our minds long enough to see what they reveal. And perhaps most importantly, it is never finished knowledge. One reason I keep writing is that there is still so much about the world that I don’t understand.

We are living in a time that rewards speed and noise. The fastest take often wins. The loudest voice gets the most attention. Against that backdrop, this space has offered something slower: essays that are less about pronouncing conclusions than about staying with questions. Each week, your notes and responses have reminded me that there is still an appetite for writing that takes its time, for thought that doesn’t rush to perform certainty.

Writing this Substack has also changed how I write elsewhere. It has made me more attentive to voice, more patient with struggle, and more grateful for readers who read not just to agree, but to think alongside you.

As we head into the new year, I would love to make this project even more of a dialogue. If there are topics, questions, writers, or craft problems you would like me to explore in 2026, please reply in the comments or email me to let me know. What do you find hardest about writing right now? What do you wish more academics (or public writers) talked about? What kinds of conversations would you want to read?

I’ll be taking a short hiatus until mid-January. When I return, I want Respect the Marble to keep doing what marble does best: to hold the marks of thought, to slow us down, to invite care. I’ll refocus on my own pieces, with new Etched in Marble conversations sprinkled in, but I want to write them more like letters: shorter reflections on the process of writing and thinking in public life.

In closing, I want to thank the writers who have already agreed to take part in Etched in Marble series, a set of conversations with academics, journalists, and public thinkers who don’t just write about the world, but write into it. These conversations require time, openness, and a willingness to speak honestly about craft; about what writing costs, what it clarifies, and what it makes possible. I’m deeply grateful for their generosity.

Last but not least, thank you for being here. Thank you for reading with care. I didn’t anticipate how much this project would matter to me, but it has. It’s reminded me that the audience we imagine shapes the writing we do, and you’ve made that audience one worth writing for.

Wishing you a season of rest, reading, and renewal.

— Catherine

Rosie Collington is one of the most compelling new voices in political economy. A postdoctoral fellow at Copenhagen Business School, she studies how new forms of expertise and governance, from energy scenarios and disclosure infrastructures to algorithmic systems, are reshaping climate finance and the future of the state.

Co-author of The Big Con (with Mariana Mazzucato), Collington has written with rare clarity about consulting, capitalism, and the hidden architectures of economic power. Her work combines empirical precision with a clear-eyed view of how the language of efficiency can hide the politics of accountability and power.

But what stood out most in our Etched in Marble conversation was not only her analysis, it was her conviction that writing itself is a deeply human act. Collington doesn’t write just to publish. She writes because she needs to, because it’s, as she puts it, “the most meditative thing I know.” In an age of acceleration, AI drafts, and frictionless text, that insistence on writing as thinking, slow and effortful, feels almost radical.

“I’ve Always Needed to Write”

“I’ve always needed to write,” she says. “Pages and pages of diaries when I was a kid. It’s how I make sense of things.” That habit never left. Even while working in London, priced out of a master’s degree, Collington wrote a novel in the evenings.

“It wasn’t a good novel,” she laughs, “but it was one of the best things I’ve ever done for learning how to write.” The exercise taught her structure, pacing, and, above all, persistence. Writing, she discovered, isn’t magic. It’s the discipline of returning to the page until something true emerges.

“It’s Not Fair to Keep our Ideas Locked behind Paywalls”

Collington is clear-eyed about the privilege that comes with academic life. “We’re always writing for someone when we choose to write,” she says. “So why only write for three peer reviewers. Having once been on the outside herself, working policy jobs and learning from non-fiction books, and op-eds, she’s deeply aware of how exclusive academia can be.

“It doesn’t feel fair to keep our ideas locked behind paywalls,” she says. Public writing, for her, is a form of fairness: a way to open the gates of knowledge that too often close behind tuition fees and institutional walls.

Rosie’s golden rule is simple but profound: don’t take your reader for granted. “Academic readers are captive,” she says. “Their job is to evaluate your work. But public readers? They’re reading you on the bus, during a baby’s nap, after a long day. You have to earn every page.”

That means writing with clarity and honesty, showing surprise, doubt, and the human texture of research. “You can be more honest in public writing,” she explains. “You can say what really surprised you, what you didn’t expect to find. That’s how readers connect. That’s how they trust you.”

“Writing Helps Me Think Bigger”

Collington’s choice to write for wider audiences hasn’t always been met with approval. “A senior academic once told me that only people with big egos write books like this,” she recalls. “But it never felt like ego to me. It felt like something I owed.”

