2020. What a year. What can be said that hasn’t been said a thousand times already? Let’s just skip past that and jump into how it was for me: I was laid off. I considered consulting. I got a new job. Becca got a new job. Optimizely was acquired. We got a new car. A dog. Moved to a larger house. Basically, we transformed our entire life. And thankfully no one close to me passed away from Covid.
A lot happened, good and bad, which pushed me to grow in many ways that I didn’t expect.
Career
The lay-off from Gladly forced me to take a step back and re-assess my career, the path I’m on, and what will keep me satisfied. I started pursuing independent consulting as a way to have a more flexible work-life balance, and make space for multiple simultaneous projects, but I couldn’t get it off the ground.
My hypothesis was that early-stage startups often struggle to attract design talent and successfully integrate them into their development processes. The founders usually aren’t designers, so they don’t know how to run the fledgling design org. They’re too small to have a full-time head of design, and the designers they do attract are usually too junior to know how to set themselves up for success. This felt like a gap I could fill. (It still does).
But what I was trying to do was too ill-defined. Plus I was starting from scratch during a pandemic, when many companies had frozen their budgets, selling to companies that don’t have much money anyway, so there were headwinds against me. And then Becca was feeling less stable at her job, so I went back in-house (ultimately at LaunchDarkly).
Deciding to go back in-house was a bitter pill to swallow, in all honestly. I was hoping to build a more flexible work-life balance where I was more in control of my time. Going back in-house felt like a sacrifice to that vision. (Also, I didn’t want to be new again, since this would be my 3rd job 2 years).
Instead, though, I changed my mindset going into my new role. My job doesn’t have to be my sole creative focus. I can make space for other projects while also having a full time job. The key, for me, is to not expect work to fulfill all of my creative urges, and to reserve energy for projects outside of work. In my previous jobs I would pour all of my energy into them, but that’s not healthy. I need to build time into my life for creative activities that aren’t work related. This mindset shift, and being more attuned to my energy level and not taking on too much at work, has helped a lot.
I still think there’s opportunity to fill the design-leadership gap, so I’m still feeling it out. I learned that it’s better to lay the ground work for future growth and jobs and income streams while you’re doing other things, so I’m doing that now (in addition to side projects, creative hobbies, etc.).
Side projects
Being unemployed — and quarantined — gave me space to re-kindle my love of side projects. I regularly had side projects in my 20s, but then they dropped off when I went to grad school, focused on my career, ramped up my social life, and got married.
I re-discovered that I love having a project to work on slowly, deliberately, over a long period of time. It gives me an outlet to try new ideas on, emerging technologies to experiment with, and learn new skills (or brush up on old ones). Although I regularly try out ideas that inform decisions in my day job, that’s not the primary reason I do them. I primarily do them to scratch creative itches.
In contrast to work, I don’t feel rushed or pressured to get anything done. I don’t have deadlines. There are no stakeholders to please. No internal politics to navigate. I approach them as something fun to work on. I can just follow creative urges as far as they take me, without worrying if it will pan out or not.
There were 2 main projects I worked on:
Center, a personal CRM to help you stay in touch with your network. I’ve been working on it with my buddy Omar, who started it a couple years back. It struck a chord with me since I was managing my network and consulting leads in Notion, which was serviceable but not great. I got sucked in and started helping out on product strategy, design, and frontend coding, which I’m still doing today.
Invisible Ink, which is a writing app that doesn’t show you what you’re typing or let you backspace or edit. You can only write. Why would I build such a monstrosity? The idea came from Vernacular Eloquence, which cited studies showing that people who wrote without seeing their writing ended up with better arguments, and prose that flowed more naturally. Why? Because writing is actually reading and writing, where you write a few lines, re-read it back, edit it, write some more, repeat. This gets in the way of developing your line of reasoning.
Bonus third one: writing on this blog. I wrote 13 posts last year, which is more than the past few years, but not prolific. I like having space to think and write, and am building that into how I spend time outside of work.
