Writing lessons learned after writing a book ★

It may sound dumb, but one of my reasons for writing a book was to improve my writing ability. Maybe I could’ve practiced on the blog instead, but putting things on paper gave it some added weight I don’t think I would’ve gotten otherwise.

Here are some of my most important writing takeaways I’ve gotten from the process of writing a book. These aren’t original by any means, just things I’ve collected during the process. Many details are from the excellent book On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction that I can’t recommend highly enough.

Writing is a skill

Realize that writing is a skill. A skill can be improved, but it will take conscious effort.

Deliberate practice

Like any skill, the best way to improve it is to practice. Without practice, everything else is meaningless.

But it’s not enough to “just write”, you also need to evaluate your progress and try to notice what you’re lacking and where you can improve.

Be introspective, think about what you’re doing and be your own critic. This is an extremely valuable skill, which will helpful no matter what area you want to improve in.

It can be difficult, here are some questions I try to ask myself whenever I write:

• Does the text flow nicely?
• Where is the red thread?
• Are you making the case succinctly, or is there lots of fluff?
• What is the purpose of this section/chapter/paragraph?
• Can I remove these words?
• Am I repeating myself?
• Can I replace any of these words to make it simpler, more succinct, or more correct?
• Does the text sound good?
• Are the sentences too short? Too long?
• Is there sufficient variation in the text?
• Are you using the character types; commas, ellipses, hyphens, dashes and brackets?

Remove unnecessary words

My biggest takeaway from On Writing Well is that if you can remove a word or two from a sentence, it’s probably a good idea to do so.

1. Quite often we use extra words that don’t really add anything of value.
2. We often use extra words that don’t add anything of value.
3. We often use redundant words.

It’s not wise to go overboard, but for me it’s been very helpful to keep in mind. If I’m not strict on myself I’ve found that I’m very good at adding redundant words everywhere.

Keep it simple stupid

KISS, a common acronym in software development, is also applicable to writing. Complexity is an alluring mistress, especially for the bright and motivated, but using simpler words and sentence structures is often the better way.

This is especially true in non-fiction where you’re trying to explain a technical concept. By keeping things simpler—often simpler than you’d like—your explanation will be more easily understood by more people.

The reader will be tasked hard enough to understand the subject matter at hand, throwing complicated jargon at them will only make understanding harder.

Yes, it’s difficult to explain a hard subject in simple terms.

If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter

Be sure, and make it personal

One common piece of advice I’d like to push back on is to keep the technical writing dry and impersonal. The advice is to avoid “you”, “I”, and “in my opinion” while hedging your bets with “maybe”, “there’s a chance”, and “occasionally”.

It’s much more memorable and interesting to expose your personal opinions and to use strong wording. If you point out every exception to the rule and add dozens of qualifiers to every statement, you will muddy the water so much that the core message will be drowned out.

Instead, focus to deliver the core message to the best of your abilities. Make it colorful and deliver it with confidence. Show your personality; make it interesting, make it funny, and make it memorable. The reader will thank you for it.

Consistency is the most important thing

If you’re going to write a larger piece of work like a book, the most important thing to get it done is working on it consistently.

Anyone can write when motivation runs high, but what separates the wheat from the chaff is if you write when you’re not motivated. It’s exactly like exercising; the people who gets results are those who go to the gym when they don’t feel like it, or who go out for a run even when it’s raining like mad.

It’s comforting to think about very successful authors who only write with the help of inspiration, but I think it’s a trap.

A Song of Ice and Fire is my favorite book series, but I’m sure that if George R. R. Martin had been more focused on writing consistently—instead of waiting for inspiration—we wouldn’t be here still waiting for the next book a decade later, worried that he’ll die before he finishes the series.

And he’s not alone. The Gentlemen Bastard series is just as good, but we’ve been waiting a decade for the next book there too. Although I haven’t read it yet, The Kingkiller Chronicle is another example.

Do yourself a favor and turn yourself into an author that grinds out results, not one who waits for inspiration to strike. The trick is, you can “force” inspiration to come by forcing yourself into writer mode. And the way to do that is by making it a habit.

What worked for me was to allocate 15–30 minutes of writing every morning (which sometimes became much more). Even though I only worked on the book a few hours a week, this consistent work—this habit—worked wonders for me.

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite

One thing that may hinder the writing process is that the output isn’t great the first time. Most of the time it’s just bad, but often it plainly sucks. And that’s hard to handle, because we don’t want it to suck. We want it to be great!

I think the key here is to let go. Allow it to suck, as long as we get something down to work with. Then you’ll move forward and allow yourself to get into writer mode where the words will flow.

It’s only then that the real writing can start: the rewrite.