Writing, in her view, is a form of resistance, not against institutions, but against flattening and the automation of voice. “I’m sick of reading ChatGPT’s voice everywhere,” she says. “It’s arrogant and overconfident. I want readers to feel there’s a person behind the words.”

To protect that voice, she reads drafts aloud. “I don’t use AI tools for writing,” she says. “They drain the life out of language. Writing should sound like someone thinking, not like a machine summarizing thought.”

Far from being a distraction, writing for trade audiences sharpens her academic work. “Academic papers reward narrowness,” she says. “They want small, tidy claims. But public writing lets me think in bigger frames, about history, politics, and power. I often get my best ideas when I’m writing for a general audience.”

“Two Nights a Week”

Now a postdoc, Collington still writes most of her trade work in the margins of the day, evenings, weekends, and recently, during maternity leave. “Two nights a week,” she says. “Four or five hours while my husband takes over. It’s not much time, but it’s focused time.”

She uses tools like Pacemaker to set weekly word goals and always leaves a paragraph unfinished, “so future Rosie has something to grab onto.” She also leaves herself meticulous notes: where she stopped, what she was thinking, what comes next. “It’s like sending a message in a bottle to my future self,” she smiles.

“Bring Humans Back Into the Story”

What she’s ultimately trying to do, Collington says, is simple: “bring people back into the story. Writing well doesn’t mean dumbing down. It means respecting the reader’s time. It means showing the people behind the policy, the choices behind the data, the feelings behind the facts.”

Her forthcoming book, she says, continues that project, using narrative to explore how states’ pursuits of private finance for green transitions has not only failed to achieve decarbonisation goals, but also led to backlash and facilitated the far-right. “It’s about how we organize our economies,” she says, “but also about what it means to be human within them.”

Etched in Marble: “Write for the Reader You Respect”

When I ask Collington the series’ signature question — If you could etch one idea into the marble of our society today, something about thinking and writing you’d want future generations to carry forward, what would it be? — she doesn’t hesitate.

“Don’t take your reader for granted,” she says. “Write as if someone is giving you their Saturday afternoon, their commute, their only free hour of the week. Make it worth it. Make it vivid. Make it honest. And make sure your voice, not a machine’s, is the one they hear.”

Writing, for Collington, is not a performance of expertise. It’s an act of connection. It’s a way of bringing readers into the process of making sense of the world.

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Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. Etched in Marble is a series of conversations with writers I admire for thinking deeply, writing bravely, and shaping the world not just through what they say, but how they say it. This series of conversations is part of my Substack, Respect the Marble. If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing. Respect the Marble is a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft.

This week’s conversation with Victor Lapuente, a political scientist, columnist, and novelist, left me thinking about writing not as performance, but as care.

Writing, for him, is an act of guidance. A writer takes a reader’s hand, like a companion on a trail, and shows them the landscape. If they slip, if the path is muddy, if the view never comes into focus, that’s on the guide, not the traveler.

It’s a profound reframing in an academic world that often measures success in argument, originality, and output. Lapuente reminds us that the deeper ethic of writing is care for the reader.

One Recommendation

This week, return to a writer who guides you well. Someone whose sentences carry you forward rather than make you work to keep up. Read a page not for the argument but for the gesture:
- How do they take your hand?
- Where do they slow down?
- Where do they break the path into steps?

If you want a place to start, try Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a novel Lapuente praised for letting ideas walk alongside scenes, gestures, and human movement.

One Tiny Exercise

Try writing a paragraph as a guide, not a persuader.

1. Imagine your reader as someone you care about. Not a reviewer, not a skeptic, imagine a friend.

2. Write one paragraph explaining a complex idea from your current project. Use active verbs. Keep the writing steady. Slow down where the argument gets tricky.

3. Reread it and underline any place where the reader could get lost. That is where the plan of writing needs to be redrawn.

Writing becomes easier when we stop imagining the reader as an obstacle and start imagining them as a partner. Or, as Lapuente puts it: “Write with love for the reader.”

Víctor Lapuente writes like a good guide: steady hand, clear map, and his eye always on the reader. A professor at the University of Gothenburg and ESADE, he has built a career studying the institutions that hold democracies together, and the behaviours that can make them fall apart. He writes regularly for the Spanish daily El País, and writes book. His academic books, like Organizating Leviathan (with Carl Dahlström), examine how bureaucracy, ethics, and civic culture shape the quality of government.

Recently, he has turned to fiction, exploring democracy’s future in the age of AI through story rather than regression tables. Across these worlds, academia, journalism, literature, one thing stays constant: a deep belief that writing is an act of service. “Be clear,” he says. “And be kind to your reader.”

