Are you worried about your ability to pay for books you want to read? Several of my newsletter readers have that problem. They’re unemployed and trying to figure out what to do next, their pivot. Since they read my newsletter and blog, these people trust my advice. They have asked where to find my free […]
Several newish writers have asked me how to help their readers find their writing. What they’re doing does not seem to work. They write on LinkedIn and on other social media sites. But the people they want to attract to their writing do not seem to find it. That’s the writer discoverability problem. Every writer
After I delivered a talk about product management, Fred, a prospective writer, asked a question. He said, “It seems like there are no new ideas. How can I write something that’s already been done before?” I said, “Write your truth, your experiences. Don’t worry about what’s come before.” He said, “But someone already wrote that.”
I read a lot online. And I love it when writers offer me subheadings to break up the content into consumable chunks. But not every writer does that. When writers don’t use subheadings, I have to work to grasp the key ideas in the piece. The more text between subheadings, the less likely I will
A French writer bought Free Your Inner Nonfiction Writer and wasn’t sure what I meant by a “fieldstone.” He couldn’t find a translation that made sense to him. In Weinberg on Writing, Jerry explained fieldstones as a way to build a piece of writing, just like masons used blocks to build stone walls. The more
It must be the season for “research” on social networks. Just this past week, I received several requests to share my stories with researchers—as if my experience was research. Some of these researchers are graduate students. Others are consultants. All of them share these goals: They want to write a substantial document, incorporating their research.
Many nonfiction writers start books with outlines. I’m not big on outlines because they shortcut the writer’s thinking. (Nonfiction writers think and learn as they write.) However, some writers go off on tangents without outlines. Or, some writers (raises hand) are prone to put everything she ever learned about this topic into one book. Either
When I published Writing Secret 9: Keep Your Writing Clean As You Write, the feedback surprised me. Many of my fellow nonfiction writers write a lot before they get internal feedback. That might be right for them. It’s not right for me. I finally understood why I write differently. I think of each iteration as
Some writers suggest you write sloppy, “vomiting” the words onto the page. They think all writers need to start with “shitty first drafts.” But sloppy writing means you need several drafts to clean up the sloppiness. To me, that’s like waiting until the end of coding to write and run any tests at all. (Been
If you, as I, write frequently, you might wonder where is the “best” place to publish your writing. You might think social media, especially Medium or LinkedIn, is the “best” in terms of eyeballs. (That’s people to the rest of us.) That’s possible the day, or maybe the week, you publish the piece. That’s because