Use indirect preparation to write and publish

I’ve made changes to my workflow for writing articles for Gestalt’s Garden. The most important one is to prioritize using indirect preparation to prepare my article ideas.

The writing process, ideally, is divided into three steps:

1. Prepare. In this step you prepare all the ideas and material you need to write the article. This includes, ideally, doing all the thinking you will show in the article before writing the first draft.
2. Write. In this step you use preparation to write a first draft, ideally, in a single pass without having to prepare any additional ideas.
3. Edit. In this step you edit the draft until you reach the final version to publish.

Therefore, writing an article always requires preparation. Whether it is a preparation: (i) conscious and explicit or (ii) unconscious and implicit.

In the past, I would choose an idea I would like to write about and prepare that idea so I could write it. Typically, this preparation takes me a long time (even months). This type of on-demand preparation is the direct preparation: you prepare what you need to make that writing.

Well, now what I do is use an indirect preparation. In my other creative projects, inevitably, I also have to do preparation. Therefore, I can reuse that preparation to write my articles and, in this way, save the first preparation step.

In other words, I now look for the intersection between:

• what I already have prepared due to previous work
• what I would like to write.

In my opinion, what is most difficult to do—and where the most value is generated—is preparation: thinking. This way, I maximize the utility of every time I spend my limited time on preparing.

References:

• How to Write a Book – Without Even Trying (so hard)