Lou: This is episode 51 of Write While True. Write While True is an infinite loop, and that’s because we think of writing as an infinite game, a game we’re playing for fun and to get better at, like a game of catch. So in each episode, we’ll tell you something we learned about writing, and then we’ll throw you the ball with a writing challenge or a prompt.
I’m Lou Franco.
Brian: And I’m Brian Hall. And today, we’re going to talk a little bit about what is even the point of writing. So we’ll begin, we’ll lead in with a quick check-in.
We both set these writing habit goals, and we both somewhat fell off one weekend, but it’s been another week.
So first off, Lou, how’s it going? Tell us about your writing habit and whether you’re keeping it up?
Lou: Well, this time I did a little bit better. Maybe not the way I wanted to, but the end result is better. So I published, I think since the last time we talked, I published three posts on my blog. One definitely came from my morning writing, prompted morning writing. And the other two are just part of long series. It’s like just the next post in a very long series.
And one of them, honestly, is just this podcast being posted. That counts as a blog post, because there’s a blog post with the transcript. And the other one is part of this 26 in 26 I’m doing. And then the other
one was from my morning pages. But three posts in about a week since we talked last.
Brian: Yeah, that’s really good. I do not have such an impressive update. So my goal was first thing in the morning, when I take a first sip of coffee, I’m going to open up this text file that has draft blog posts and topic ideas and at least open it, see where that goes.
And I have not done that since I said into this microphone that I was going to do that a week ago or so.
I have done other stuff though. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today is the question of what counts, what counts as writing. And what I’ve been doing is because I currently have a book that’s in beta, I’m collecting feedback on this book. So I’m not actively editing it or writing new chapters.
I have been playing around with this JavaScript framework that is for interior layout for books. And so we can talk about procrastination and creative procrastination and what counts as work and what counts as writing just a bit. I’m inclined to say that it counts because it is building toward the goal of actually publishing this book and the interior layout. You know, you can do a really cheap and easy job of it, but it can actually be a really important part of reader experience. You can do some fancy stuff or some thoughtful stuff.
And I’m building up my ability to do that by spending my mornings and my first sip of coffee, learning this framework. And at the same time, you got to watch out because learning a JavaScript framework is not writing per se. So that’s what I’ve been up to. And it’s felt productive and like it works toward my ultimate goal, my ultimate writing focused goal, but I haven’t been writing. So I’ve mixed feelings about that.
And I guess I want to say, Lou, you went through the whole process of blogging for a long time and then taking on a book project or multiple book projects, writing the book, editing the books. Now you’re in the phase where you have to be marketing the book. I hope you’re marketing the book. Talk to me about writing goals in different phases of projects.
Lou: Yeah. Well in the blogging mode, I blogged for 20 years and honestly, I don’t know if I had much of a goal beyond developing my writing ability.
Career management was part of it. I was definitely more active in the parts of my, in the parts of my career where I was looking for my next thing. I was way more active and I was directing those posts towards things that I thought would be interesting to a prospective employer.
And I’m doing a lot more independent consulting phase of my career because I just need to be more marketing myself. And you never know. I I’m a strong believer in just having lots out there and you don’t, you never know what random thing is going to happen for the book.
The book is also part of marketing, my independent consulting. So that’s the, the goal isn’t really the book, right? The book, the goal is more customer acquisition and the book is part of that. And so anything I’m doing around customer acquisition, well, anything I’m doing around marketing, the book is also going to be a customer acquisition.
So I definitely consider marketing the book part of what I need to do. And so much of that is writing anyway, that it’s definitely writing.
You know, the, the ones where you get into the murky middle is like, was getting my book typeset. Not that I did the work, but I had to manage that work. You know, what, what is that? And that’s kind of what you’re doing here.
That’s, um, but you know, for me, it’s definitely was part of the project.
Brian: Did you go through a phase where you had a very specific book writing goal, for example, an hour a day, just on the book, nothing else counts, no LinkedIn posts, no newsletters, only producing words that will go into the book. And then did you later move off that goal?
Lou: Yeah. When I had nothing. So the first six months of, of the project, when I essentially had source material, like I had a lot of blog posts that maybe had a sentence or idea here or there, they were not totally tied into the theme of the book. And when I was thinking at that moment, just getting to the first 5,000 to 10,000 words, I needed to concentrate on writing, trying to get at least what my goal was three hours of writing a week. You know, that felt like a very doable amount. I could, in that time I was getting about 1500 words per week. So just doing the math, like you could see like, okay, I can get to 10,000 words in you know, six weeks, seven weeks. And that was good enough.
That pace was good enough for me to get a manuscript by nine months, 10 months. That was a good first draft. So yeah, during that time what counted as writing meant: typing into the document.
How about you? What are your thoughts on that?