In our conversation, Lapuente returns again and again to that double commitment. Writing, for him, is not only a craft but a civic duty: a way of clarifying ideas for oneself and offering them, unpretentiously, to others. It’s the bridge between what we study and what we owe to the public.

“Gaining Degrees of Freedom in Thinking”

Asked why he writes, Lapuente starts at the beginning: teenage curiosity about why some places prosper and others stall, why opportunity clusters for some and not others. First stop: Orwell and fiction. Next stop (almost by accident): political science, discovered a day before enrolling at university. Decades later he’s circling back to fiction, not abandoning analysis, just widening the lens. Writing, in all forms, is how he thinks: get something down, see what holds, then improvise from solid ground.

Lapuente describes his writing life as a slow escape from guardrails. He began in academic articles, then moved to books, then public essays, and finally fiction. Each step gave him more freedom. “An editor once told me,” he laughs, “‘You have the problem of God.’ In fiction, you can do anything, but that means you have to decide everything.”

That’s why he still values the discipline of academic work. “Empirical methods keep you honest,” he says. “They stop you from floating away.” The challenge is to hold both together: the rigor of the academy with the freedom of fiction.

He describes the shift as one of “gaining degrees of freedom”, moving from the narrow corridors of academic writing to wider and riskier terrain. Freedom, in this sense, isn’t indulgence; it’s responsibility. “The more space you have, the more carefully you have to think about how you use it.”

“Hold the Hand of the Reader”

The metaphor he returns to is disarmingly simple. “When you write, imagine taking the reader’s hand, like a child you care about, and then show them the landscape.” The point isn’t condescension, it’s responsibility. A writer is like a guide. If the path is muddy, that’s on you.

“Don’t treat the reader as an adversary to defeat or a hurdle to clear,” he says. “Treat them as a companion you want to help. Slow down where the footing is tricky, point out the ridge line, and avoid cliffs of jargon.” It’s advice that applies as much to academic or policy writing as to prose. In all, clarity is kindness. Readers don’t owe you their attention, you have to earn it word by word.

“Insert the Philosophy Into the Action”

Fiction, Lapuente says, taught him to write better political science. The lesson came from an editor who told him: “Don’t park the argument in a room, let it walk through the forest.”

He recalls how Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain does exactly that: philosophical dialogue intertwined with movement, gesture, and scene. The idea becomes visible in action. “That’s what I try to do now,” Lapuente says. The same principle now guides his academic writing. If readers lose track of your argument, assume the fault is in the guidebook, not the traveler. “If your reader gets lost,” he says, “rewrite the map.”

“Switching Language Is a Test of Clarity”

Writing in two languages—English and Spanish—has shaped his style in ways few workshops could. When he spent years abroad, his Spanish thinned, and a Spanish editor once remarked that his prose had become rusty. Rather than retreat, Lapuente took it as a challenge. He began reading voraciously in Spanish, novels, essays, columns, to rebuild range and rhythm.

Each language, he found, acts as a check on the other. Writing in English cooled down his tone, trimmed excess emotion, and forced him toward precision. Writing in Spanish restored warmth and cadence. “Switching languages,” he says, “forces you to test your clarity. You can’t hide behind idiom or fog.” The result is prose that feels both disciplined and alive.

“Show Compassion For the Reader’s Time”

When it comes to the craft, Lapuente offers concrete advice:

• Front-load your message. “The most important word in a paragraph is the last word of the first sentence.” It sets the direction and hooks the attention.

• Prefer action to abstraction. “The government decided” beats “the decision of the government.” Subjects plus verbs cut faster through the fog.

• Test outside the seminar room. Explain your core idea to someone beyond academia. If they can grasp it, you’ve likely found the clean line.

He also tries — with mixed success, he adds — to separate the brain that drafts from the brain that edits: let the messy version arrive before you start pruning it into shape.

Under all the tips sits one principle: to show compassion. “Compassion for the reader’s time; compassion for views you don’t share; compassion for your future self who has to revise this later.” You write so someone else can see what you see. That demands clarity, empathy, and the courage to choose.

Etched in Marble: “Write with Love for the Reader”

I close by asking Lapuente the signature question in this Etched in Marble series: If you could etch one idea into the marble of our society today, something about thinking and writing you would want future generations to carry forward, what would it be?

He doesn’t pause. “Write with love for the reader,” he says. Take their hand. Show them the view. Use short steps when the ground is uneven. Keep your verbs active active. And remember: the more freedom your form gives you, the more carefully you must guide. Writing, for Lapuente, is ultimately an act of care: an attempt to make meaning with the reader, not just for them.