Going into my new job with side projects in the hopper has helped me establish a better relationship between my job, creative ambitions, and side projects. I used to want my job to be the be-all-end-all of my creative outlets. But it can’t be. I realize and accept that now. I like writing, hand lettering, programming, graphic design, watercoloring, and more. No job will scratch all of those itches. So I like being in management, and leading teams, so that I can empower people to do their best work in my day job, but save creative energy for my own personal projects outside of work. It feels like a good balance so far.
Creative confidence
By far my biggest growth in 2020 is my newfound creative confidence.
This primarily came from the Artist’s Way, a 12-week program to help you strengthen your artist’s voice. It has helped me be more attuned to what my muse is saying, and given me the confidence to follow it wherever it may lead. This is true both for my personal projects, and my job.
In personal projects, I’m less afraid to follow whatever interesting design idea, lettering idea, writing prompt, etc., that I have. Is it pleasing to me? Do I like it? That’s the main thing that matters. I used to be more concerned with, Is this the right way to do something? Is this how other people would expect me to do it? Instead I am more confident listening to myself. I now use my internal compass as a guide.
This is true in my job, too. I’m more confident pursuing the course of action I see as correct, based on my prior experience and understanding of the field. In the past I’d be more worried about it being the “right” thing, or what my boss expects. Now, not so much. It’s very liberating.
Routine
The routine of quarantine can be dull and repetitive, but there’s aspects of it that work for me. Every morning when I wake up, and I know I’ll be home all day. Home for work. Home for play. Home for side projects and dinner and chores and so on. Home home home. This simplicity means I don’t need to think too hard about what my day looks like. It’s like wearing the same clothes every day — it’s one less thing to think about, so you’re mentally freed up to focus on more important things.
I of course miss seeing people and having in-person events, going to restaurants, seeing live music, and so on. I will welcome those back into my life when they’re ready. But for now, I’m embracing the aspects of routine that work for me.
So ya. 2020, I won’t miss ya. But your hardships pushed me to grow. Now here’s the door.
2020. A year of isolation and social distancing and quarantining. Sounds like it should be a great year for reading, right? Well, not as much as I would have guessed. I read 28 books this year, which is less than last year (only by 2), but still significantly more than the previous 2 years. So not bad, but not as great as I would have expected.
I shifted more of my leisure/quarantine time to side projects and artist dates, which have been very fulfilling, so no regrets there. Also, I read 4 books that were over 1,000 pages, so all in all I consider 2020 a solid year for reading.
A few other things of note:
I read 5 fiction books, which is still low but what can I say, fact is stranger than fiction. And books like Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biography and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted read like fiction, and to me are more compelling because they’re recounting events that actually happened. Even so, the right fiction can be a nice form of escapism, so I do want to dial up the fiction more in the coming year (don’t I say this every year?).
Design, color, typography, and lettering books once again make up a significant portion of my reading list (about a third). I can’t stop, won’t stop reading them. They help me grow professionally and fulfill me creatively.
8 books were written by women, and 5 by people of color (3 being both). This is a fairly low, but not abysmal, percentage overall, so I should try to dial this up in 2021.
I moved my reading list to Notion! Which makes it easier to keep track of counts, dates, authors, filter, sort, etc. Check it out here.
Links below are Amazon Affiliate links, which earn me a small kickback.
Favorite books of the year
Path to Power and Means of Ascent by Robert Caro
I kicked off the year with Path to Power, volume 1 of 5 (potentially more? He’s still writing it) of Robert Caro’s Lyndon B. Johnson biography. I read most of it during our honeymoon, trekking through Patagonia for 5 days with this 1,000+ page beast in my pack (#worthit). I picked up volume 2, Means of Ascent, later in the year, and while slower than volume 1, was still excellent. Caro is by far the best political writer there is. The depth of his research, and the way he makes what should be dry political maneuverings into Shakespearian drama is incredible. It inspires me to be better in my craft.
