Draft and re-draft (and re-draft). The writing should go through many iterations. You make drafts, you share them with a few people, you do something else for a week. Maybe nobody has read the draft, but you come back and you’ve rejuvenated your wonderful capacity to look at the work and know why it’s terrible.
Kind of related to this: giving a presentation about the ideas in your article is something that you can use as a form of a draft. If you can’t get anyone to listen to a presentation, or don’t want to give one quite yet, you can pick some people whose opinion you value and just make a presentation where you imagine that they’re in the audience.
I find that if I’m thinking of how to present the ideas in a paper to an in-person audience, it makes me think about questions like “what would be a concrete example of this idea that I could start the presentation with, that would grab the audience’s attention right away”. And then if I come up with a good way of presenting the ideas in my article, I can rewrite the article to use that same presentation.
(Unfortunately myself I have mostly taken this advice in its reverse form. I’ve first written a paper and then given a presentation of it afterwards, at which point I’ve realized that this is actually what I should have said in the paper itself.)
Kind of related to this: giving a presentation about the ideas in your article is something that you can use as a form of a draft. If you can’t get anyone to listen to a presentation, or don’t want to give one quite yet, you can pick some people whose opinion you value and just make a presentation where you imagine that they’re in the audience.
I find that if I’m thinking of how to present the ideas in a paper to an in-person audience, it makes me think about questions like “what would be a concrete example of this idea that I could start the presentation with, that would grab the audience’s attention right away”. And then if I come up with a good way of presenting the ideas in my article, I can rewrite the article to use that same presentation.
(Unfortunately myself I have mostly taken this advice in its reverse form. I’ve first written a paper and then given a presentation of it afterwards, at which point I’ve realized that this is actually what I should have said in the paper itself.)