Subscribe to Respect The Marble

Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. Etched in Marble is a series of conversations with writers I admire for thinking deeply, writing bravely, and shaping the world not just through what they say, but how they say it. This series of conversations is part of my Substack, Respect the Marble. If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing. Respect the Marble is a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft.

Few economists write the way Dani Rodrik does, with the clarity of a teacher, the precision of a craftsman, and the nerve to say what others only think. A professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and author of The Globalization Paradox and Straight Talk on Trade, and most recently Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World, he has spent much of his career urging the economics profession to confront its blind spots and outline the political trade-offs built into economic life.

What distinguishes Rodrik isn’t just the range of his scholarship, but the clarity that runs through it. He has a gift for pulling abstract questions, about globalization, industrial policy, inequality, back down to earth, translating them into choices societies actually face. His voice is measured, not polemical, but there’s always a steel thread beneath the prose. He writes not to perform certainty, but to test our convictions. In doing so, he gives readers permission to think alongside him rather than simply be persuaded.

In our conversation for Etched in Marble, Rodrik’s writing revealed itself as more than a craft. It’s both a way of thinking and a way of intervening. Writing, for him, is where arguments sharpen, ideas get tested, and courage shows up.

“I Write Because I Like to Write”

When I asked Rodrik why he writes, his answer was disarmingly simple: “I write because I like to write.” He didn’t come to academia through a straight path. Neither of his parents went to university, and it took him time to discover what kind of work would truly sustain him. What tipped the balance was realizing that writing itself, not just research, not just teaching, was what he loved most. “It’s an inherently enjoyable process for me,” he says.

That joy is intrinsic, but also instrumental. Writing is how he thinks. “I often start writing before I know fully what I’m going to say, or where the argument is going to lead,” he admits. But for Rodrik, the act of writing is the laboratory: the place where clarity emerges, inconsistencies are exposed, and evidence is forced to hold.

“The Hardest Part Is the First Sentence”

Rodrik laughs when I ask him about process. “The hardest part of writing is the first sentence,” he says. “If I have the first sentence, the rest comes.”

He doesn’t necessarily work from detailed outlines, the structure reveals itself in the act of writing. The first sentence is the opening into the argument, and from there he thinks his way forward. If he realizes two paragraphs in which something doesn’t hold, he stops, rethinks, and revises. Writing begins in uncertainty. It’s a search for shape and sense. What readers see is the second act: the moment when the argument has been tested, refined, and made to stand on its own.

“Say What You Want to Say”

One of Rodrik’s most striking insights came from an editor early in his career: when writing for a general audience, start with the conclusion. “The general audience starts with a presumption of trust in you,” he explains. “You don’t have to reproduce the entire academic exercise, step by step. You can start with what you want to say, then bring in evidence to illuminate and complicate.”

This advice explains why Rodrik’s public writing is so effective. Whether he is warning about the costs of hyper-globalization or laying out a new vision for an inclusive economy, he doesn’t bury his central idea. He leads with it, and then builds the argument with care.

“Spend Your Reputational Capital”

Rodrik is perhaps best known for challenging the mainstream economic consensus on globalization before it was fashionable to do so. “You could say I was spending some of my reputational capital,” he reflects. Because he was publishing in top journals at the same time, critics couldn’t dismiss him as unserious.

But his decision to write for broader audiences was more than professional strategy. It was a civic choice. “There was basically a space in the intellectual spectrum that was completely blank,” he says. “Why not occupy it?”

It was risky, he recalls colleagues asking why he was “feeding the barbarians”, but he felt it was necessary. Someone had to make the case that globalization had trade-offs, that winners and losers were real, and that the politics of compensation mattered. “If we only talk to each other,” he says, “we end up mistaking our consensus for truth.”

“Alternate Long Sentences with Very Short Ones”

So how does he do it? How do we take ideas built for seminar rooms and make them resonate in public debate without watering them down? Rodrik’s answer is practical. Start simple. “Don’t bury your argument under caveats,” he says. “People can handle nuance, but you have to give them a reason to care first.”

He also believes that writing clearly is an act of respect, not only for the reader, but also for the idea itself. “If your argument can’t be stated plainly, maybe you don’t yet understand it well enough.” This principle, he adds, applies as much to academic writing as it does to op-eds.

