Write! book review
At our local library, I picked up a copy of Mikkel Hvids book “Write!” (“Skriv!” in danish). It is a well written book about how to write in the profesional sense.
A central point is that we, in school, learn to write to learn, as opposed to writing to convey something to the reader. It hit a nerve, so I decided to read it.
The book presents a series of techniques on how to write texts. As he says “Good texts are easy to write”, which sometimes feels counterintuitive when thinking of quotes like “I did not have time to write a short letter” (probably not a quote from Churchill).
Writing should be done in a disciplined manner and in phases
- Idea generation
- Organising
- Writing
- Revision
And it is important to do each phase separately.
Most people will have their head working hard to come up with reasons why they should not write something right now, and dividing the world into phases will help a lot in keeping focus and being disciplined.
He also includes a lot of comments and references on how other (succesful) writers and authors do their works.
In the writing phase, one should should thrive for achieving flow and work uninterrupted. Bringin up “flow” was a good sales point for me.
You must a have a clear idea and a plan, and then just write, write, write. I think that most people who have written reports, long blog posts or other texts, intuitively know that this is actually true. When you know what you want to write, it is just easy and suddenly you have written multiple pages. For me, Mikkel Hvid just adds some theory and pointers on displine to the topic.
Even though this is about writing, it is easy to see that this is generalisable to other medias as well, whether it is video production, podcasts, presentations, or teaching material.
My primary take away from this is that you must have a plan before you start typing. This is not a revolutionary idea, but still it is good to get a reminder from time to time.
He is also strict in his opinion about the plan, that it must be in writing. This also makes a lot of sense. He presents a method about having a few bullet points that must be included, and, with the research fresh in memory, start writing. It works well. Personally, I am way more verbose in my notes about what I am to write, but then again, I am not a profesional writer.
All in all I think he is right. Have a plan before you start, and very importantly, don’t edit while writing. This is a key trick that I didn’t know. Not going back and forth to reformulate phrases and fix spelling errors, will help a lot in achieving flow.
Going back to fix the text is something for the revision phase. He is being clear about that is should be a “revision” not an “editing” phase, since the stuff you wrote is coherent and of high quality after the first iteration, so all that is left is fixing spelling, adding a couple of references and double checking facts. If the text is messy, it means that your preparation was not good enough, and you should go throw the text away and go back to a previous phase.
Using his suggestions, I am now writing half a page in half an hour. I find that to be quite fast.