Today I also didn’t work much on the book. I announced the next Data Vis Book Club announcement on our blog and on Twitter (and am very excited about reading the full “Visual Thinking for Information Design” book), had a long phone call with a coworker, and prepared a call for students for tomorrow.
I also started reading “Start writing your book today”. Reading books about writing is a fantastic way to procrastinate on actually writing, I discovered. But it’s also very motivating and, in the best cases, pushes you to write (until the next low phase).
These books normally make writing sound fairly simple. Which is…you know, kind of true. You just sit down and write. It’s fairly simple.
“Start writing your book today” by a woman with the wonderful name Morgan Gist MacDonald is about the discrepancy between “it’s simple” and “you still don’t get it done”. It also talks about how to actually get writing done. “Commit to 5000 words per week,” it tells me. (So far, in these updates, I wrote 1200 words this week). That makes sense to me. But I also spend a lot of time working on illustrations, looking for examples, etc. – how do you count for this time? Maybe actually having a set time instead of a set word count makes more sense. 2h every day or so.
“Have a primary writing time and backups for when life gets busy”, Morgan Gist MacDonald tells me, too. If I do that, then, hopefully, I won’t tell you “I also didn’t work much for the book” ever again.
Quote of the day: “You are a writer when you commit to writing—plain and simple. Give yourself the title, and claim it.” – Morgan Gist MacDonald