Writing for oneself is as old as writing itself. Writers have always written privately. Famous writers like Franz Kafka, Zora Neale Hurston, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson. And countless amateurs like me, writing private journals not for publication.
Private journaling
There have been years in my life when I’ve journaled daily, struggling to record and make sense of my experiences. Journaling privately helped me uncover and process what I was going through. Eventually, I stopped journaling, but I kept what I’d written for a long time. Until, one day, I flipped through my journals and realized I didn’t need to keep them anymore.
Private freewriting
While trying to become a writer, I practiced freewriting for several years. Freewriting helped me realize that I could write, that I was a writer. I still have those journals. Though I wrote everything in them for myself, I published one story — “The Batch Fixer” — on this blog last year.
Writing for myself
Although this blog contains posts for anyone to read, I’m often also writing for myself. For example, my post earlier this month: “Nine practical tips to letting go in a chaotic world“; believe me, I’m working on them myself. My posts on meditation, listening, and facilitation are often attempts for me to understand and put into practice what I’m writing about.
So, while I’m sharing advice that you, dear reader, may find helpful, I’m also writing for myself.
A hat tip to my men’s group for the inspiration for this post. We are going on an outing to Emily Dickinson’s home. Dickinson’s only publications during her lifetime were 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems and one letter.
If you’d told me back in 2009 that by 2024 I’d have written over a thousand blog posts for this website, I’d have told you you were crazy. (I’ve published 827; the rest are drafts, but still.) I’d have thought I would have run out of ideas years ago.
Jerry’s book uses frequent analogies to building fieldstone walls.
Every stone-built wall is unique because you build it from a unique combination and arrangement of stones. Even using the same set of stones, you can build thousands of unique walls by stacking them differently.
The same is true of creating unique combinations of ideas. As Jerry said about his famous book The Psychology of Computer Programming, written over 50 years ago and still in print: “…it’s merely a putting-together of computers and people, two topics that had previously been considered separate”.
My posts, like conferences, are containers for ideas. Yes, I do have new ideas regularly! Yet, on review, many of my posts combine core ideas about meeting design, facilitation, facilitating change, consulting, personal effectiveness, the meeting industry, leadership, and marketing in novel ways.
“I may run out of ideas, but I’ll never run out of new combinations of ideas.”
It works for me!
Attribution: Stone Wall GIF by JC Property Professionals via GIPHY
This is not another success story about becoming a writer.
Outwardly, I’ve succeeded. Since 2005, I’ve written three successful books on meeting design and facilitation and over 800 weekly blog posts on a wide range of topics. About half a million words so far. My books continue to sell, and this blog is the world’s most popular website on meeting design and facilitation.
What I want to share is my struggle to become a writer, in the hope that it may inspire at least one struggling writer to persevere.
Why?
Because…
• I suffered through a long period when writing a book seemed to be something I would never be able to do; and
• So many well-known writers imply that all you need to do is figure out how to organize your writing routine, whereupon turning out hundreds of words a day becomes no big deal. This is not true for 99.99% of mortals.
So here’s my story.
Write a book? You must be joking!
For the first fifty years of my life, I wrote very little. I went to a British school designed to cram students’ brains with what they needed to know to get into Oxford or Cambridge University. Choosing to be a physicist dictated that my English classes ended when I was 16 so I could exclusively study math and science.
In college, the only writing I did was lab reports, answers to physics questions, tests, and exams, and my Ph.D. thesis. Yes, my thesis was a book, but the required thesis style was so formal that it was easy for me to use the form.
My 1977 Ph.D. thesis
After a postdoctoral year at Tufts, I went on to manage a solar manufacturing company, teach college computer science, and develop a successful information technology consulting practice. I wrote what was needed for these careers, but nothing substantial.
And then in 2005, twenty-eight years later, I felt compelled to write a book about the new ways I’d developed to design and lead conferences that became what the participants wanted and needed. A dozen years of designing and facilitating these events, together with their enthusiastic reception, had convinced me that what I’d created was valuable and important.
I would never have become a writer if I had not felt this strong desire and excitement to share what I had stumbled upon with a wider audience.
“Never attempt to write something you don’t care about.”
Jerry was right. I would need every scrap of my conviction about the importance of peer conferences to persist in what followed.
Trying to write
To my dismay, when I sat down in 2005 and attempted to turn my thoughts into a book, I was unable to write more than a few coherent sentences before giving up in despair.
It took me weeks to flush out the simplest outline. Even writing one small section of the book seemed a hopeless task.
I tried many things. I:
set aside time to write every day;
created a special place in my home to write;
tried dictating into an early version of Dragon Dictate.
Nothing worked.
I felt stupid and incompetent. Attendees loved my events! The most common feedback was along the lines of “This was so great! I don’t want to go to another traditional conference again.” And yet I was incapable of putting into words the why? and the how? of what I routinely did at the conferences I convened and led.