And then, he smiles, and turns to the craft itself. “Alternate long sentences with very short ones,” he advises. “It’s amazing what a difference it makes.” Too many long sentences, he says, are a sign that the writer hasn’t quite decided what they mean. “Short sentences are risky because you’re forced to be clear.” Clarity, for Rodrik, isn’t a matter of style but of honesty. The short sentence is where the argument stops hedging and takes a stand.

“Etched in Marble: “Write to Think”

When I ask him the signature question of this Etched in Marble series — If you could etch one idea into the marble of our society today, something about thinking and writing you would want future generations to carry forward, what would it be? — he doesn’t hesitate:

“Write as a way of thinking. Don’t wait until you’ve fully figured it out. Use writing to develop your argument, to clarify, to see where it holds and where it doesn’t. And when you’re ready to share it, make it clear enough that anyone can follow.”

It’s a fitting answer for someone who has spent a career thinking on the page, and inviting the rest of us to do the same. Rodrik’s reminder is simple but profound: writing isn’t separate from thought. It’s how thinking manifests itself.

Subscribe to Respect The Marble

Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. Etched in Marble is a series of conversations with writers I admire for thinking deeply, writing bravely, and shaping the world not just through what they say, but how they say it. This series of conversations is part of my Substack, Respect the Marble. If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing. Respect the Marble is a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft.

This week’s conversation with Lea Ypi stayed with me for one reason above all: her belief that good writing begins not with certainty, but with reading.

Ypi treats writing as exploration, as a way to test ideas in daylight, expose them to doubt, and discover what survives. But that kind of thinking, she reminded me, doesn’t emerge from the blank page. It begins in the library.

“You are a good writer if you’re a good reader.”

Reading, for Ypi, is not preparation. It is apprenticeship. Readers learn structure by feeling its pull. Readers learn voice by hearing cadence. Readers learn empathy by inhabiting other worlds. Good writing stands on the shoulders of books we have carried with us.

One Recommendation

This week I recommend simply this: Read something that stretches you. Not for relevance. Not for productivity. Read for inspiration, for mind, for heart. Read a book outside your field. Pick a thinker you disagree with. Focus on a sentence whose beauty slows you down. Reading is not consumption, it is training.

One Tiny Exercise

This week, choose one writer whose sentences you admire. Read one page slowly, aloud if you can.

• Write a paragraph in response, not copying, but carrying the rhythm forward.

• Notice what their sentences teach your sentences: how they move, pause, risk, return.

Reading is not separate from writing. Reading is writing, just written by someone else first.

Lea Ypi writes where certainty ends and risk begins. A professor of political theory at the LSE and author of Free and Indignity: A Life Reimagined, she treats writing as exploration, as a way to push arguments into the open, expose ideas to doubt, and search for clarity on the page. Her work bridges two worlds: the discipline of philosophy and the ambiguity of literature.

From the beginning, writing has been her way of testing the world. “When I was nine, I wanted to be a writer,” she recalls, driven by the urge “to share my thoughts with the world.” Philosophy gave her rigor, but it also boxed in her writing, creativity giving way to the confinements of academic form. It took Brexit and a pandemic for her to return to her earliest ambitions: to write with rigor but without the safety net of convention.

In our conversation for Etched in Marble, writing emerged not just as Ypi’s craft but as her way of thinking critically. The page is where she questions assumptions, confronts doubt, and traces how ideas take shape. That means mapping with a philosopher’s precision, then stepping into the uncertainty of creative form, and exposing her inner life rather than hiding behind academic orthodoxy. We spoke about the limits of scholarly form, the challenge of writing for a public without shared premises, the role of empathy in literature, the discipline of daily writing, and why clarity begins not in certainty but in the willingness to question.

“When I Was Nine, I Wanted to Be a Writer”

As a child in Albania, Ypi began writing diaries and poems, small experiments in turning inner life outward. Those early pages weren’t only practice, they were a kind of hypothesis testing: try to capture what you think you see, and then measure what survives once it is written down.

The writers she admired pointed her toward philosophy, where novels carried ideas through characters and consequences. “I figured that philosophy was the kind of subject that would help me become a writer,” she says. But the demands of philosophy pulled her away from fiction. “Philosophy completely killed the creative writing,” she admits. Academic writing demanded she situate herself in arguments already under way, to make “an original contribution to the literature” rather than to invent new worlds. And because writing is “a very draining activity,” the more she invested in mastering that mode, the less space was left for risk-taking of the imaginative kind.

“I Gave Myself Permission to Take Risk”

By the time Ypi wrote Free, she had passed through the academic rites of passage: completing her PhD, publishing in journals, making her mark as a political philosopher. She had proven she could master the conventions of her field. What she hadn’t done was test whether her ideas could survive outside it. That test came with politics.

