Category: Writing Systems

Practical frameworks and processes for writers who want to work with more clarity, consistency, and less resistance.

What I Do Between Drafts

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The time between drafts is not empty time. It is, in many cases, the most productive part of the writing process — but it is productive in ways that do not look like productivity, which is why it is often misunderstood and undervalued. A writer who has finished a draft and set it aside is not resting from writing. They are doing a different kind of work, and understanding what that work is makes it possible to do it more deliberately.

Between drafts, the thinking that the draft has started continues without the draft present. The argument that was only partially formed in the writing develops in the background. The problem that was visible but not yet solvable in the draft becomes, in the days away from it, a problem with a shape that revision can address. The piece is absent; the thinking about the piece is not.

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How I Work With an Editor

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Working with an editor is one of the most practically important relationships in a writing life, and one of the least discussed in terms of how it actually works. The discussion that does exist tends to focus on the writer’s experience of being edited — on how to receive feedback without defensiveness, on how to manage the emotional difficulty of having your work changed by someone else. This is real and worth discussing, but it starts from the wrong place. The writer who understands editing only as something done to them is in a passive position relative to a relationship that works best when both parties are active.

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Writing the Difficult Piece

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Every writer has pieces that are genuinely difficult to write — not difficult in the sense of requiring research or technical knowledge, but difficult in the sense of resisting being written. The argument that will not cohere. The subject that feels too large or too close. The piece that has been started and abandoned several times without arriving anywhere. Writing a difficult piece is a situation that calls for a different approach from ordinary writing, because the methods that work for pieces that are not difficult tend to make difficult pieces harder.

The difficulty is usually not random. A piece that resists being written is almost always resisting for a reason, and identifying the reason is the first step towards addressing it. Not all difficult pieces have the same problem, and the same approach will not work for all of them.

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How I Plan a Series of Posts

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Planning a series of posts is a different activity from planning individual posts, and treating it as simply more of the same tends to produce a different kind of failure. A site that publishes individual posts without thinking about how they relate to each other tends to produce a body of work that is competent post by post and incoherent as a whole — a collection of pieces that cover similar territory from similar angles without building anything cumulatively.

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Writing to a Deadline

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Writing to a deadline is the normal condition of most professional writing, and yet it receives surprisingly little attention as a distinct skill. The assumption tends to be that good writing is good writing, and that a deadline simply determines when it must be finished. This assumption is partly right and partly wrong. A deadline does not change what good writing is, but it does change how it is produced — and the writer who does not adapt their process to deadline conditions tends to produce work that is either late or worse than it would have been with more time.

Understanding how deadline pressure affects the writing process — and how to work with that pressure rather than against it — is a practical skill that develops with experience and can be developed more quickly with deliberate attention.

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What I Do When I Disagree With a Brief

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Disagreeing with a brief is a situation that most working writers encounter and few discuss openly. The brief arrives — from a client, an editor, or a commissioning manager — and something in it is wrong. Not wrong in the sense of factually incorrect, but wrong in the sense that following it as written would produce a piece that does not serve the purpose it was commissioned to serve, or that asks the writer to say something they do not believe, or that constrains the piece in ways that will damage rather than shape it.

What to do in this situation is a practical and an ethical question simultaneously, and the two aspects cannot be separated. The practical question is how to navigate the disagreement without losing the commission or the relationship. The ethical question is what the writer owes to their own judgment when that judgment conflicts with the client’s instructions.

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How I Build an Argument

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Building an argument in writing is not the same as having one. A writer can have a clear position — a view they hold, a claim they want to make — without knowing how to move a reader from the opening to that position through writing that earns it. The argument that exists in the writer’s mind arrives there through intuition, experience, and accumulated thinking. The argument that appears on the page has to be constructed, step by step, in a form that the reader can follow.

This construction is a learnable skill, and it has a sequence. Not a rigid sequence that every piece must follow exactly, but a working sequence of moves that a writer can apply, adjust, and depart from when the piece requires it.

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Writing the Middle

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The middle of a piece is where most writing fails. Not the opening, which receives the most deliberate attention, and not the ending, which is brief enough to be controlled. The middle — everything between the opening that earns attention and the ending that releases the reader — is where the piece either delivers what it promised or quietly stops doing so.

Writing the middle is the hardest part to write well, and the hardest to diagnose when it goes wrong. A weak opening is usually visible. A weak ending announces itself. A weak middle tends to be felt rather than identified — the reader’s attention drifts, the piece loses its forward momentum, and neither the reader nor sometimes the writer can say exactly where it happened.

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How I Know When a Piece Is Ready to Publish

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Knowing when a piece is ready to publish is harder than knowing how to write one. Writing has a recognisable sequence — notes, draft, revision, editing — and at each stage there is a reasonably clear sense of what comes next. Readiness has no equivalent sequence. It is a judgment, made at a specific moment, that the piece has reached a state where further work would not improve it enough to justify withholding it.

This judgment is difficult because it has no objective test. A piece can always be revised further. The question is not whether more revision is possible — it always is — but whether more revision is necessary. Distinguishing between these two is the actual skill, and it is one that develops slowly, through publishing pieces and seeing, after the fact, whether the readiness judgment was right.

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Writing Across Different Formats

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Writing across different formats — the essay, the social media post, the newsletter, the long-form article, the marketing copy — is often treated as a single skill that simply needs to be resized for each context. Write the idea, then adjust the length and tone for the platform. This understanding is incomplete. Different formats are not the same writing at different lengths. They are different kinds of writing, with different relationships to argument, structure, and reader attention, and treating them as interchangeable produces work that is competent in none of them.

Understanding what changes across formats — and, just as importantly, what does not — is a practical skill for any writer who works across more than one context, which today is most writers.

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