Beyond just being well-written, the content resonated in these polarizing political times because a large chunk of Means of Ascent is about how Lyndon stole the 1948 senatorial race by buying votes from counties and unregistered voters, and cemented his win with legal maneuvering. Sound familiar? Knowing all this transpired previously made me very concerned that it could happen again this year. Thankfully it didn’t, and fraudulent votes didn’t seem to be an issue, but even so it’s wild to read about how he stole a senatorial election, concealed it, and went on to become president.
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
I wrote a whole post about this book, so I don’t have much to add and you should just go read that instead. I will say, though, that I continue to use the techniques in this book and have made morning pages (and to a lesser extent, artist dates) a part of my regular routine. I can’t recommend this book highly enough to anyone who wants to tap into their true creative potential (hence the star rating 🌟).
Vernacular Eloquence by Peter Elbow
Another book that I wrote an entire post on, so just go read that. Definitely the most impactful book I’ve read in terms of making me a better writer. It also highlights lots of failures in our school system, racial and systemic biases perpetuated through education and reading and writing. Reading this during the George Floyd protests made those sections especially impactful. I’m still thinking about that stuff today.
Interactions of Color by Josef Albers
The third book that I wrote an entire post on. This book took me about 5 years to get through, with many fits and starts in between. I’m really glad I read the book and, more crucially, did all the exercises. Reading it without doing the exercises is a waste of time. The whole point of this book is the exercises. It completely changed the way I look at color, and has made me much more attuned to the characteristics of colors and, more importantly, the interactions between colors. Wholly recommended if you want to be a better designer or artist.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
I picked this book up on whim when I saw it in the recommended section at Green Apple Books. I had somehow never heard of it before, despite being a Murakami fan, and ended up thoroughly enjoying it. It resonated during the pandemic since it’s about isolation and loss and discovering who you are.
Full reading list
Also in Notion, which I keep up-to-date with what I’m currently reading, and includes previous lists.
Colorless Tsukuru Tagalog and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (Dec 9, 2020) Recommended? 👍
The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars and Kirk Kohlstedt (Dec 26, 2020) 👍
11/21/63 by Stephen King (Nov 9, 2020)
Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison (Sep 21, 2020)
Someone who will love you in all your damaged glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Sep 10, 2020) 👍
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein (Aug 31, 2020) 👍
The Designer’s Dictionary of Color by Sean Adams (Aug 1, 2020) 👍
Means of Ascent by Robert Caro (Aug 26, 2020) 👍👍
The Multi-hyphenate Life by Emma Gannon (Jul 16, 2020)
How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (Jul 13, 2020) 🙌
My Year I’d Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh (Jun 25, 2020) 👍
Why Have Kids by Jessica Valenti (Jun 7, 2020)
The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron (Aug 28, 2020) 🌟
Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing by Peter Elbow (Sep 7, 2020) 👍👍
How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell (May 26, 2020) 👍
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein (May 13, 2020)
Vintage Hand Lettering by Lisa Quine (Apr 26, 2020) 👍
Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson (Apr 24, 2020)
Emotional Design by Aaron Walter (Apr 12, 2020) 👍
The Stroke: Theory of Writing by Gerri Noordzij (Apr 5, 2020) 👍
Interactions of Color by Josef Albers (Mar 21, 2020) 🙌 (started sometime in 2015)
Design as Art by Bruno Munari (Mar 16, 2020)
Creative Spaces by Ted Vadakan and Angie Myung (Mar 16, 2020)
Evicted by Matthew Desmond (Mar 8, 2020)
Wabi Sabi by Leonard Koren (Feb 15, 2020)
Path to Power by Robert Caro (Feb 12, 2020) 👍👍
Writing is Designing by Michael J. Metts and Andy Welfle (Feb 6, 2020) 👍
Moonwalking with Einstein by Josh Foer (Jan 19, 2020)
I recently noticed that my team of Product Designers at LaunchDarkly (p.s. I’m hiring) was having trouble navigating the overlap of Product Design and Product Management. No one said it explicitly, but after hearing some frustrations in 1:1s and team meetings I connected the dots that this issue was the common variable across a variety of complaints.
