I’m Lou Franco and this is episode 45 of Write While True.
Write While True is an infinite loop, and that’s because I think of writing as an infinite game. A game I play for fun and to get better at it. Like a game of catch.
So in each episode, I’ll tell you something I learned about writing, and then I’ll throw you the ball with a writing challenge or a prompt.
Episode
For the first three seasons of this podcast, I mostly talked about short form writing as I was trying to develop a writing habit. Mostly blog posts and journaling, but even this podcast is a kind of short form writing because I work from scripts that are about 5 to 10 minutes long.
I started this podcast in 2021 and I’ve recorded 44 episodes so far. This one is number 45. In that time, I’ve written about 400 new blog posts.
To give some context, my blog is over 20 years old and has about 650 posts total, so more than half of them have been written in the last 4 years since I started this habit.
Last year, I started to write something longer. My goal was to write a 50-page book. I started in late 2023 and I decided that along with writing the book, I would also share my progress and what I’m learning in season 4 of this podcast. This is the sixth episode of that season.
The first four episodes were devoted to discussing my process, which I developed using the book “The Four Disciplines of Execution.” Each of the first four episodes of the season discusses how I’m using each of the four disciplines.
Then I took a 9 month break, so in the last episode, I shared what I did in that break, which was to work on writing (of course), but also to share that work in public.
Sharing my book in public helped it grow, so instead of my 10,000 word goal, I have more than 40,000 words. It’s currently being read by a developmental editor and when I get it back, I’ll be doing a somewhat major revision based on his feedback. I’m hoping to launch the book in a few months.
But even with all of that new writing, a lot of the ideas and content are drawn from my blog. That’s what I want to talk about today — How I started this project by reviewing and gathering my work.
My first step, at the end of 2023, when I decided that I wanted to write a book, was to immerse myself in my own writing, so I just read my blog. I just read all of the posts.
In episode 13, I talked about a book called “A Technique for Producing Ideas” by James Webb Young, where he said that new ideas are just novel combinations of old elements. The first step in his process is just to immerse himself in the material. That’s what I did, and I saw that I had written many posts on my approach to technical debt and that I had written other posts with some thoughts on developer productivity. And then I realized that they were related. That’s the core of what my book is about.
I gathered all of the titles of all the posts that seemed to have some relation to either of these topics and developed a table of contents. Then I added in missing chapter titles. Chapters that should be there but that I hadn’t written about in my blog. Over the past year or so, I’ve been writing those posts on some of those topics (on those missing chapters) and then I’ve been developing all of this further in the book.
I’ve also been grabbing ideas from all of the other posts. They were written before I had figured out the relationship between technical debt and productivity, so there’s a lot of new writing to tie it all together. The posts gave me something to start from.
This is very similar to how I developed the posts to begin with. My posts start from writing that’s in my morning pages, my journal, and smart notes.
If you want to hear more about how I develop first drafts for short blog posts, I talked about morning pages in Episodes 1 and 19, and I talked about Smart Notes in Episode 2. I covered my journals in episodes 21 and 22, and I talked about how I assemble first drafts in episode 3.
My process for writing the chapters was similar.
So, my suggestion this week is to gather your work and see if you can find a recurring idea or novel combination that you can turn into a longer work. If you have been blogging, that’s a great place to start. But if you haven’t, here are some other ideas.
Do you make posts on Mastodon or Linked In? Export them into a text file, read them and see if you can find themes to expand on.
If you take notes on an e-reader, throw them in that file.
Think about times when someone has emailed looking for advice, that’s what I did, and I found some of my responses in my sent folder. They became blog posts and now they’re being developed further into my book.
Search your emails and computer for some of the keywords in the themes that you’re discovering—you might find an old document or presentation.
And look through your journals if you have them.
Even if you find only a few related things, use them to start a table of contents and brainstorm on what’s missing. 50 pages is about 10,000 words, which is probably about 10-20 short blog posts. Try to find as much of that as you can in your prior writing. It’ll make it so much easier to get started.
This has been Write While True, a podcast where we love infinite loops as long as they’re fun.