Time to think

Slowing down my writing process is helping the quality of my work

At the start of my writing career, as a journalist in London in the late 1980s, the process of writing was very different. We didn't have computers, let alone the internet. Work was typed, or occasionally handwritten, and then sent by fax or mail.¹

And then everything went through multiple rounds of editing. Sub-editors would go through and tidy up the language. They’d check the grammar and punctuation, paraphrase sections to make them shorter so they would fit in the available space on the page,² and very occasionally request rewrites from the original writer. Most of the time, the subs did the rewrites themselves - going back to the writer would take too long, so they only sent it back if they needed more information. I cut my journalistic teeth rewriting other people’s work. Then, finally, the editor would read the piece and decide whether it was acceptable. Only then would it be prepared for publication.³

When I was working on magazines, content was often planned out three to six months in advance, especially for seasonal content. It was normal to spend days or weeks working on a single piece. Without the Internet, the research alone could take months. I remember having to go to specialist libraries, order research documents, and file information requests with businesses and embassies, who frequently took weeks to respond. Tracking people down for interviews and arranging a time to meet was often a mammoth task in itself. And of course, printing and distribution added in yet another delay: typically, it would take two weeks between closing an issue and it hitting the newsstands.

Daily newspapers were different, of course.⁴ The news sections ran on a highly reactive basis, but even so, much of the content was planned in advance. In-depth stories, opinion pieces, and columns were scheduled as far ahead as possible.

It wasn’t quite like this, but not far off. Most of the men wore ties.

Any publications that tried to work at that pace these days would be out of business very rapidly. Thanks to Google, email, instant messenger and word processing, writing an article is now a matter of hours. With the advent of AI, it's often mere minutes. Proofreading is almost entirely automated: sub-editors have been replaced by little red lines and AI suggestions. HTML, templating and the Web have made layouts irrelevant for the majority of publication.

Even the role of the editor has more or less disappeared in many places: it's quite normal for authors to manage the entire publication process end to end. I haven't had to worry about an acceptance process for about 20 years. I’m the “marketing guy”, so it’s all left up to me. I write, and if I'm happy with it, I put it online and move on to the next piece.

Much of my professional work is done on an almost knee-jerk basis. I start the day by reading LinkedIn, and a selection of blogs, newsletters, Web sites, and other sources. I figure out what’s trending, and how my clients can contribute to that discussion. Then I comment, repost, and maybe create some original material that’s intended to generate likes, shares, follows, and rankings. If we’re all talking about Sam Altman and AI ethics today, then I’ll slam together 1500 words about how this might affect whatever industry I’m representing today. Tomorrow’s topic might be return to office mandates or California privacy laws or productivity tools or whatever. Thanks to technology, I can be an instant expert in any of them.⁵ Skim, research, write, publish, repeat. Half the time, I can’t even tell you what I wrote last week.

Being my own editorial team

But as I step away from corporate writing to fiction and personal projects, I have realized that I don't want to work that way anymore. I like giving myself plenty of time to think about my work before I publish it. I've created a publication schedule that goes several months into the future. I draft things up, leave them for a little while, then come back and revisit them periodically. I don't feel the need to rush work out as soon as I've drafted it. I'd rather take my time, and publish it when I'm really happy with it. And, if I’m being honest, I end up deciding that some of them aren’t worth posting.

I'm not just talking about stories, but these blog posts, my newsletters, and the pieces I'm writing for Unhack Your Brain. It's not unusual for me to go back to a post three or four weeks after I wrote it and add some footnotes, clarify something I didn't express well, or even add a whole new section when a new perspective occurs to me.⁶ It's a whole different feeling to “oh crap it's Sunday night what the hell am I going to put in my Monday morning blog post?”

Working this way also gives me the opportunity to sub-edit my own work properly. Right after I’ve finished it, I'm not in the best place to take a dispassionate view on its quality. As we all know, the best way to find typos in your work is to hit publish! But if I leave it for a few weeks and come back, I'm seeing it with fresh eyes. I can find the mistakes,⁷ and I can almost always think of better ways to say the same thing.

In other words, I’m separating out the roles of writer, sub-editor and editor. The actual writing is just a tiny part of the work. I still write fast: when I sit down at my computer I can usually crank out between 1000 and 1500 words an hour. I can usually dictate a blog post in under half an hour once I know what I want to say: if I'm on a roll, I can create five or six posts in a day.

But I can spend weeks or months thinking about a piece before I write a word, and then I can spend just as long getting it fit for publication. This piece, for example, came out of a conversation I had with Phil South in September, originally drafted in October, rewrote in November, and finally published in December.

A second opinion

The other huge change in the way I work is that I'm no longer a one-man band. My writer's group, the Rockland Writers, are invaluable.

One of the biggest challenges of being a self-publisher is that you have to be self-critical, but without an editor, it’s pretty much impossible to assess whether you're being too harsh or too lenient with yourself.

Having a friendly group of critics, fellow writers, and beta readers goes a long way to fill that gap. They'll tell you whether your work is good enough to publish and they'll offer perspectives you can't come up with on your own. You don't have to agree with them but it's always useful to listen to them! It’s like having a writers’ room.

Working this way is more relaxing and more enjoyable. And, most importantly, I'm much happier with the end results.

1. In my first job at African Preview, we received a lot of submissions from correspondents in Africa via telegram or Telex - that’s how old-school we were!

2. Column inches were a thing back then. Word counts didn’t matter that much: what was important was how much space a piece occupied. If you used long words, you had to write fewer of them.

3. And that’s another whole story in and of itself. Page layouts involved razors, glue, and an eye for parallel lines, and then hoping the cuts didn’t show up when the page was printed.

4. I never worked on a newspaper. I had the opportunity to work on one of the leading UK broadsheets, and when I realized what the schedule was like, I decided against it. That was a smart move, I think. I also had the opportunity to work on a tabloid, and I turned that down without even thinking about it.

5. Or, at least as far as the algorithms are concerned, I can appear to be an expert. In the modern world of online content, that’s what counts.

6. Which usually seems to happen at 4am.

7. Most of them, at least.