After months of struggle, I might have given up if I hadn’t participated in a five-day Writer Workshop led by Jerry Weinberg in New Mexico. Jerry’s workshop helped me experience and believe that I was a competent, creative writer who needed to keep writing to get better. I began to write spontaneously about interesting experiences I was having. (Here’s a piece I like that I wrote in twenty minutes: “The Batch Fixer“.)
Despite my boosted confidence, I continued to stumble to write my book. True, I was also working, scaling back my IT consulting business, but I had plenty of time to write. My difficulties were not caused by lack of time. Instead, I felt largely incapable of writing sentences that conveyed what I wanted to say.
Yet somehow, I persevered.
My struggle lasted two years.
Slow progress, eventually leading to triumph
In 2007, something changed. There was no blinding flash of insight. The change came about through “practice man, practice“. But, slowly, I began to be able to write in ways that didn’t cause me to throw up my hands in frustration.
It took another two years to complete the draft of my first book. I found a wonderful editor, Anne Lezak, who was incredibly encouraging. Towards the end of our working relationship, she told me I was a good writer!
Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love was published in 2009. It was recognized fairly quickly as an important book on meeting design. 18 years later, the book is still in print and people continue to buy it!
Today, I am not a great writer, but a competent and, I hope, sometimes interesting one. Writing has become easier for me, though I still struggle at times. I continue to post every week on this blog, something I’ve been doing since 2009.
Three lessons I learned that may be helpful to you
Avoid reading successful writers’ descriptions of how they work! Why? Because every writer’s journey and process is different. Mine was unique, and yours will be too.
Don’t spend too much time learning from others. There are hundreds of decent books about the process of learning to write. I have thirty of them, mostly purchased as a distraction from actually practicing writing. If you only read one, make it Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. If you’re writing nonfiction, also consider Jerry Weinberg’s Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method.
Seek encouragement. Jerry’s workshop was a life-saver for me. Join a writing group. (I didn’t, but the right one would have helped.) In particular, share your plans for the book with people and writers you respect. I had lunch alone with Jerry during his workshop. His enthusiasm for my conference design work was a huge boost. I also benefited greatly from Naomi Karten‘s kind encouragement both in person and via email. Find your own mentors and use them sparingly and with appreciation. They can be a big help.
Final word
During his workshop, Jerry took us to a local writer’s group. I’ll always remember his big smile when I announced there, for the first time in my life: “I am a writer!” Jerry had primed us to do this when we were asked about ourselves! I’m not sure I fully believed it at the time, but now I can say it with confidence.
“I am a writer!”
My wish is for you to be able to say “I am a writer!” and know it’s true.
I freewroteThe Batch Fixer contemporaneously on April 10, 2006, in twenty minutes while waiting for a flight at Dallas Fort Worth airport. Enjoy! He’s sitting four chairs to my left. All was quiet when I chose this little island of seats on a ramp away from the C concourse gates. No cell phones in evidence, though I didn’t expect that to continue. What I didn’t know was that in the following 15 minutes, I would hear the word “batch“ spoken by one person more times than I’ve ever heard it in my entire life.
I don’t know where he is from — my knowledge of American accents is poor. He has a problem that I slowly and painfully piece together over a series of phone conversations.
The customer had received a batch – 30 gallons sprayed on — and it was the wrong color. The customer had received a new batch, which was the right color, rejected the new batch because it didn’t match, and returned the new batch to the factory. The factory had called to say that there was nothing wrong with the new batch. Joe had done a wet test, on paper and wood. He’d confirmed that the old batch was incorrect in some way. The salesman, who, by now I had given the name, Harry, had talked to several people, who also talked a lot and found that they didn’t want to replace the old batch because the customer would find out that they’d been sent a color that they had already used which wasn’t correct.
So Joe was going to create a blend of the old and new colors and send it to the customer.
By this time, I have formed a firm opinion of Harry’s organization. People there have officially defined roles. They like to talk and are ready to justify why things happen the way they do and why this isn’t their fault. PoorHarry is the fixer, the guy that has to get a solution for his customer and keep everyone else happy too, especially his boss. As he places his calls with one person after another, I hear different facets of the story. More details for Carmen, requests to the unknown boss for directions, a steady stream of justifications, and next steps for Joe.
Harry is patient and doesn’t lose his cool for a minute. He talks through the layers of bureaucracy and responsibility, his nasal voice constantly overlaying his discussion of the old batch, new batch, wet test, drawdowns on paper and wood, the shorthand of his working life, a code in which he swims, only translating when necessary.
He has left now. The flurry of calls eventually petered out with a sense that the problem had been handled, contained, until tomorrow at least when he will meet with Joe and start another round of negotiations and persistent persuasion.
While this was going on, I felt insulated. I had been reading a book on improv — on adjusting to circumstances in the moment and riffing. And here was Harry, batching it, batch, batch, batch, and my mind skipped and reeled as the flurry of batch punches assaulted my ears, delivered into my brain, flummoxing me into a place of inability to grok my reading.
I could’ve moved, put on my headphones, or inserted my earplugs. I thought of doing this. And yet I stayed with Harry, oddly fascinated. I wondered whether what Harry batched would suddenly be revealed. Would he suddenly break character, crack, stand up and scream, swear under his breath? But he did not. He wheedled his way to a temporary solution and stalked off to his gate, the fixer doing his job — fixing the batch.
