As I write this post, I'm sitting on roughly 5,000 words of my manuscript. I've written more than that and have plenty of jotted notes and typed-up transcripts from conversations with people I may quote or feature in the book, but I feel pretty good that the 5,000 words are pretty close to finished product. If nothing else, they are in the right order and seem to follow something that passes for a logical flow of ideas.
Beyond a simple status report though, I would like to share a handful of random thoughts (or get a few random things off my chest) about my writing experience. Quite frankly, this post is mostly for me (it's my blog, so I suppose I get to do that every now and then) -- but I hope that you find it at least somewhat interesting, to the degree that it provides some backstory to the process.
Have any suggestions or words of advice? I'd love to hear them.Writing a book is harder than it sounds. This is a big honking statement of the obvious, but this point didn't hit home until I was actually in the process. Of course, I knew that I had a lot of hard work ahead of me to get from proposal to published book but the concept feels more real now than it did a month ago. While I could have written 5,000 words of rough-and-ready blog posts in a week or so, it has taken me several times that to write the same number of 'book words' with the proper amount of polish and flow. While I often use my blog to float new (sometimes half-baked, sometimes barely researched) ideas, anything that makes it into the book needs to be pretty buttoned up, even if only because I don't want to be embarrassed when I see my work sitting on a shelf at my local Barnes & Noble. I can't just casually peck out a batch of disjointed ideas and call it it a book, can I? On the other hand...
I have a strong tendency to overthink things. Having read enough marketing books (especially social media marketing books) that all seem to tread and retread the same ground as dozens of other similar books, I am hyper-conscious of not falling into that trap. I often find myself scrutinizing every word (can I say "permission" or will people think I'm ripping off Godin; if I use the word "groundswell" will Charlene Li kick my ass) and worrying about whether readers might already know (and be tired of hearing about) an example I've used to illustrate a point. On the other hand, when I do light upon an idea that seems to be all my own I sometimes wonder why nobody else has written about it before and begin to discount the validity of the idea. I'm slowing coming to the realization that I need to cut the crap and get on with it. Some duplication is inevitable and, as long as I bring my own perspectives to the table, it's all good.
It's shockingly easy to lose sight of who I am. This probably sounds more like existential angst than I intended, but my point is this: having read hundreds of marketing books over the course of my career, having read thousands upon thousands of great blog posts, and of course armed with my handy dandy McGraw-Hill style guide, I will sometimes write a passage that, upon further review, reads as if it were written by someone else. The ideas are watered down, the language isn't really my own, the tone isn't as conversational as I'd like it to be, the structure feels a bit off. Sure, it reads like it could be a passage in a book -- just not a passage in *my* book. That's when I know it's time to go back and edit, edit, edit or -- in extreme cases -- hit the delete key and start again. The cost is lost time and wasted effort; the benefit is a book that I can be proud of.
Being a 'working marketer' is both a blessing and a curse. As an active marketing practitioner who works with clients day in and day out, I can bring plenty of first-hand experience and practical lessons to my writing. On the other hand, this first-hand experience consumes forty (who am I kidding? it's more like sixty-plus) hours per week -- leaving precious little time for writing the book. It's kinda shocking to me that I am writing this big thing in drips and drabs between client commitments, helping to run my company and (of course) dealing with the small issues of life like eating, sleeping and spending time with my kid. I suppose this last bit means that being a 'living person' presents its own set of writing challenges. :-)
The Internet is my friend; the Internet is my enemy. Given my subject matter, much of my research points me to the web, both for real examples and third party commentary (by industry media and bloggers) about those examples. But true to the nature of the web -- and especially the social web -- one thing always leads to a dozen others, and those dozen always lead to dozens more. What often begins as a focused fact-finding mission (I need one stat, I need to confirm a name or title, I need a link or a Wikipedia definition of a commonly used term) sometimes, after an hour spent surfing rather than writing, unearths lots of great information but at the expense of tangible productivity. At the end of an unproductive day, I might console myself that "at least I did a bunch of research" but -- let's face facts -- that's kinda bullshit. (As a related side note, it probably took me about an hour to write this post -- an hour I just spent writing Internet stuff rather than book stuff. The irony is not lost on me, but I do believe that sometimes you just need to purge random thoughts like these by putting fingers to keys.)
I need better ways to capture thoughts as I have them if I want to make sure my best thinking makes it into the book. While I began with a reasonably high tech approach--clipping things and inputing random ideas into Evernote--and still use Delicious to compile interesting and relevant links, I now do most of my thinking on paper using a pocket-sized Field Notes memo book. It works, but sometimes an idea will have come and gone before I can even fish the notebook out of my pocket. Jane Quigley pointed me to a 37signals post about thinking out loud and capturing the results on audio, then suggested a handful of iPhone Apps that I might find useful for capturing thoughts (by audio or otherwise) while on the go. I definitely suck at this but didn't know it until I started writing the book. Interesting lesson learned...