Brexit, she recalls, made the gulf impossible to ignore. Inside universities, the conversation was “very sophisticated, very detailed, with lots of objections, you had worked out all the different lines of argument.” Outside, the debate was “much cruder,” driven by slogans rather than premises. It wasn’t that academics were wrong, it was that they were inaudible. “Nothing was heard. Nothing cut through.”

Her response was to step into the public square. She began blogging, then writing op-eds, drawing connections between her research and the arguments unfolding in real time. It was both professional risk and civic duty. “I gave myself permission to take risk,” she says. The risk of exposure, of misinterpretation, of writing without the safety net of academic convention. But there was also a political urgency, “a civic urge” to bridge the gap between knowledge and impact.

“With Public Writing, You Don’t Share the Premises”

That shift forced her to rethink how arguments begin. In academic debate, “people are in your field or in a debate and you share the premise. You don’t need to go for first principles. You just start from where everyone is.” Public writing offered no such shortcut. “With public writing, you don’t share the premises because people don’t necessarily come from the same walk of life as you.”

The work, then, was to build arguments from the ground up. Philosophy trained her to test objections and design the blueprint. Public writing required her to rebuild the structure from first principles, so readers starting elsewhere could still climb. It was slower, riskier, more vulnerable, but also more urgent.

“It Was More about the Insecurity of Sharing Your Inner Life”

Free added yet another layer: biography as method. “In academia we don’t share our inner lives, we just share our positions,” Ypi says. Yet every position has a history. Commitments to equality, cosmopolitanism, or resistance to nationalism are rarely abstract choices. They are shaped by family, culture, and circumstance. Writing Free was her way of tracing those origins, asking not just what she believed, but why.

The risk was exposure. To colleagues, it wasn’t only that she had chosen a nontraditional form, it was that she had written herself into it. What could look like confession was, for Ypi, another form of clarification: making her claims accountable to the experiences that had shaped them.

Feedback became part of the process. Some readers thought Free read less like a narrative arc than “a series of scattered episodes.” Ypi agreed, and decided to use the criticism as method. “In the next book, there is much more character development and plot development.” Indignity, she explains, was deliberately constructed to push her ideas further: plot to test them across time, characters to test them across values. For Ypi, the moves of fiction are not a retreat from philosophy but another way of doing its work.

“I Actually Plan Very Carefully”

For all her openness to risk, Ypi never writes blind. Her scholarly habits remain: she won’t sit down until she knows the structure, the argument, and even the likely objections in view. Books begin as blueprints, chapters mapped with a clear sense of what each must achieve.

Yet structure alone isn’t enough. Creative writing, she insists, needs something unpredictable, an image or sentence that arrives only once she’s already on the page. “With creative writing, it’s not enough to have the structure. You have to bring the reader with you on a journey, and that can’t happen before you are actually in the journey yourself.” She calls it “a kind of grace.”

That grace is fragile, especially against the rhythms of daily life. She admires the maxim to “write at least half an hour every day,” but admits it’s almost impossible to keep. More useful is the advice to stop while you still have something left to say, so the thread doesn’t break, even when daily life interrupts.

The balance, then, is between discipline and grace. Discipline gives the scaffolding, and grace brings it alive. “Sometimes I read something I wrote and think, wow, who wrote that? And other days it’s the opposite: this isn’t good, I can’t live with this.” Both, she insists, are essential.

“Novelists Thrive In Ambiguity and Doubts”

For Ypi, the stance depends on the form. In philosophy, the goal is clarity and resolution. “The point of philosophy is to create certainty, to resolve a debate,” she says. Literature demands the opposite. “In fiction I try to hold back on my views as much as possible.”

A novel works by inhabiting multiple perspectives, even those she disagrees with. In Indignity, she wrote a Nazi character; to make him credible, she had to imagine his world from the inside. Philosophy would have pushed her to dismantle his arguments. Literature required her to reconstruct them.

This is why she admires Dostoevsky: the absence of a single authorial voice, the polyphony of characters whose tensions and contradictions create the story. “Novels are good to the extent that they are complex, and they show you the different features of the human spirit,” she says. Ambiguity here isn’t failure, it’s fidelity to reality.

“You Are a Good Writer If You’re a Good Reader”

Ypi worries less about the form in which ideas appear, in essays, novels, or videos, but about the foundations that sustain them. “I am worried about the decline in education,” she says. “That decline leads to less readers, and a decline in content.”

