More Observations on Writing

Keith Ray, Dale Emery, and I are writing books. Keith and Dale are tracking their writing with spreadsheets. Dale is posting his progress online. You can see his Oct 8 progress.I decided they were on to something, and start tracking my progress in a spreadsheet also. I have about 35,000 words written. I have about 1/3 of the chapters in progress. Maybe. It depends on when I realize I have to write more or less about a topic.For Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds, I wrote each chapter, sent it to my reviewers, got feedback, wrote the next one, and so on. For Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management, Esther and I first wrote the first draft, got review comments, wrote the second draft, got review comments, pair-wrote the third draft and got review comments.For this book, I’m working with an editor now, so I’m hearing about weaknesses in the writing as soon as I tell him something is available for editing. This is way cool. In a sense, I’m refactoring as I write. (Oh yes, there’s a lot of simplification and clarification going on :-)I’m noticing that when I write down the first draft, I still have a big burst of words, but as soon as Daniel starts giving me feedback, the word count doesn’t change all that much, but does tend to decrease.I’m enjoying the writing-down part of this book more than I expected, because I am receiving more feedback faster. This is the same thing that happens on projects when you have cross-functional teams working on one feature at time. I’m pleased to see how well it works for writing a natural language too.