10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day

Filed Under Successful Blog, Writing | 72 Comments

Connecting to the World

Look in a scrapbook. Look in your wallet. You’ll find written messages. Diaries, wedding invitations, resumes, love letters, even our names are written as words. Yet, the best writer — the most prolific, the most proficient — is never finished learning, never finished becoming a writer. We are apprentices every one of us. We’re all in the process of becoming.

We’re all apprentice writers — part ego and part self-doubt. It’s the ego that helps us face down that blank page to say what we have to say. It’s the self-doubt that stops us from casting the movie about what we’ve written.

In this age of noise and clutter, we all need to be writers. Writing and publishing are the way we connect to the world.

10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day

We write to record our thoughts . . . and by recording them we think them through, rearrange, and re-organize them. We make our ideas clearer. We make our thinking stronger and more easily understood. We carve a path that a reader, a listener, another person can follow from our minds to their minds, from our hearts to their hearts. Writing is a connection waiting to happen.

Publishing makes the connection more natural and accessible.

Here are ten reasons that writing (and publishing) every day is important.

Writing every day makes us better thinkers. It takes our thoughts out of our heads and challenges us to express them in understandable ways. Effective writing is the opposite of seat-of-the-pants thinking.

Writing every day teaches us how to work with words in print, to construct a meaningful message. Like playing a guitar or doing math, writing takes practice.

Writing every day helps us develop a voice that is natural and consistent, strong and confident, and attuned to readers. Everything we write has an audience. Even when we write for ourselves, we go back to read, listening to what we wrote. We question. We consider. We critique our choices.

Writing every day improves our ability to craft remarkable prose that people want to share. Every time someone shares something that we write they add value to our ideas — when they change them and when they don’t.

Writing every day gets us comfortable with the conventions of writing and the conventions of writing give our messages credibility. The credibility is how society finds the appropriate place for our ideas.

Writing every day lets us find our personal writing process. We lose our fear of flying and learn our way around our creativity. We get familiar with what to do when we need ideas, how to know what we want to say, what is always going to be hard, and what parts are worth looking forward to.

Writing every day teaches us how to tell our internal editor to be quiet until we need feedback.

Writing every day makes us better, more thoughtful readers. We bring the insights and appreciation of a writer to what we read.

Writing every day connects us to people. We meet more people in print than we can ever possibly meet face to face. Many people will know our written voice as well as they know our names.

Writing every day makes us architects and builders. We record our history, and we imagine the future. We inspire and motivate, both ourselves and others. We make something that changes the world, something lasting. We make a unique contribution that others might use.

Everything written is inherently personal and at the same time dynamically social. In a noisy world, it’s the way we communicate across continents, across living rooms; with folks we just met and with every generation of our families. We write our dreams, our business plans, and ask questions. We read. We respond. We get the ultimate first impression.

Each time we write our voice becomes clearer, more focused, and stronger, until our writing is inseparable from our voice. Everything we write is written about us.

Publishing is how we talk to the world and how the world hears us.

What have you told the world today?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Bookcraft 2.0: Writer, Book Editor, Copyeditor — What Do They Do?

Filed Under Business Book, Successful Blog, Writing | 15 Comments

Who Does What?

Phil and I have moved into Section Two of the four sections of his book. Are you surprised to notice that I’ve not talked about sentence structure or commas? . . . . When I was a publisher, I used to tell my boss:

You have to build the book, before you can see the commas.

Beginning of the Writing Process (courtesy of Voyages In English 2006)

This diagram shows the part of the writing process that Phil and I are currently working on.

This post is a closer look at what we’re actually doing — what his role is as the writer and what my role is as the book editor.

The Writer

The writer, that’s Phil, crafts the message. In this case that’s his blog posts.

The writerâ€™s job is to choose words with precision and arrange them carefully. His purpose is to convey meaning. He does this by prewriting, drafting, and writing/revising. The writer is on the outgoing side of the message. In this process, Phil’s blog posts are the draft in the diagram.

The Book and Content Editor

The editorâ€™s job is to challenge the writing. All editors are on the incoming side of the message. We remove ambiguities, errors, and barriers. An editor ensures that the meaning the writer intends is the meaning that reader receives. Editors look and listen for the audience and then tell the writer the truth about what they see and hear.

That’s why and how great writers and editors form lasting partnerships. The relationship is balanced and symbiotic.

As the book editor, my job is to help structure and challenge the writing to ensure that every idea and detail belongs in the book. As the content editor, my job is to challenge the writing, looking for problems in the expression of ideas â€” logic, clarity, and cohesion. I think about questions like these.

