A borrowed pencil on the bus to school
Hey friend,
Lamott’s shitty first drafts (PDF) are a good approach to writing, but they don’t work quite as well when, instead of writing one bad thing quickly and then improving upon it, you write one bad thing after another, four or five or six in a row, put ‘em in a little pile, and set them on fire. I know this because it’s how I’ve spent the last several hours.
I mean overall, yes, my little bonfire — this writing labor — has been good for my craft. Writing is writing, especially intentional writing, and it’s better to do it than think about doing it. But it was good in the way that an afternoon at the gym is good for my figure; I might be stronger than I was before, but the experience did not, in and of itself, get me laid. (Getting laid being the only motivation I am aware of to exercise voluntarily.)
A more productive and organized man than I might pick a theme early in the week, muse upon it reflectively through so many walks and meals and showers, capture notes here and there, even do a bit of research, and then treat his writing time as an opportunity to synthesize and improve upon his musings and notes. And sometimes I am that man. But not usually. Usually, I am the man that I am, a man who was once a boy who would start assignments with a borrowed pencil on the bus to school, and finish them in the hall before the day’s first bell. (And, perhaps most destructively, still get an ‘A’.)
So this has been a hard letter, arrived at the effortful way. Fine. Writing is always hard, I say. I’m particularly fond of quoting the late David Rakoff’s shocking image to describe just how difficult writing can be: Like pulling teeth … from your dick. You might not have a dick, but I’m sure you get the drift. The thing is — and I’m sorry, this image is about to get worse — the thing is that if you really had a tooth stuck in your dick, god damn would it feel good to get it out. And that’s one way I know a piece is going to be a keeper: I can feel the tooth coming out.
Conversely, I don’t always know why a draft isn’t working, why it doesn’t give me that feeling. It’s a lot of what I’ve been struggling with today. I think — and this is preliminary, so you’ll forgive me if I write you about this again later — it’s often because I’m trying to Say Something. Because I’m trying to write Something Important, trying to Strike A Chord. And when I’m doing that trying, I’m not really writing, am I? I’m imagining. Imagining a future where the Great Piece has already been written, where the Point has been made, where the accolades are already being received, and my award is in the mail.
It’s a kind of trying akin to trying be the life of the party, or trying to get a new nickname to stick … efforts sure to give you the opposite of the result that you wanted.
Happily for us both, I did eventually stop trying and start writing. This approach often gives me writing about writing, but that’s my third favorite section in the bookstore, and it’s more or less what pays my bills, so I suppose all’s well that ends with a handful of bloody dick teeth.
I have almost certainly lost you by now, but on the off chance I have not, I’ll tell you about a few goings-on in my life that may be of interest.
A workshop and an article on mapping content ecosystems
Speaking of trying, I’m still trying to make content ecosystem mapping a thing. I wrote a brief new introductory article to entice folks to explore the method further. And I’ll be teaching a workshop — in a slightly longer format than previous editions — this coming Monday and Tuesday. If you find yourself interested, and with that time free, you can use the code q2hooray to save $400 on standard registration, or snag the last remaining sliding scale seat at just $250 for a full day’s worth of professional development training. There are but 9 registrants at present, so there will be lots of time for 1-on-1 attention and Q&A.
A meetup presentation on finding your place in the discipline of UX
The kind folks that organize the Seattle chapter of Ladies that UX invited me to visit with their group, and I elected to adapt something from my Content Career Accelerator program to focus more broadly on the UX industry. I’ll be giving a brief, interactive presentation called Finding Your Place: Two Factors that Shape Every UX Role, followed by an AMA.
A new workshop about communicating product changes
Brain Traffic’s Button conference, on content design, has added workshops for this year’s event in Portland. I’ll be leading one of them, a new workshop I refer to as Communicating Change and that they’re calling Change is a feature: Effective strategies for communicating product changes. It’s about what it says it’s about, mostly … apps and websites and digital products are always changing, and many teams don’t have a plan in place for evaluating which changes are worth communicating about, and how to do it successfully if they are. This topic was the very first thing in this industry I ever presented about, back at MinneWebCon 2012 and the 2012 IA Summit in New Orleans. Good times.
Things on my blog that are almost certainly new since I last wrote you
I collected sources of live learning in the UX content space (classes, workshops, that sort of thing). I gave an old LinkedIn article new life as I still care about content. I turned a brief article into a brief video about portfolios for UX content jobs. Over on LinkedIn, I shared:
- a quick update from Japan (more later),
- thoughts on the complexity of fidelity in design writing in light of tools like ChatGPT,
- a reminder that words alone don’t make for a conversation,
- a lament about confusing design management with design leadership,
- gratitude for three smart cookies who shared work and life lessons with my UX writing students at SVA,
- gratitude for everyone involved with World Information Architecture Day, as I prepared to deliver the keynote address for the Des Moines edition of the event,
- encouragement to delete your Twitter account (I’m not there anymore, BTW),
- and an evergreen, surprised-it-needs-saying perspective on content management.
And I’m now realizing I need to blog more and LinkedIn less. Or at least get them onto the blog. But it’s Spring now, and so lovely out, and I want to go watch dogs in the park.
Hope you're well, friend. Until next time,
Scott