Brian: I was in a place where the daily writing goal was the focus. Yeah. Produce X number of words or spend Y number of minutes just writing this manuscript.
And that’s pretty easily measurable. But when you get to the editing phase, I mean, it’s kind of like almost refactoring code where deletions might actually be a big win.
And so you can’t have a word count goal. Just need a focus time goal, I guess. So shift into that. I will at least lock into this manuscript once a day for 20 minutes or so.
And then you move into a phase where the hardest part for me is marketing. And so that barely even feels like writing, but it’s in support of the writing. It’s in support of getting the writing in front of people.
And so it would be, I will send three emails every day to people that I think would like to read the book. It just changes and it depends. And there are different seasons with different goals. And I guess different
levels of strictness with the goal.
I’m in a very lax mode right now where it’s like, well, as long as I’m somehow engaging with the project, that’s enough to keep it going. So I don’t just let it drop.
And so the writing is not really happening at scale. Currently, I’m okay with that as long as it doesn’t go on too long.
Lou: Yeah. I mean, and also, I mean, I think, I think you’ve mentioned that you’re in a, in a, in a beta period, like you, you, you need the feedback right now.
So going ahead and just like plowing through writing might not be a good use of your time. Honestly, this might be the perfect time to figure out interior layout. I will say from an interior layout, you know,
my perspective on it was I would have liked to have more control over it, but I decided I was not going to be doing, be able to do a good job using the tools that I knew about.
So I’m kind of hoping a programming tool is, I can’t wait to hear more about this from you when you figure it out. I want to, I have so many questions, but I won’t put them to you now, but I definitely, I feel like
time would have been compressed if I was controlling it.
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. And once you learn what you can do, then it probably changes the way you write or initially, if you have a target, if you have a visual of what this can look like and how you can structure pages and page spreads, you can write to a spread versus just writing text into a box.
And that can also become a way to overthink and over-engineer the project. There’s a million rabbit holes to fall into. But yeah, I would say at this point, the goal has become so fuzzy that it’s literally just do something that is working towards completing this project. And when I get enough beta remarks back, that’s when it’s going to be lock in and edit every day. And that’s pretty hard.
But for now, a fuzzy goal serves me. So I guess if we’re working toward a takeaway, now that we’ve talked about habits and different ways to set up a habit, now we’re talking about maybe how to back out of a strict habit, how to set a goal that’s a little more open-ended or just
suits an immediate term goal, suits the current phase of a project that you’re working on.
Lou: I think for me, what I’m taking away from this is I opened up saying I was happy with how my habit was going because I was ending up with posts on my site. And I’m going to say posts on my site,
I have readers, regular readers, RSS readers, and other regular readers up. So I get, if anytime I get to remind them, I exist is, is, is, is good for me.
And I don’t talk about the book all the time. That’d be boring. I think I would lose people, but I talk about it when it makes sense. And so
it’s just another, it’s just a friendly reminder to people who already think it’s worth following what I have to say.
So, and then the other thing I get out of it is often a snippet of what I write is useful for LinkedIn. And so I also did a LinkedIn post and I don’t tend to link back to my blog there.
I try to make my LinkedIn posts really self-contained, like the whole thing’s there. And if you’re interested in knowing more about me, you, you know, you can follow links around, you know, you can link in bio or whatever.
So, uh, it, it generates a LinkedIn post usually. And that, you know, it gets me to be in front of people who don’t know me yet and potentially
get them to subscribe to something at the blog and email, follow me on LinkedIn and so forth.
I feel like it builds up over time. So from my perspective, the only thing I care about right now is marketing the whole package of myself. And that means I have to put stuff out there.
Like it has to be, there has to be public stuff, new public stuff. So whatever that is, it’s going to be fine.
Brian: Yeah, that’s really good. I want to emphasize the thing I care about right now. And that’s probably the point to emphasize is that it will change with changes in your life.
Or if you’re working on a big project phases of the project, I think the only thing I care about right now with a lot of other things going on in my life is just not letting the project fizzle out.
And so if I’m doing something that’s easy and kind of fun, that still counts as long as I’m working on this book rather than abandoning this book. That’s the goal for now.
Lou: Okay. So how can we phrase the takeaway of this episode then, Brian? How would you put it succinctly?
Brian: I would say choose a goal that suits the current phase of whatever you’re working on. Know that there are lots of possible goals. It could be to write every day, even if it’s just morning pages. It could be that you need to hit publish X times a week.
Or it could just be that you need to be thinking about the project and spending time on it, even if it doesn’t look like you’re making visible progress.
Lou: Okay, great. Then I think both of us have, you know, stated our goal. I think it, you know, again, everyone who’s listening. We like it if after you’re done listening to an episode of Write While True that you
put down your player for a second, try to do the thing we’re asking you to do.
This has been Write While True, a podcast where we love infinite loops as long as they’re fun.