Long time, no write
Hey,
There was no Thursday Brew last week because I had Covid. I had to cancel meetings and took some time off to recover. Which is a nice way of saying I had to go sleep it off. Sometimes you have to press pause on life so you can do your best work. It’s okay to do that. Don’t try and work through it.
This is why it’s important to build a strong foundation with your content marketing. In most cases, this looks like SEO and a newsletter list. But it could also be having some emergency scheduling set up. Have a think this week about how you can build a strong foundation in case everything goes a bit tits up.
Before we crack onto talking about writing, I want to share a story about language and how your audience will define meaning - even if that is not your intention.
My mum was visiting at the weekend and asked: “have you still got your glory hole?”
Yes, you read that right.
It didn’t help that the conversation we’d been having before this question was about how the ventilation hole in our downstairs toilet was blocked up from the inside and not the outside.
But there she was - “have you still got your glory hole?”
I’m in fits of laughter by this point and my mum has no idea what she’s said. And making it worse by not dropping the phrase. It turns out she means our ‘room of doom’. Which is what we call the downstairs toilet where we dump all the crap that has nowhere else to live.
That - apparently - is a definition of a ‘glory hole’ in old Yorkshire. I don’t know for sure. I’m too scared to Google it. And I’m still laughing.
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Writing your long article
This is part two of a series on writing long-form content.
Okay, I might have led you into a false sense of security about the next step in writing a long article is the actual writing. I will come to that, I promise. But before you start typing out your article you need to plan it.
When you plan out your work first, you can visualise the path it’s going to take. This stops you from getting distracted by all the different directions you can go in, stops you from muddying the message, and going off on a tangent. All things that are very easy to do and things I’m guilty of myself.
I once spent about 5 hours writing a blog about how I wasn’t a tree only to realise that by the time I got to the conclusion, it had naff-all to do with what I wanted to say. It was a total waste of my time and it never got published. If I’d planned, I’d still have those five hours of my life to use on something useful. Or watch Bridgerton.
Although, because I do all my writing in an app called Bear, I still have a copy of that waste of time as a reminder about not planning my content properly. As an aside, you might find it useful to write in something like Scrivener, Bear or Notes. It gives you less chance of being distracted by emails and other things pinging about on the internet.
I stick mine open full screen, have it in dark mode and bung all the research links and notes in at the bottom so I can refer to them. Right now, I’ve got several half-written articles ready for a polish up so I feel like the hard work is done. Plus, it’s a whole lot nicer to write in a pretty app than it is on a Google Doc. Unless you like Google Docs, of course.
How to plan
Now I’d hate to tell you how to plan as a hard and fast rule. There are many different ways to plan out your long read. I approach it in a couple of ways. First of all, I write down the one thing that I want people to take away from reading this article. This also helps in the editing process - which I’ll cover next week.
If all you do to plan is write down that one thing, you’ll be doing great.
But if you want to go further, you can sketch out a bit of a story arc. Where does the story begin? What are the salient points? And what do you want to reveal as you go?
You can’t ram all the information into the first paragraph, so deciding what you are going to cover and in what order before you start writing, will help you a lot when you are writing. I’ll be honest, I don’t always write this stuff down.
Sometimes I hold it all in my head and other times, I make a few bullet points if I think I’m going to get distracted or not tackle it all in one go.
Which leads me nicely onto the writing part.
Before I start on this, I want to say that this does count as generic internet advice. I can tell you how I do this but I can’t tell you whether this is right for you. This is the kind of thing you have to try for yourself and figure out as you go what works best for you.
There are two approaches I use for writing a long read. Sometimes I’ll do one and sometimes I’ll do another. I think the difference is how much I’m enjoying the subject that I’m writing about and how much research I’ve done beforehand. Usually, this is the biggest difference.
Approach 1 - Do it all in one sitting
I like to think of this as a well-prepped approach. You have everything you need and now all you need to do is switch off to the world, put on some music and get those words out of your head.
My biggest warning for this one is to definitely NOT edit as you go. That will make the whole process painful. Sit and write. See what comes out and don’t worry too much about the order of things. Especially if you’ve not created a detailed plan.
This is about getting the words down and doing it fast. Well, as fast as your fingers will let you.
I’d also advise that you don’t need to do this writing from start to finish. If you know what your conclusion will be, get that down first so it’s not clogging up your head as you’re trying to write it.
Besides, writing the intro can often be the hardest part. Why try to tackle the hardest thing first if you already know what you want to say in the middle or end?
Sometimes you will be able to write from start to finish, letting your thoughts flow. Those are magical days.
I’m drafting a chunky blog at the moment using the next approach but I started slap bang in the middle. I knew what I wanted the belly of my post to say and am kinda hoping the rest of it will figure itself out.
There are no rules about what you do first and what you do last. Besides, it all comes out in the edit.
Approach 2 - Do it in chunks
If you are short on time or have only a couple of hours here and there, then doing it in chunks makes more sense. Maybe, like me, you only have the middle so far and you need to think about how to connect all your ideas together a bit more.
This way, you give yourself permission to take more time over it. I’d advise that you go back and do a bit each day rather than once a week else you might find your half-written draft a year from now and realise it was actually very good but why did you never finish it?
This has happened to me before. I’m generally annoyed with myself for forgetting about its existence.
The chunking approach works really well when you have other things to do in your business. Or it’s the school holidays and you’re short on big chunks of time.
Whichever approach you choose (or if you have one of your own) then remember that this is your first draft. It really doesn’t matter too much what you put on the screen right now because no one other than you is going to see it.
Here’s a peek into my world: no one ever sees the first draft. It goes through a couple of iterations before my work reaches the client as a first draft. I made the rookie mistake of sending the first draft to a client once. She’d requested it to see if I was going in the right direction. There was a very long phone call that followed, pointing out every bit of repetition, grammar and the rest.
I learned an important lesson that day. Never show anyone the first draft.
Okay, so no one is going to see your words as they stand right now. This means you can write away and not worry about the emotional ties you have in your work.
Everyone feels a connection to their writing in some way unless you are a professional writer and it quickly gets trained out of you.
Remember in school and you had to read your writing out loud in front of the class? It’s a horrible feeling. You put so much of yourself into writing and then you have to let other people read it.
What if they hate it? What if they laugh? What if someone calls me out and tells me that I’m wrong?
All these questions go through your head when writing something. And all little mind-gremlins that can be controlled because you don’t have to show this piece of writing to anyone just yet.
This is why the editing process is as equally as important as the writing process. And I’ll be covering this next week in a step-by-step approach.
Made it right down here did you? Well, thank you for reading the whole thing.
I’ll see you next Thursday,
Fiona