How to write more and better
My best tips for cranking out words that people want to read
NPR hits: On Point just re-aired my conversation with Meghna Chakrabarti, and I was on AirTalk with Larry Mantle this week.
I talked to famed YouTube science guy, Professor Dave Explains
As part of my master plan to corner the indie rock dad market, I was on the Hyphenate podcast hosted by my buddy Randy Randall, from the iconic Sub Pop band No Age.
I also talked to the amazing Alex Trippier of Be a Happier Parent for his podcast
The UK’s Sunday Times did a cool feature on the book
My book is out in 8 days and you might get sick of me soon. I’ll be showing up on some friends’ Substacks over the next few weeks, so now is a good time to either a) follow me closely and ‘like’ everything I post or b) avoid the internet entirely until this all blows over. I recommend a)! For starters, I had lovely chats with Taylor Zapolsky in our Interintellect Salon on Saturday and Forest Gren and Virginia Karnstein on the Wailing & Gnashing pod on Sunday. Today I’ll be live with Molly Dickens, PhD at 12pm PST/3pm EST.
When I first got my book deal and it became official that someone was going to pay me to write a whole book, my emotions went from exhilaration to dread in about 24 hours. Now I had to actually write the book, and it had to be long, and it had to be good. Terrifying.
I’ve always counted myself lucky that I’m not the kind of academic who writes long scholarly books. In academia, there are what’s known as “book fields,” and there are “article fields.” In a book field, you ought to have a book published, or at least under contract with a legitimate academic press, by the time you go up for tenure. Book fields include the humanities and some branches of the social sciences. In “article fields,” which include the sciences, no one expects a book from you, but you do need to publish peer-reviewed papers in high-impact journals. That means that when you do a study, you write up your findings in cookbook style: intro, methods, results, discussion. I have written and published dozens of these kinds of papers, but they’re all bite-sized and formulaic. Although I’ve cranked out a lot of writing in my career, I have gotten very little practice extending my ideas across multiple chapters and hundreds of pages. So the challenge of a whole book felt incredibly daunting.
It turns out that you write a book the same way you eat an elephant: one bite at a time. In order to get my book written, I had to relearn my approach to organizing my time and keeping myself motivated. I also had to relearn how to write. I had to buck my training as an academic myself in order to force myself to write actively and assertively.
Ultimately, it worked! I wrote a whole book, and I’m biased, but I think it is good. In this post, I am going to tell you how I did it. First, I will tell you how to write more, and then I will tell you how to write better. Read on for all my best tips and tricks for productivity and writing well. If you’d like to sneak past the paywall, might I recommend that you pre-order my book? You’ll get a free subscription to this newsletter and an actual book. Plus, if you pre-order before the official pub date, I’ll add you to my Street Team email list to get advance notice of private events and other fun happenings. For fellow nerds: If you comment “spreadsheet” on the pre-order form, I’ll email you the custom-coded Excel spreadsheet that I describe below.