I was hearing things like, “I’m supposed to own the user experience, but the PM keeps cutting scope from my designs!” And, “Am I expected to run team whiteboarding sessions?” There was also confusion around the fact that sometimes they do customer interviews, and other times PMs do.
Product Managers also had some struggles with navigating this gray area. They want to shape the final product (as they should), but were unsure how best to provide input without stepping on the toes of designers. If I sketch out my ideas, am I doing the designer’s job for them? Is it ok to ask designers to do customer outreach and development? If the designs I’m seeing are missing the mark, how do I give that feedback without telling them their work stinks?
To clarify expectations for both sides, I wrote the doc below. It doesn’t try to draw a distinct line between the two roles, but instead explicitly states the area of overlap and provides guidance on how to navigate it. I also give advice for leaning on each other, such as asking PMs for scope, or asking designers for more iterations.
So far this doc has alleviated some confusion on both sides, and empowered my team to speak up when they need more from their peers.
If you or your team is struggling with this as well, I hope this doc will help.
The roles of Product Designer and Product Manager have a significant amount of overlap (they both have “product” in their title, after all). So who does what? Having overlap and redundancy is healthy and makes sure multiple people are thinking about the big picture. But fuzzy roles and unclear decision makers leads to people spinning their wheels and unproductive power struggles. This doc aims to clarify who does what by explicitly laying out roles, the overlap, and how to navigate the ambiguity.
Product Designers
Product Designers are responsible for creating great user experiences. What does that mean, though? Don’t we all own the user experience? In a sense, yes – everything the triad does will impact the final experience. Sales, support, and marketing all impact the customer’s experience, too. But in the context of the triad, the designer should be pushing for the best experience that meets business and customer goals, with the project constraints (scope, technical tradeoffs, what’s available in the design system, and so on). If the proposed design doesn’t meet the customer’s needs, or is hard to use, or unpolished, or doesn’t follow our patterns, that’s on the designer. They do this by owning:
Final visual design
Interaction design
Prototyping
Usability testing
Personas
Journey mapping
And more, this list isn’t exhaustive
Product Managers
Product Managers are accountable for the business value of their team’s output. If a project isn’t valuable to customers or LaunchDarkly, has unclear or incorrect scope, fuzzy use cases, takes too long to build relative to the value, or the team doesn’t understand what problem they’re solving or why, that’s on the PM. They do this by owning:
Roadmap prioritization
Team goals & strategy
Project scope
Project goals and success criteria
Data analysis
And more, this list isn’t exhaustive
The overlap
This still leaves a healthy amount of overlap between the two roles. Both do:
User research
User scenarios
Use cases
Lo-fi sketching and flows
Team workshops & whiteboarding
And even more, this list isn’t exhaustive, either
So who owns these activities? The answer is both. The best projects will have designers and PMs collaborating on these. But sometimes a designer takes the lead on research, or the PM will lead whiteboarding activities. It will depend on who has the time, skills, and interest, among other factors. When things are unclear, they should discuss who is doing what.
Additionally, being accountable for an outcome doesn’t mean you’re on the hook for doing all the work to achieve it. Nor does it mean you can’t contribute to what someone else is accountable for. Designers should contribute to use cases and scope. Engineers and PMs should contribute design ideas. Everyone should contribute to the roadmap. But at the end of the day, the person accountable for the final result has final decision making power.
Even so, this won’t prevent disagreements. You may not agree with the final scope, technical architecture, or user flows. Voice your concerns, have a healthy (but respectful) debate about the tradeoffs, and try to reach consensus or a set of next steps to resolve the tension. But at the end of the day, recognize who is accountable for the outcome, and thus the final decision maker, and disagree and commit.
Lean on each other
Knowing who’s accountable for what gives you someone to lean on when things are ambiguous. Use this to your advantage.
For Product Designers
Lean on your PM if you don’t understand the project’s goals, use cases, scope, or value. You can and should have an opinion on these, and shape them with your work, but it’s a fool’s errand to try to finalize a design if these aren’t crisp.
