Immediately following a Saturday morning interview with Dan Ward, I caught up with Ray Kimball. What a treat. We both thrive in elicitive learning models where learning is inherent in group interactions. You can expect in our classrooms to see the teacher as a catalyst and facilitator and the students and their knowledge is the primary resource.

Like a number of interviews I have done recently, Ray shares real gems on writing rituals that I intend on incorporating in my own routines. Even his writing isn’t a solitary activity — his dog Ike accompanies him cranking out 10–12 pages in 2–3 hours.

Yet as I strive to merely scratch out 500 words a day, I am reminded by the [edited] wisdom of Lao Tzu:

The journey of a thousand [pages] begins with one [word]

[John DeRosa] What does the first hour of your day look like? What time do you typically wake up?

[Ray Kimball] I should first say that my last couple of years has been atypical. For the last three years, I’ve had the pleasure to be working on my doctorate (an EdD, to be precise) supported by the Army. This has afforded me a ridiculous level of flexibility in my schedule. That opportunity, plus my non-standard assignments prior to it, spurred a joke from a colleague: “Ray, over the last five years the Army has had more accountability over Bowe Bergdahl than you.” So I say all of the following knowing that, moving forward, I am not going to have the level of flexibility I’ve had in the last few years.

Ideally, I like to get up around 5:30 or 6:00 am. The first hour of my day is my information dump. I will look at my Facebook feed. I will look at my Twitter feed. I will look at my email which has a national security list-serv on it. I will look at my Feedly (which replaced Google Reader for me, RIP) which has RSS feeds from different websites. That gets me current on what is going on in the world today. That process has replaced my old habit as a captain or a major, where I would pull up the [DOD] Early Bird. The Early Bird back then was my thing and I would go through it to get me focused. After the Early Bird died, I tried some of the commercial variants, but I found that I had already read most of the articles in them. So now I just go to my own streams.

That first hour for me is useful in getting up to speed. I am very jealous of the individuals who can wake up in the morning and go right into writing. I can’t do that. I have to have time to metabolize coffee. I have to have time to get into the flow of the day. The hour-long information dump lets me do that.

It is after that hour where I really like to start writing. That is my peak time. My norm during graduate school was to do my information dump and then write for about two or three hours. I found I could write ten or twelve solid pages during that time that was well documented, formatted properly, and only required a quick re-attack in the afternoon to tighten up. I am hoping I can continue that schedule moving forward, even if it’s only an hour or two in the morning. I compare my writing productivity in that time to other times, and it’s night and day. So in the future, if I can fence that off, I will.

[JD] Describe your writing space.

[RK] I have a little home office: it’s a corner set aside in the house with a desk, a chair, and some bookshelves. My computer is a laptop docked on a docking station, slaved to a 24-inch monitor, keyboard, and a mouse. The big screen is important because my eyes aren’t what they used to be: I’m a former Army Aviator with 20/20 vision now reduced to using reading glasses. The big screen also helps if I am writing and referencing material since I can have two documents open on the screen and be working back and forth.

My dog sleeps right next to my desk. He’s my writing buddy. He’s a fourteen-year-old Jack Russell Terrier, so he sleeps a lot. He curls up next to me. Typically, about an hour and a half into my writing I get his snout poking into me. That’s an indication that it’s time for me to take a short break. I play with him for a while before I go back to writing and he goes back to sleep. We kind of feed off each other that way.

Bookshelves: having gone through master’s degrees in history and Russian area studies and now a doctorate in education, my bookshelves are ridiculous. My wife has a doctorate in sustainability and a master’s in geology, so part of it is her books as well. Between us, on our last Permanent Change of Station (PCS), we had fifty book boxes. My wife also literally has buckets of rocks, so every time we PCS, it makes our movers cry. The bookshelves are there in my writing space because it makes it easy for me to turn around and grab something I recall from previous readings when I need it. I will think, “I remember Olivier Roy said something about this,” or “This sounds very Vygotskyan.” I can just turn around, look at the shelf, grab the book I need, and get back to writing. That’s crucial, because if I get up from my desk or if I walk out of my office, I’m done. Something else will grab my attention; the proverbial shiny object will remind me of something I need to do and I won’t go back to writing. Since I have everything I need in my home office, I can write for a solid two or three hours.

[JD] I can certainly appreciate the discipline that you have and the focus you have for writing. How do you determine what you are writing about?

[RK] Ove the last three years, most of my topics have been forced upon me by course work. Otherwise, it is something I am passionate or angry about. I started writing professional articles for Army Aviation Magazine back in the early 2000’s on issues that I thought were being ignored by the Aviation Branch. That was my start.

The breakthrough for me in professional writing was when I returned from Iraq in 2003. I was dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress and I wasn’t dealing with it well. Frankly, I was in a lot of denial about it. Then, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), which at the time was called Operation Truth, came along. I joined up with them in the fall of 2004 and blogged in their space for about four years. They were a great venue for me to practice professional writing, short-form writing, and topical writing. Usually what happened was, I saw something I was fired up about. I would research it and write it up on the spot. I would get a sanity check on it from my wife or another trusted source and fire it off. IAVA would have it up on their website later on that day. That quick process and the positive feedback that came out of it was a great confidence booster for me. That confidence translated later into things like my thesis for my master’s program, where I wrote about innovation, adaptation, and stagnation in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. It now translates into occasional pieces for Nate Finney on The Bridge. In general, it has to be something I am passionate about.

Professionally, I am required to write regularly, mostly for internal consumption. Whether it is a two-page position paper or a white paper, I will sit down and knock that out, usually on a quick timeline. That’s just the job. If it is going to be something that I write on my own time, it has to be something I am passionate about. It has got to be something that gets to my gut. It has to be something that nobody else is writing about, and if I don’t see something written, it will tear at me.

