Just say so

Writing – a whole day dancing around the writing task. It’s a familiar pattern.

Recently I started listening to the archive of podcasts called ‘Page Up‘ by Angela Lauria. There are some interesting ideas about writing and publishing in each episode. She acknowledges that there are different types of writers. Some write little and often, doing the work in short bursts, whilst others write in long intense periods.

Now, I’m not sure which of these I am and suspect I may be a combination of the two. The poet in me wants to write in short bursts – blogging really lends itself to that. Whilst the writer in flow, which I tap into on occasion – can write for long stints. I wrote about this recently when I described the idea of a writing marathon. I can comfortably produce 1000 words in half an hour. So, the theory goes that if I write continuously for a mammoth chunk of time I could generate enough material to edit into a finished manuscript in a couple of sittings. This started me thinking about the writing time for a typical book. If an average size book is 40,000 words (120 to 150 pages) and I write at 2,000 words an hour that means the actual writing time for a book is a mere 20 hours. There is time to spend on thinking, planning, editing and on structure. But the actual writing time is fairly short.

So, getting to the page and writing is so fundamental to being productive. It’s ridiculously obvious, but writing a book requires the writer to actually write words! And to get beyond the inner critic does mean just writing words, even if there is a voice chuntering away as there was this afternoon. The voice that says, this is useless, the sentences are too long – the grammar isn’t right.

This afternoon then – after a whole day of dancing around the various things I am writing on, I finally settled to 40 minutes and produced a piece of writing for the book on Core Values. This book builds on the blog posts I wrote about developing a set of core values for the work that I do. Another thousand words added to the work in progress helps me to get closer to finishing one of the heap of books I am working on finishing.

When Meg Wheatley was staying with us in Liverpool recently, I asked her for advice about writing. She has written 8 books now, so I reasoned that she must have some helpful wisdom to impart.

The clearest thing was that having a dozen or so book ideas on the go at the same time is a great way to avoid getting any of them done! She suggested deciding which one I wanted to complete first. Then just get on with it!

So, this afternoon I set to and worked on completing the book / booklet about Core Values. It’s on its way now. I am struggling with getting the structure right and being clear where things go. I have enough of a structure to write within and can change it as I go. So, there we are – enough to get things moving again. The end point will be a book to share about this topic.

Last week I wrote a blog post about where and how we work. It was a response to a blog post from Julian Stodd. After publishing it, Julian tweeted me to say that he enjoyed seeing me Working our Loud. Here then is another example of working out loud. Describing the process as it emerges. Learning through experimenting. Trial and error.