If you’re not sure about the technical tradeoffs of your design decisions, lean on your engineering counterpart.
If the PM or engineers have an idea for a solution, listen to it and make it real, even if you’re not sure it will work. Design’s super power is giving form to abstract ideas. Discussing a cheap throwaway mockup you’ve made can shortcut weeks of debate. I wrote a longer article about this.
You are expected to push for shipping the best user experience you can. Sometimes this increases the scope of a project. Sometimes this increases the technical complexity. You should discuss tradeoffs with your triad and reach consensus together. Don’t assume what’s easy or hard. Then make the best damn designs you can within the scope and constraints agreed upon.
Scope, use cases, and goals can and will change as projects move through discovery. Seeing real designs and getting user feedback changes your understanding of the opportunity space, so you should update the product spec accordingly.
For Product Managers
Lean on designers to help you with scope and use case decisions by cheaply exploring ideas together.
If you have an idea for a solution, get it out of your head and share it with your designer. But acknowledge it’s just an idea and the designer owns the final designs.
You see an area of opportunity that needs more research but don’t have time, ask your designer if they can lead customer calls.
If the solutions the designer is proposing are missing the mark, ask them to explore more ideas. Or whiteboard together if you’re seeing paths the designer’s not going down. You don’t need to be an expert in design and pinpoint exactly what isn’t working, but you can always ask for more options.
Create greatness together
Tension and overlap is healthy when roles and expectations are clear. This doc is a starting point and guide, but it takes practice to successfully navigate points of conflict. But when done right, you’ll ship solutions better than you would have alone.
Sound like the type of team you want to work on? I’m hiring.
I saw a color palette I liked recently, and wanted to use it on something, but I had no project for it. I decided to just make some fake card UIs (plus I got to use some fonts I had been itching to use for awhile). There was no point to it other than playing with some colors and fonts. No one else saw it (until now). It will never be built. It won’t win any design awards.
Some card UIs that won’t win any design awards and had no purpose…
Afterward, I felt more creative energy coursing through my veins. I felt more creatively attuned.
When I first did The Artists Way, I thought “artist dates” were mostly about filling the tank with inspiration. That’s partly true, but their true power revealed themselves to me when I took a break to move. I had a few weeks of ignoring my inner artist, so when my ears finally perked up again I learned why artist dates are so powerful: You practice listening to your artist. Their voice gets stronger. Your ear is more attuned to it.
Over time the voice gets drowned out by society, your inner critic, fears, doubts, societal expectations, your idea of who you think you are, or should be. But the voice never goes away. It’s always there.
Think back to when you were a kid and you just made stuff for the fun of it. It didn’t matter if it was good or not. There was no point to it. You didn’t worry about calling yourself an artist or changing your identity. Listening to your inner artist gets you back to that place.
The artist’s way shows you how to turn down the dial on your inner critic, and turn up the dial on your inner artist. You’ll strengthen your creative muscle and enjoy your creativity like a kid again.
How can speech improve your writing? Your initial reaction is probably, not at all. But it turns out there’s a lot that speech can offer writing, and that’s what Peter Elbow’s Vernacular Eloquence (Amazon Affiliate link that I get a small kickback from) is all about. It’s full of practical advice for harnessing the power of speech to improve your writing, so I wrote them down here for future reference.
The writing process
To oversimplify, the writing process can be split into 2 phases: first, getting words down on the page; then, editing those words into a finished piece that’s consumable by other people. Vernacular Eloquence contains techniques for both phases of the writing process.
Capturing raw thoughts
Freewriting
Overcome the fear of the blank page with freewriting. The method is simple: just write continuously for a set amount of time, usually 10 minutes, without stopping. If you don’t have anything to say, just write that. “I have nothing to say I have nothing to say I have nothing to say.” Or “I hate this I hate this I hate this.” Anything. Just don’t stop.
