Writing is about commitment. It's easy to have commitment for an article you are researching but the more words you are going to write the more commitment to whatever your subject matter you need.
I can remember writing my very first term paper for a history class when I was 15 in my sophomore year of high school in 1963 at Glendale High School in Glendale, California. My Term paper was on the History of the Automobile (which goes back way into the 1800s). Gasoline was really hard to come by because it was difficult to make, much more difficult I believe than diesel fuel. But, after people invented Gasoline and Diesel engines they started to make more and more of it. Before Gasoline and diesel the most common thing people made was Kerosene which oddly enough is sort of what Jets still burn to fly 500 miles an hour at 30,000 to 40,000 feet worldwide. (But, not much right now) because air travel has reduced 96% worldwide.
I remember it was the first time I stayed up all night to finish my report. But, I had this incredible sense of accomplishment and finally realized I completely understood how Automobiles had become so popular now and how they had been developed since the mid 1800s into what they are now.
For example, the reason we had wooden spoke wheels on cars until the mid to late 1920s is because people usually didn't drive faster than 25 miles and hour and drove on really crappy roads that were all rocks and dirt and you usually didn't drive at all when it rained. The only real exceptions to this was when you were in a big city that actually paved it's main roads. But, when you went anywhere between cities or suburbia it was all dirt and loose rocks and mud a lot when it rained.
My father spoke of Alkali roads across Arizona and New Mexico all the way to Texas from California which made your eyes burn when he was a child doing this with his father. So, you were crying all the time from the alkali dust and only the driver usually had goggles so he could actually see without crying then. And most cars didn't have much of a roof so they had canvas tops sort of like tents and even then the rain came in the sides including mud from passing cars and trucks. This would have been the early 1920s because my Dad was born in Morenci, Arizona in 1916 which was a copper mining town and copper pit. We went there when I was a child and it looked several thousand feet deep with the most huge dump trucks that are so large they are the size of a building and the wheels are 8 to 10 feet high that haul the copper ore.
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