[JD] When bit with this passion, what does your note taking system look like? How do you gather information for your writing?

[RK] My original norm was to just gather everything that I could, either through a Google search or a library search. I have been very fortunate to be stationed in a lot of places where I’ve had access to great reference materials, at places like the West Point Library or the Stanford campus library. When I worked at the White House, I was able to use the Eisenhower Executive Office Building Library, which is just heaven for bibliophiles. When I’m researching, I draw all the material that I can, pull out anything that looks the meaningful things and dump it into a Word document.

My information gathering has evolved somewhat since my doctoral program introduced me to the wonder that is bibliographic management software…

[JD] Zotero?

[RK] I have ended up going with Endnote. I know that Endnote is the Death Star, Endnote is the Evil Empire. I know a lot of people hate it, but it has worked really well for me. Maybe that’s because I have a mindset that works well with that software. I really love the ability to put all my annotations on a source in one place, search for it later, and do all my citations while I write. That works very well for me.

So now, I get all my sources into Endnote and I put my notes from each source into my own words in their Endnote entry. I build my outline. I go to my sources in Endnote, pluck out my notes, and insert them into my outline. Then I write each section of the outline. As I write and I see places where specific parts work better, I shuffle things around. It is kind of like Tetris; it is kind of like a puzzle. But the whole process of pulling information out of the source and putting in my own words keeps me out of trouble with plagiarism. I’ve seen too many other people get torpedoed in that respect, so I’m very conscious of it.

[JD] What are you reading lately?

[RK] Over the last three years my reading has been very dissertation focused: a lot of educational theory, like constructionism and constructivism. I find my own learning philosophy is closest to social constructivism, where learning takes place within groups and through the interaction between individuals. In that framework, knowledge gets formed and transformed by individuals interacting with one another. So you will find Vygotsky’s Mind in Society on my desk.

“…learning takes place within groups and through the interaction between individuals.”

I also find myself reading a lot lately about game-based learning. My current favorite is Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken; Her TED Talk got a lot of buzz, but her book is much better because it includes the underlying science for game-based learning. This isn’t just her good idea; there’s a whole body of literature behind it.

For my dissertation itself, I read a lot on mentoring. So I did a massive amount of reading on workplace mentoring and the underlying theories behind it. I used that reading to support my dissertation work.

Because of school, I’ve built an enormous amount of backlog of reading. Part of me is dreading going to Amazon, looking at my Wish List, and figuring out which book I am going to bring forward. There are probably eighty books on that list.

[JD] If you weren’t reading for school, what genre of reading you prefer?

[RK] I really enjoy history. I also enjoy fiction that breaks conventions. One in the latter category that I have enjoyed was The Rook, about a member of a supernatural secret society who has lost her memory. The other was The Night Circus, a wonderful book about a performing troupe that may or may not be time traveling. Those were palate cleansing books in between work reading and research. I used to read a lot of geo-politics. When that topic became work, it stopped being what I read in my spare time. Now, I find myself leaning back towards history. I enjoy that it’s reflective in nature, trying to figure out what lessons to learn from those periods.

[JD] What is the book you’re most likely to give as a gift or one you’ve given as a gift the most?

[RK] That depends so much on who I’m giving it to. The book I find myself coming back to again and again is Good to Great by Jim Collins. Yes, it’s business school literature, but what I really like about it is that it doesn’t claim to be the end-all-be-all of business success. I really like the start of his approach, which is to get the right people on the bus first. That concept speaks to me, because every great team I’ve been on hasn’t been great because of one leader or individual. It was a great team because of the people that were on it. They were on that team because they wanted to be. They were there because they had a drive. It is so hard to do that in the military because of our personnel and talent management systems. What I tell people is, if can get the right people on the bus at the start, here’s the book that can help you move on from there. I routinely refer back to it sometimes when I am thinking about directions that I want to go in my own efforts.

“Get the right people on the bus first.” — Jim Collins

[JD] What’s your drink of choice?

[RK] More than anything else, I find myself drinking water. Boring, I know. I was in Army Aviation for many years and hard drinking was part of that culture at the time. I found that when I was dealing with my Post-Traumatic Stress, I needed to cut back on the alcohol. It didn’t help as self-medication and in many respects made things worse. More often than not, when I write, I enjoy a nice glass of ice water. When social drinking is called for, Guinness is the drink of choice — but only on tap, not out of a can or a bottle.

[JD] Where’s the most adventurous place(s) you have been?

[RK] Personally, it’s Iceland. A couple years ago, my wife, son, and I drove around the island for a week. The contrast between the volcano blasted landscapes and green fields were beautiful. Glaciers in one park and black volcanic rock in another was gorgeous. Add in that my son is a fan of lamb, and that’s the main meat dish served on the island. He was in hog’s heaven there. It was wonderful and I need to go back

From a professional perspective, you need to understand that I’m a huge West Wing fan and I totally geeked out on my first day as White House Staff in 2009. At one point that day, I found myself walking with another individual at full speed through the West Wing, having a conversation with him. It was very Sorkin-esque. I had to stop for a minute and pinch myself, that this was really happening.

[JD] What bold steps would you like to see the MWG take?

[RK] I think it would be really cool if the Guild could be a conduit for a grant to support an individual’s writing efforts. The model I am thinking about is the Amtrak Writer’s Residency. Amtrack said, “We will pay for your train ticket, an 18-hour trip where you could just write.” It wouldn’t have to be something that funded someone for a year or even six months. It could just be something small that would make someone’s writing life easier. For example, access to an academic database, where the fees are usually obscene! That would be a bold step the Guild could take.