My WordPress dashboard tells me I’ve written 750 posts since I began this blog exactly thirteen years ago. At least one new post every week since 2009. I have a few thoughts.
Surprise and delight
If you had told me back in November 2009 that I would be posting on this blog every week for the next 13 years I would not have believed you. I’d be sure that I would have run out of things worth saying. Yet I am still writing weekly posts — over half a million words to date! — with a healthy set of new ideas biding their time in drafts.
Did I underestimate my creative ability? Could I not see that my lifelong curiosity would guarantee the ongoing discovery of new things to write about? Did my initial difficulty putting pen to paper convince me that I’d never be able to keep up the effort to write something new week after week?
Probably all of the above. Educated in a Victorian-era environment, I was taught that creative people were artists and poets, not scientists like me. As a lifelong learner, I’ve always been curious and asked questions, so it turned out I will always be learning new things about the world and myself, some of which may be worth sharing. And after struggling for four years to write my first book, it was natural to assume that writing would always be hard for me.
So I’m surprised and delighted that I still have something to say. However, whether I would have kept writing continually since 2009 depends on an additional factor.
Gratitude
In 2009, about a million new blogs were started. As far as I know, no one was blogging about meeting design. There weren’t any obvious ways to let anyone know what I was writing about. Googling “meeting design” returned hits about meetings for designers. In 2009, this website received a mere 24,238 page views. Was I wasting my time?
Well, apparently not. The following year somehow brought in over 400,000 page views. The popularity of this website grew steadily, and it now gets about five million page views annually, putting it in the top one million active websites. Not bad for a niche site on a topic that few people ever think about!
And this growth has come about from tens of thousands of folks who have visited, subscribed to, and linked to my posts. ~1,300 subscribers get an email whenever I post. Social media, especially Twitter, brings significant traffic. And search engines are no longer flummoxed by the concept that people want well-designed meetings.
I am so grateful. Grateful to you: my subscribers, the folks who share my posts, and the thousands of people who have purchased my books. Without your engagement, support, and continuous encouragement, I would have given up long ago.
And, of course, I’m grateful for the friendships that have grown between us, the in-person and online experiences we’ve had together, and the community that we’ve developed over the years.
Love
Speaking of community brings me to love. Yes, love. We don’t talk much about love in the professional sphere. Isn’t it a little unseemly? Expression of pleasure and happiness is okay, but being genuinely effusive about loving your work might be awkward.
And, sure, most of us—me included—have spent time or are still spending time doing work that we really don’t fundamentally love. Which is a shame, even if it’s virtually unavoidable.
I have been blessed with finding work that I truly love to do.
(No, not every minute of every day of course. Writing posts, for example, isn’t always the most pleasant activity when you’re driven to share something new just about every Monday morning.)
For the last thirteen years, designing and facilitating hundreds of events, writing books that have influenced how meetings are thought about and held, and sharing a growing body of (now) 750 posts have been a privilege and a pleasure!
I love what I’ve done, the community that has made it possible, and the possibilities of an unknown future.
My book Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love has now been available for over five years in both paperback and ebook versions and is still selling well. I thought it might be of interest to share how the proportion of paperback versus ebook sales has changed over time. The following figures include both indirect (mainly Amazon) and direct (my web store) sales.
As you can see from the above graph, paperbacks were, on average, 82%, of sales when the book was published in 2009. Although there’s significant variation from month to month, due mainly to bulk sales of one format or the other, the five-year trendline shows that by March 2015, the most recent month for which I have full indirect sales figures, paperback book sales dropped to just over 60% of all sales.
The paperback costs $27.95 (Amazon) or $26.00 (from me directly), and the ebook format costs $11.00 (only from me). I haven’t changed any prices over the years, though Amazon plays tricks with the paperback pricing from time to time. These pricing levels provide me with approximately the same income per copy for direct sales, regardless of the format.
One factor that affects the quantity of new paperback sales is that, these days, there are usually a few used copies of the paperback available on Amazon for a few dollars under the new price. Sales of used copies reduce new copy sales. On the other hand, I expect some copies of the ebook get shared too.
An additional trend I am noting for my website sales is that combination sales (both ebook and paperback versions of the same book) have been increasing over the last year. I offer a discount when people buy both formats simultaneously. Consider this if you are selling your books yourself.
Conclusions
People still like paperbacks! Even though the ebook is 40% of the price of the paperback, I’m still selling more paperbacks than ebooks.
The ebook format is becoming more popular over time.If, and that’s a big if, the trend continues, both formats will become equally popular sometime in 2017. Interestingly, my new book The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action which has only been available for three months has sold about equal numbers of each format to date.
Don’t read too much into my experience.Conferences That Work is non-fiction, priced higher than most ebooks, and is only available as an ebook directly from me, so there’s no comparable Amazon sales channel. Your mileage may vary.
Are you an author with book format sales history of your own? Feel free to share your experience in the comments below!