Write While True

Brian: And today, once again, we’re talking about tools, but this time focus on tools for publishing and collaboration in writing, which is all a bit more complicated than what text editor do you use?

Brian: I’m Brian Hall.

Lou: Today, I would actually like us to look back two episodes where we talked about reader profile, so writing towards a specific reader, and to maybe double-click on that a little and talk a little bit more about the archetype readers that you might be…

Brian: Today we’re talking about negative feedback.

Brian: And I’m Brian Hall.

Lou: Hey, Brian.

Brian: I’m building up my ability to do that by spending my mornings and my first sip of coffee, learning this framework.

Brian: I’m Brian Hall.

Brian: And so just getting yourself in position and getting started in this way tends to lead to more powerful, robust output.

This is the beginning of season five, episode 48, and I’m going to tell you about something that we’re doing a little different now.

It’s been a while.

This is the 7th episode of season four.

But even with all of that new writing, a lot of the ideas and content are drawn from my blog.

My intention after episode 43 was to follow along the process of writing the book and share what I learned along the way.

There’s a hole in this process, and we need to fill that right now.

As I mentioned in the past two episodes, I’m trying to write a short book, and I want to share the process as I’m going through it.

My wildly important goal is to publish a fifty page book on a topic in my industry by the end of 2024.

For season four, which I’m starting right now, my plan is to take you through my process as I try to write a short, focused book.

The white pastel can draw white on top of the charcoal, so now I can make white marks, which can also be smudged and mixed.

I’m reading a book by Stanley Fish called How to Write a Sentence.

Today I want to talk about one of the rules that’s in Strunk and White.

The advice applies to any kind of writing.

I recently came across the phrase zombie nouns, which was coined by Helen Sword.

What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to learn how to recall fit words when we need them in our writing.

The idea of collecting quotes is not something new.

I think one sentence from David Lambuth really sums up what I want to say about paragraphs.

I’m going to use these three books again for today’s topic, which is the order of words in a sentence.

Every book on writing tells you to avoid adverbs (and even adjectives).

Last week, I spoke about something very fundamental—how to write complex sentences, and I’m going to continue along in that theme for what I’m now calling season three, drawing lessons from some of what I consider the greatest books about writing, and pic…

I like to sketch, mostly with pencil and charcoal on paper.

This is the fourth and final episode in a series I’m doing about the book Art & Fear [amazon affiliate link] by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

I decided to do a four-part series on the lessons I learned from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

I reread the book Art and Fear by Bayles and Orland and they had so many ideas for how to get people to make art, that it worked for me to start my blog going again, and then ultimately restarting this podcast.

One of the things that got me back to podcasting after a two year break was rereading Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

We just passed the second anniversary of the break that I didn’t come back from right away.

When I was done with a journal, I’d put it on the shelf with others.

I’ve been using a paper journal for years.

When I was 13, my mom got me an electric typewriter for Christmas.

If you are just coming to this podcast on this episode, I have to tell you that I talk about Morning Pages a lot.

I thought it would be a good idea to re-listen to all of my podcasts from season one.

I thought about things that were going well, where I had a lot of output, like my programming projects.

I did season one of this podcast a couple of years ago.

I made this podcast, but I wanted to self-host, so I learned how to do that with s3 and wrote my own way to get analytics.

Last week I encouraged you to collect general knowledge.

New ideas are combinations of old ones.

In the past, when I set goals to write more frequently, I was always stopped by not having ideas ready for what to write about.

I know that a lot of my episodes are variations on the theme of quantity.

The exercise this week is to think about your "why"?

I don't use a lot of social media, but if I don't plan my time intentionally, I'll find myself watching a lot of YouTube.

This episode is about lowering the bar, and I'm tempted to just say go do it and sign off.