I really think that changing, revising, rewriting, and refactoring is the key to writing well. It’s the rewrite that will allow you to:

1. Make the text fluent.
2. Make the writing consistent.
3. Find and fix errors, both large and small.
4. Reduce fluff.
5. Ensure that the core message is delivered as clearly and strongly as possible.

In my mind the rewrite is like polishing a gem. Without it, the gem is not much more than a glittering rock— you can see the potential, but it’s nothing special. Yet after the polish it will sparkle and captivate you.

The rewrite is essential to good writing.

Clarity of thought translates into clear writing

Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other.

Writing can be hard sometimes. You have a plan, you get something down and you try to rewrite and mold it to something good. But despite doing everything “right”, what you’ve written still sucks. It’s frustrating.

When this happens to me, the problem isn’t the writing itself—it’s my thoughts.

If your thoughts are muddy and unclear, then what you write will also be muddy and unclear. But if your thoughts are sharp and clear, then the writing will be also be sharp and clear.

In practice this means it’s often better to take a step back and organize your thoughts than to force unfinished ideas on paper.

It may sound like it runs counter to my previous advice of getting something down and then working with it, but I think they compliment each other. Rewriting is one way of organizing your thoughts, but it’s not a panacea.

Have a plan and an outline

Another way of organizing your thoughts is to approach writing top-down instead of bottom-up, where you focus on the big picture and then drill down.

A good way is to formulate a high-level plan, and creating outlines is a simple and effective way of getting some structure. This may not be the best approach for a novel, but for the type of technical writing I do creating outlines has served me very well.

Organizing a book

On the highest level the chapter titles can serve to guide you (both the reader and the writer) through the book, and doubly so if you organize them in sections (real or imagined). For example, even if you’ve never seen my book before, the three main sections should give you a good idea on what the book is about and the journey it’ll take you through:

What is a cryptocurrency?
Properties of a cryptocurrency
How do cryptocurrencies work?
Look out for snake oil
What is money?
Are cryptocurrencies money?

Better digital payments
Cheaper & faster
“Undesirable” businesses
Freezing of merchant accounts
Uncensorable donations
For the unbanked

A better currency
The financial crisis, bad loans and bailouts
The blind leading the blind
A defective system
Private money
A global currency

With this high-level outline all I had to do was to fill it in. Yeah, that’s simplifying the reality a little, but it’s actually pretty close to how I wrote my book:

1. I had a bunch of ideas that I turned into chapters.
2. I wrote one chapter at a time (not necessarily in order).
3. I revised the planned chapters over time.
4. I rewrote a lot.

It may sound too simplistic and too perfect—surely you cannot plan so well that this is all there is to writing a book? But remember that this is only a rough plan to guide you, in reality the process will be messy. Moving, rewriting and throwing away chapters will be necessary.

Organizing chapters or blog posts

This approach with first creating an outline also works great inside the chapters or in a longer blog post.

I may start with a simple list of things I want to say, but my goal is to turn that into headers and sub-headers. As an example, these are the headers from the post Battling burnout:

Is it burnout, depression or both?
No apparent reason
Red flags
Seeking help
What was the actual cause?
Things that helped me
The only thing that really helped me
Are you ever cured?

Burnout was quite a difficult subject for me to write about, and I didn’t know how to approach it. But with an outline I got past the block and could start to chip away at the post.

Perfectionism is a blessing and a curse

On one hand it’s good to strive for perfectionism. Even if you never reach it, the act of trying to make something as good as it can possibly be will increase the quality.

But on the other hand, trying to be perfect may be a hindrance. It may be paralyzing and I suspect it’s a big contributing factor for the famous “writer’s block”, where the writer is severely slowed down or even becoming unable to produce anything at all.

Perfect is the enemy of good

I felt this effect after I had put way too much time designing the web version and the physical version of the book. I think the result was really good; the book looks beautiful and is pleasing to read, but I burned out hard when I had to do it again with the eBook version. 2 years after the book was done, the eBook/PDF are still not available from regular stores, and truthfully I don’t know if I’ll ever gather the energy to do that.

The problem is that my standard was (is?) too high. I wanted it to look as good as possible, but chasing perfection only led to burnout.

I’m still trying to be satisfied with things that are good enough instead of wanting perfection. But it’s hard.

Summary

To summarize, these are my main takeaways that totally coincidentally corresponds to the headers in this post:

1. Writing is a skill that can be improved.
2. Establishing a writing habit is crucial.
3. Rewriting is very important.
4. Clear up your thoughts to clear up your writing.
5. Outlining the book and chapters helps you and the reader.
6. Don’t strive for perfection.

I am by no means an authority on this matter; these are just some lessons that I learned when writing a book.