Figure out the fundamentals first
In my opinion, reading “The Workshop Survival Guide” is a must for:
- knowing how to prepare and run a successful workshop
- enjoy the creative process of preparing and running a workshop.
I am currently deepening in the ideas on how to write. I would love to have “The Writing Survival Guide”, but, at the moment, we are not that lucky :^)
However, the process of «creating a workshop» has many similarities with the process of «writing an article». So I think it is possible to adapt the advices from “The Workshop Survival Guide” for article writing.
Below is a quote from the book that contains one of the advices that helped me the most to improve how I create presentations for my workshops. Then you have my adaptation of this advice for writing. (It’s not very well thought out, but I think this connection of ideas can be promising).
Building the essential slides should take less than an hour. If that sounds impossible, it’s because you either a) haven’t put together a real Skeleton, so you’re designing your workshop from inside the slide software, or b) you’re fiddling with style and layout. Both are huge time traps. Come back to the style later in single pass. If you’re not sure what a slide needs to say at any given point, close your laptop and go back to figuring it out on your paper skeleton. It’s far too easy to spend dozens of hours fiddling with your slides’ details when you should be figuring out the fundamentals.
—Rob Fitzpatrick and Devin Hunt in “The Workshop Survival Guide: How to design and teach educational workshops that work every time”.
Writing the first draft of a 1,000-word article should take less than an hour. If that sounds impossible, it’s because:
- you haven’t prepared a real outline for the draft, so you’re using the draft as a tool to think about what you want to say
- you are editing the draft as you write it.
Both are huge time traps.
Come back to editing the draft later in one pass.
If you’re not sure about what you need to say in one part of the draft, close the draft and figure out the outline. It’s far too easy to spend dozens of hours fiddling with the details of a first draft when you should be figuring out the fundamentals.