Don’t worry about form, grammar, sentence structure, spelling, or even if it’s any good at all. Freewriting is just for you. No one else needs to read it. Self-editing as you go and worrying about perfect grammar and spelling is the best way to go nowhere fast. You’ll return to spelling and grammar later in the editing phase.
A few tips:
“Without stopping” doesn’t mean rushed. You can take a minute to breathe deeply, un-tense your muscles, or let a thought develop.
It’s private. Not to be showed or read by anyone else. You’re speaking, but with the added safety of not having any listeners. This psychological safety will help you be messy and unrefined and just get thoughts down.
You can freewrite about a topic, or you can just write whatever comes to mind. During quarantine I started the habit of doing morning pages (hat tip to the Artist’s Way) every day, which is just writing 3 straight pages of whatever thoughts come to mind.
The structure usually isn’t usable as is. It will likely jump around too much and be meandering. But there are usually sentences or multiple paragraphs that are perfectly readable. The next section on the editing process will give you tools to make sense of this mess.
Invisible writing
A specific form of freewriting is invisible writing. It’s writing without seeing what you’re writing, like the name implies. Most writing is actually reading and writing, since you’re reading back what you wrote and editing it at the same time. This slows down your writing, and gets in the way of developing your ideas. It’s like if you set out to carve the statue of David and obsessed over getting the pinky perfect before realizing you bought the wrong type of marble. Oh, and the slab is too small.
Since invisible writing prevents you from reading as you go, you can only add more words and focus on developing your line of thinking. You can do this by making the text color the same as the background color, turn your monitor’s brightness down, or use an editor I built called Invisible Ink that blurs out your text and doesn’t let you edit.
This is a more opinionated form of freewriting. In the 70s, Sheridan Blau studied people writing invisibly (using empty ballpoint pens and carbon paper) and observed it “enhanced their fluency and spurred their creativity. The invisibility of the text seemed to force them to give more concentrated and sustained attention to their emerging thoughts than they usually gave when writing.” (p. 162). In other words, it improved their thinking. As Elbow puts it: “What it helps is productive thinking — the ability to come up with lots of ideas and to explore them in creative and fruitful ways.” (p. 163). I have found myself exploring more ideas from writing invisibly.
Why freewriting and invisible writing work
Since they’re private and disposable, they help you overcome the biggest impediment to writing — getting started — by giving you psychological safety to write messy, unreadable, worthless prose.
Since they force you to just keep producing words, “it pushes most of us into our mental speaking gear where we can’t plan or rehearse words before uttering them.” (p. 149). Your thoughts naturally connect to each other, as they would if you were speaking to another person. You don’t have gaps in logic, which you often see in poor writing. This helps the reader follow your train of thought. Reading is actually more similar to listening than we give it credit for, hence writing that follows the cues of speaking is easier to read.
By shifting into that mental speaking gear, you’ll write with livelier and more natural language.
It quiets the internal editor who’s telling us everything we create is awful, worthless drivel.
It gives your unconscious mind space to take over. Your conscious mind is busy focusing on the words you’re putting on paper, and in the process your unconscious mind can get to work and serve you up new and sometimes surprising thoughts. You’re tapping into the same phenomenon that leads you to getting your best ideas in the shower.
Using these techniques, I’ve been surprised at the number of times I’ll start down one line of thinking, then switch tracks, then double back on that and end up somewhere totally unexpected. It often feels like arguing with myself, which helps me develop stronger ideas.
The editing process
Now that you’ve gotten your raw thoughts down, how do you make sense of that messy, incoherent, meandering blob of text? Elbow describes two methods, which are poles on a spectrum: collage and essay.
Collage
In this technique, you grab the best phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc., and string them together, separated by lines or asterisks (or not, up to you). This method lets us avoid:
Revising weak passages. Just throw them out instead.
Figuring out the main point. It can function as a series of vignettes, moods, impressions, and so on.
Figuring out the best logical order. Just use an order that feels right or intriguing.
Making good transitions. Just stop when you’re done with a section, and start the next one.