Without attentive readers, no form can thrive. Markets reward what is clickable and profitable, not what is careful or complex. “We are more and more captured by these forces of markets and capital that are completely unbridled, only pursuing profit,” she warns.

Yet she resists nostalgia. “I personally don’t think that’s to do with the mode. There can be intelligent ways of doing videos and online content, just as there are really stupid pieces of writing.” What matters is the habit of mind that reading cultivates. Reading teaches structure, rhythm, and empathy, the same qualities that make writing worthwhile. “You are a good writer if you’re a good reader.”

Etched in Marble: “I Know That I Don’t Know”

Toward the end of our conversation, I ask Ypi the series’ signature question: If you could etch one idea into the marble of our society today, something about thinking and writing that you believe future generations should carry forward, what would it be?

She answers by turning to Socrates: “I know that I don’t know.” The phrase is simple, but for her it marks the beginning of all critical thinking. “It’s the stance that makes critical thinking possible,” she says. It’s about refusing to take anything for granted, and challenging authority, including your own.

Knowledge, in this view, is never about possession but about pursuit. Writing becomes the place where we test what we think we know, expose it to scrutiny, and discover its limits. Claims become invitations, disagreements become data, and the page becomes the place where thinking is forced into the open.

What stayed with me is Ypi’s conviction that critical thinking is not a slogan to invoke but a discipline to practice, and one she lives out in her work. Question the premises, test ideas in different forms, welcome criticism, keep the rigor of the map but always leave room for “grace.” The only certainty that matters, she reminded me, is that we still have more to learn.

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Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. Etched in Marble is a series of conversations with writers I admire for thinking deeply, writing bravely, and shaping the world not just through what they say, but how they say it. This series of conversations is part of my Substack, Respect the Marble. If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing. Respect the Marble is a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft.

In her diary in September 1925, Virginia Woolf captured something essential about the writing life: “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” It is a reminder that writing begins not with polish, but with structure, with laying out the pieces before we try to make them work. Woolf’s line gestures toward what every writer eventually learns: without a plan, the pieces never come together.

A century later, that insight feels still urgent. We live in a culture focused on results. Outcomes dominate: journal rankings, grant scores, citation metrics, and word counts. Students often ask how long their essay should be before asking what they want to argue. Scholars scroll through dashboards that quantify their output while leaving the thinking that precedes it invisible.

The result is predictable. We valorize the finished product and neglect the slower, more fragile stage where writing actually teaches us something: the shaping of a structure strong enough to hold what we mean. To be good writers, we have to reverse that instinct, and move our attention from outcomes to process. In my conversation with Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper from early September, that distinction came into sharp relief.

“The Map Comes First”

Kuper never begins writing until he knows exactly where he’s going. “I never get stuck because I have a map,” he told me. “If you’re stuck, it’s because you didn’t plan.” Before drafting a single sentence, he builds the entire architecture: each point he wants to make, the order in which they appear, the logic that carries one into the next. Only when the skeleton is firm does the prose begin. And then the real work begins.

“I rewrite every sentence about fifteen times,” he said. “Always asking: what will the reader not understand here?” It’s a discipline that has nothing to do with perfectionism and everything to do with respect, for the reader, for the argument, for the craft. “Without a map, you’re wandering,” he said. “With one, you can take the reader exactly where you want them to go.” Kuper’s map is what academic writers would call the structure. I tend to call it the skeleton.

The Cult of Outcomes

Academic life has grown relentlessly outcome-oriented. Papers become “outputs,” proposals “deliverables,” ideas “impact.” The expectation is speed, fluency, productivity. But the deeper work is harder to measure.

When writing is treated as a polished display of what we think, rather than the place where thinking actually happens, the order of learning gets reversed. We fixate on the ending and shortcut the inquiry. A skeleton interrupts that pressure. It slows us just long enough to see whether the ideas we hope to express can stand on their own.

The Skeleton of the Argument

My students know I insist on one thing: before you write, build a skeleton. I say it so often I’m sure they hear it in their sleep, like a Buddhist monk gently reminding them, yet again, that the road is what shapes you, not the destination.

A skeleton isn’t an outline with polished transitions or half-written paragraphs. It’s a stripped-down map of claims, counterclaims, and evidence, the argument in its most honest form.

Why does it matter? Because a skeleton reveals weakness before you’ve invested in the prose. It shows where the logic slips, where evidence is thin, where a conclusion stretches too far. It keeps you from polishing sentences that lead somewhere you never intended to go. Academic writing often falters not for lack of data or insight, but because the structure was never tested before the writing began. The skeleton is where that testing happens.