Is the focus clear? Is the message sound? Does the structure make sense for the premise? Does every part meet the standards?
Is the structure natural to the topic? Is the navigation seamless and not in the way of the message?
Is the voice confident and consistent? Does it sound like Phil’s voice? Is the tone authentic and appropriate for the audience?
Do the words make sense, with a consistency? Will the reader hear what Phil is saying without a chance of misunderstanding? Does the word choice fit the premise and the way the audience listens?
When I turn the page, is what comes next, what the reader expects?

As I answer each question for myself, I share my answers with Phil. Every week we talk. Phil uses our conversation and specific edits to do his writing revisions. He adds new content where he agrees it is needed to make the pages fit together and flow. He wants the message in the book to work for readers.

The Copyeditor

When we’re finished with all of the pages, we’ll hand them over to a copyedtior. Then the focus moves from â€œwhatâ€ the writer is saying to â€œhowâ€ and â€œhow wellâ€ the message is said.

Though copyeditors still care about sense and logic, their irreplaceable contribution lies in their work to achieve linguistic perfection. Copyeditors check for grammar, usage, mechanics, syntax and semantics. In some scenarios, proofreaders follow to check spelling and punctuation. They also check to ensure that no new errors have been introduced during the editing process. In other scenarios, copyeditors do these roles too.

Phil and I have three more sections to get through the diagram. But keep watching, we might be doing a few things with Section One while we’re working on those. . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you’d like Liz to help you find or make a book from your archives, click on the Work with Liz!! page in the sidebar.

A Holiday Gift: The 31-Day Calendar of Blog Post Ideas for January

Filed Under Idea Bank, SOB Business, Successful Blog, Writing | 35 Comments

A Blogging Calendar to Start the Year

It might seem early for a holiday gift, but folks get busy and go traveling. I didn’t want this list to get lost or overlooked. So,I hope you don’t mind that I give you this gift a little early. . . .

In honor of the holidays and as a thank you to all of you, I’ve made a calendar of 31 Blog Post Ideas to Write About in January.

They say there’s no such thing as an original idea. I tend to agree with that on principle, but I also know that the execution is personal.

At the end of some days, we can’t tell where some ideas started or where they end. We have the same ideas at the same time independently. Our thoughts interweave, connect, and influence each other’s thoughts. Our ideas turn into remarkable and thrilling concepts and realities. Humans, who think up ideas, are incredible at doing that.

You’ve had some of these ideas. I’ve had some. Some have been around, it seems, forever. I’ve tried to twist some when I could. Some come with links to example posts — from my posts, from yours and from others.

I hope you find a few post ideas you can use to make your life easier to have more time to live, to wonder, and to explore.

The 31-Day Calendar of Blog Post Ideas for January

Here goes . . .
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Writing for That One Most Important Reader: That Curious, Clever, Intelligent Individual

Filed Under Audience, Basics, Successful Blog, Writing | 13 Comments

How Do You Write for Everyone?

How easy it is to get overwhelmed when I think of how individual each reader is. How can I possibly meet what they expect, when each of them comes with a different goal, a different history, and a different mind set?

Whatever the subject I choose to write on, I can be sure that some readers will know it far better than I do and some will have never encountered it before. How do I bridge gap to write a piece that meets learners on solid ground while engaging readers with significant expertise? These writing questions are central for anyone who writes for an audience of more than two people they already know.

How do I answer these questions for myself and for others?

I give them the answer Big Roy discovered.
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Bookcraft 2.0: Even the Best Shoes Don’t Belong in a Bookstore

Filed Under Business Book, Content, Strategy, Successful Blog | 2 Comments

Look for Books Like Yours

If you recall, Phil, an editor, and I have been through his pages. We sorted them into four parts. I’ve read the parts through again and begun the process of fine tuning the order. This will get us to the final book map. We also checked the market at Amazon to see what books like Phil’s new book were doing. . . .

I promised to tell you more about that.

When I started in publishing I was a freelancer. I read everything I could about writing and one bit of advice always confused me:

Go after the publishers who already sell the kind of book you want to write.

To me, that advice seem counter-intuitive. Why would a publisher want another book about writing if they already had a list full of them? Shouldn’t I go to where a publisher didn’t have any?

« go back — keep looking »

10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day

Connecting to the World

10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day

Bookcraft 2.0: Writer, Book Editor, Copyeditor — What Do They Do?