You are very welcome, dear friend!
As for scholarly writing, I could wax poetic for days but I’ll try to be brief.
The two main kinds are an article and a book. Everything else is a derivative of the two.
To write a scholarly article, you need an idea and a calculator. The idea should never be “I want to write about …” because that’s not an idea but a topic. An idea is, for example, “In her novel Frankenstein’s Mother, Almudena Grandes projects her neoliberal subjectivity of a twenty-first-century leftist back onto the dictatorship of Franco.” I first came up with this idea right here on the blog but then the article suffered significant travails because the edited volume it was destined for became a victim of a romantic split between its editors. In any case, the article is coming out in print in a couple of months.
After you get your idea fleshed out, get out the calculator. Think about how many words you can realistically write in a day and subdivide the intended length by this number. Then look at your calendar and mark the date when you will be done. I do not recommend sitting down to write anything unless you have a clear date of completion. The worst thing is to turn into one of those people who spend years “working” on the same article that no longer motivates or remotely interests them. They have the eyes of exhausted old horses that should have been put out to pasture years ago.
We are in literature, folks. Nobody is solving Fermat’s theorem or curing cancer. Whatever it is can’t possibly take several years. If it does, you are probably writing the wrong article in a wrong way.
Another piece of advice: in the name of everything holy, please don’t tell yourself, “today I’ll be working on my article / book.” That’s a road to bad, bad places. Say, instead, “today I will write 3 sentences about the extent to which Grandes was influenced by Ramiro Pinilla.” After you finish your 3 sentences, decide what tomorrow’s 3 sentences will be about. “Tomorrow I will write 3 sentences on how Grandes is much more influenced by Pérez Galdós than Pinilla.”
The brain resists the grandiose. It likes tiny, bite-sized projects. I can’t tell you how easy it is to write when you start every day knowing exactly what today’s 3 sentences should look like.
As for a book, it’s one of those things where the changes accumulate incrementally but are realized in a burst. I came up with the idea and a detailed plan of Neoliberal Love in a single afternoon. But I had been thinking about neoliberal subjectivities for at least a decade. I have all my secondary sources annotated and pretty much learned by heart at this point.
The Ukrainian book was written in a 5-month ecstasy of writing but it contains things I’ve been reading and thinking about since 2006. So my advice: read, think, discuss, and one day it will burst out of you like a geyser.
An article is planned, scheduled and executed. A book erupts like a flamethrower. But there won’t be a book without many carefully planned and severely executed articles.
I’m not sure if I’m answering what you wanted to know but feel free to specify if you were looking for something else.
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