Five Feet at a Time

In this contribution to a Symposium on Revising, Duncan Watts shares some personal reflections on his own writing process and how he was inspired early in his career by some advice from the Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann and the rock-climbing pioneer Royal Robbins. He also describes five strategies for writing that he has found useful, concluding that even the most hopeless seeming situations can be surmounted in the same manner as a big-wall climb: "five feet at a time."