Steps
Look through the rough writing, and choose the bits you like the most (phrases, sentences, whole pages, etc.)
Lay them out in front of you (physically, or in a tool like Notion [my preferred tool of choice, especially since you can just drag and drop whole paragraphs and sections around. You can also put bits of text side-by-side.]), then read through them — slowly, respectively, meditatively.
Arrange them in an order that feels pleasing or compelling or logically makes sense or just intuitively feels right. It doesn’t really matter; listen to what the piece wants to be.
At this, you may see some missing bits: missing thoughts or ideas or stories to add. Maybe you see your core idea now and can state it with clarity and can write a reflection on it. Maybe you remember a badly written bit that you see now is needed. Or maybe you see a good way to write an opening or closing bit. Remember, however, that good collages can get along without openings and closings: you simply need a bit that works as a way to “jump into” your piece and another to “close the door” at the end.
Revise it. But do so with a “negative” approach. See how much you can do by just leaving out words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc. Omission usually adds energy; addition saps it. Some rephrasing is fine, but see how far you can get without heavy re-writing. Reading your words aloud is best for this process (more on that below).
Instead of trying to make nice connections or transitions, just use asterisks or dingbats.
Do a final copy edit if you want to finish it (for style, clarity, and grammar).
You can start with a collage, and revise it in the direction of an essay.
Essay
An essay has more of a narrative than a collage. The process is to find the “stray bones” laying around, and gradually build them into a strong, coherent “skeleton” that’s alive.
Find promising passages. Read slowly and grab the good bits — phrases, passages, whole pages. Some will be important because they contain stories or examples, not just a thought or idea or point.
Create bones. For each important passage, create a tiny summary germ sentence. Make it as brief and pithy as you can. Summarize it with verbs as the point you’re trying to make, rather than a description of what it is. For example, not just “The ad for Coca-Cola,” but instead “The Coke ad implies that Coke will improve your health.”
Why do you want to summarize with verbs over single words or phrases? Because this strongarms you into thinking. You’re creating ingredients that will later help you see the logic of your thinking. A little sentence says something and has conceptual semantic energy that helps you get from one idea to the next.
Germ sentences might well be questions.
If a passage of rough fast writing feels important in some way for the topic you are writing about, force it to yield a germ sentence.
Germ sentences will help you later when you are trying to figure out a sequence or organization.
Figure out a main idea. Look through the list of germ sentences and mark the ones that feel important or central. Look at the marked ones and figure out your main idea.
Maybe there’s a felt but absent main idea here. An idea trying to hold all this interesting material together. Figure it out. Write it out. Do more freewriting around this implied idea. Or talk it through with someone.
Build the skeleton. In other words, a sequence. Begin to work out a good sequence for your bones.
Start with the main idea and the germ sentences you marked as most important. This forms a story outline – it tells a story of thinking that feels coherent and sensible. It’s an outline of thoughts, not just single words or phrases that point to mere topics or areas. Try to build a good sequence of sentences where each point follows the previous one naturally, where the sequence is going somewhere and has felt shape.
There are lots of ways to tell a story. They can start at the end and you tell how you got there, or at the beginning, or middle with some random interesting anecdote.
You may find there are gaps now. If so, fill them in. Return to freewriting to capture more raw thoughts that you can revise into coherent points.
Revise this into a readable draft.
Do final revisions by reading aloud (more on that below).
Revising by reading aloud
Once we have a draft down, we can start making the final revisions that has correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style. The editing process is the hardest and longest part of writing (assuming you can get over the fear of the blank page in the first place). The process is slow, and you’re often bogged down by word choice, sentence structure, grammar, and all the fiddly bits of writing that we learn in school.
While much of this process is mechanical and following rules, speech can still help us write final, grammatically correct sentences.
The technique
This technique is pretty much what it sounds like: read your writing aloud. But as you do so, pay attention to how it feels in the mouth, and how it sounds to your ear. Where do you stumble? When does the kinesthetic feeling of physically moving your mouth and tongue feel off? When is it grating in the ear?