Writing as Process

We underestimate process because it is largely invisible. Academic life does not reward the notebook filled with dead ends, the abandoned draft, the argument that took a month to understand and two pages to express.

But that is where the real work happens. Where the argument sharpens. Where the research gathers meaning. The skeleton is the hinge between reading and writing, between thinking and its translation onto the page. It’s the moment where ideas confront resistance, where they strengthen or fall apart, and we learn from either outcome.

Writing as Iteration

Good (academic) writing is a kind of breathing: inhale, exhale. Build the skeleton, fill it in; revise the skeleton, fill it in again; only then move into a full draft, and only then shape the sentences. The skeleton steadies the draft, and the draft, in turn, interrogates the skeleton.

Drafting reshapes the argument because it belongs to what Abe Newman in our conversation called the logic of discovery: the messy stage of circling, testing, and stumbling toward an idea. Without a structure to press against, we end up looping across the page, mistaking motion for progress.

Iteration isn’t delay. It’s the transition between discovery and what Newman describes as the logic of presentation, when our writing moves from internal understanding to outward explanation. The shift from making sense of our research for ourselves to making sense of it for others, in a form readers can grasp.

A Rough Guide to Process-Driven Writing

For academics, especially early-career researchers trained in an era that often puts outcomes over process, shifting toward structure takes deliberate practice. A few principles can help:

• Sketch the skeleton: Start with claims, not paragraphs. Write down your argument as bullet points: the core claim, the sub-claims, the evidence that belongs to each. If you can’t summarize it plainly, you don’t yet have an argument yet.

• Stress-test every step: Interrogate each claim with a reviewer’s questions: Why? How do you know? Compared to what? What would falsify this? If a point collapses under basic scrutiny, better to see it now than after months of drafting.

• Let the skeleton evolve: As your thinking deepens, your structure will shift. That’s not failure, it’s the logic of discovery doing its work. A changing skeleton is often the strongest sign that your argument is maturing.

• Revise structure before prose: Resist the urge to polish sentences too soon. Move sections, reorder evidence, adjust the skeleton. It’s far easier to rewrite an outline than to salvage pages of elegant writing built on the wrong foundation.

• Draft with restraint: Only start writing full paragraphs once you trust the bones. Don’t “write your way into” an argument you haven’t structurally secured, that’s how you end up with beautiful prose attached to claims you can’t defend.

Respecting the marble means respecting the grain, the weight, and the time required to carve. Writing is no different. Feeling stuck isn’t a verdict, it’s a signal. It means you need a skeleton.

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This week’s conversation with Erik Voeten left me thinking about the movement of ideas, about how they travel, whom they reach, and what it takes to make them land. Voeten has spent his career not just producing scholarship, but circulating it: carrying research across the boundaries between academia, media, and public life.

When I asked him why he writes, his answer was simple and disarming: “I write because I want to know.” Writing, for him, isn’t a performance of expertise. It’s a form of inquiry..

What emerged in our conversation was a vision of writing grounded in clarity, discipline, and the quiet work of making space to think. “If I can explain it clearly on the page, I probably understand it,” he told me. “If I can’t, then I don’t.”

What I loved most, though, was his sense of responsibility: knowledge that never leaves the room is half-finished. To write clearly is to carry ideas across the bridge to others, scholars, policymakers, readers who didn’t ask to be there, but stay because the path is well lit.

One Recommendation

In that spirit, I recommend The Art of Explanation by Ros Atkins. It’s a book that does exactly what its title promises: it shows how to make complex ideas land. Atkins breaks down the craft of explanation into structure, precision, and audience awareness, the very disciplines that shape Voeten’s approach to writing across boundaries.

What I appreciate the book’s underlying ethic: clarity isn’t simplification, it’s service. Explaining something well is an act of respect, for the idea, and for the reader. It’s a perfect companion to Voeten’s insistence that writing is only complete when it connects.

Tiny Writing Exercise

This week, try Voeten’s test: write to see what you understand. Pick one idea from your current project that feels a little foggy. Set a timer for 15 minutes and try to explain it on the page as if you were writing for someone just outside your field.

Then ask yourself:

• What is the core of your explanation? Can you point to a sentence, or an example, that captures it cleanly?

• Where does the writing strain? Notice the sentences that feel hedged, evasive or not to the point.

• What came out clearer than expected? These are the ideas that may already be taking shape; follow them.

Underline the lines that feel a little off, they’re the ones asking for deeper thought and attention. Trust that the words will come. Explanation isn’t the end of thought, it’s where thought begins.