Consciously thinking about what is wrong with a sentence is much tougher to spot and fix problems then just saying it aloud and feeling how it sounds. This doesn’t usually point to a solution, but it will point to problems.
This method helps solve:
Bureaucratic prose that sounds stilted and dry
Roundabout or long-winded language
Repetition and clang (conversely, it will help you hear when repetition is good)
Interruptions that break the flow of a thought or sentence
Punctuation and emphasis
You can think of reading aloud as helping people hear your writing like you’re speaking it. When you speak, you put emphasis on certain words, pause in certain places, and modulate your volume and rhythm. Try to punctuate and format the text to achieve this. Where is there a longer pause, and where should the words just flow? Where do you want to signal a shift in tone?
For example, consider the phrase, “I didn’t steal the book.” Think of all the different ways you could say it:
“I didn’t steal the book.”
“I didn’t steal the book.”
“I didn’t steal the book.”
Each of these has a very different meaning. Which will the reader hear when they read it? Punctuation and formatting can ensure they read it the way you intend, and revising by reading aloud will help you identify how they should read it.
In Elbow’s words, “It’s the marriage of sound and meaning that we seek with reading aloud — and that punctuation is meant to convey. We are looking for the out loud performance that best matches the meaning — that is or enacts the meaning.” (p. 279)
The author provides a few additional pieces of specific grammatical advice:
About commas: When in doubt, leave it out. Careful reading aloud will help us avoid most of the extra commas that come from the pauses in casual speech, but some will creep in.
Stick to periods, commas, and question marks. These minimize chances for grammar infractions, yet they’re all we need for excellent writing. The most realistic goal for punctuation is the same one for spelling: not to be noticed.
Never use which. Most that/which tickets are issued for illegal whichs. The workaday that is fine for most of what we normally write.
And then there are dashes. When you’re perplexed about what to use, use a dash. A dash is never wrong from a strictly legal point of view if you use it in any spot where you pause in careful reading aloud.
Does it lead to perfect grammar every time? No. But grammar is full of ambiguity, and good writers break the rules regularly. It will lead to proper grammar enough of the time to not make your writing more confusing.
Some other advice
Elbow sprinkles some other pearls of wisdom throughout the book, so here they are in a grab bag “collage” format 😄
On starting: “If we don’t have an actual story to drive our essay, the most obvious way to create a "story of thinking” is to start with an itch: not a claim or a policy but a question of problem or perplexity. “ p. 309 (emphasis added). You may remember this from the opening to this post…
"Good orators often consciously startle an audience with something that seems wrong or even is wrong.”
“One of the best ways to help readers understand a complex idea is to start with an oversimplification. A simple claim is easily stated and easily grasped; complications and qualifications can be added later. This strategy can function not just in sentences but in paragraphs or even whole essays.” (p. 312). When we build in all the qualifications our sentences are too complicated, and boring, and have no energy or pull.
I highly recommend Elbow’s book if you want to become a better writer. It’s one of the few (only?) books I’ve read that improve your writing by showing you how to develop better ideas and arguments, instead of teaching you rules of grammar and style. The techniques above are the most concrete takeaways from the book, but it’s full of longer explanations about why speech leads to better writing, with studies and practical teaching experience to back up his arguments.
The book can be academic and long-winded at times, which I simultaneously enjoyed and felt bogged down by. He would often make an argument and then write out all of the counter arguments and then counter-counter argue those, to which I would sigh, “I was convinced 5 pages ago. You don’t need to convince me anymore!” But it was also fun to see his logic unfold. He’s good at calling out sections that are skippable and largely academic, so they’re easy to skip over if you don’t want to go down long academic rabbit holes. He also includes historical explanations of how the current system of “correct” writing is just as arbitrary as any other form of “incorrect” writing (tl;dr the people in power make the rules).
Buy it now if you want to improve your writing (this is an Amazon Affiliate link that I get a small kickback from).
Some card UIs that won’t win any design awards and had no purpose…