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Write in the editor Vol. ?

October 8, 2018

I’m writing in the editor again. When I do, I finish posts. When I don’t, I don’t finish posts.

I write in Evernote and Ulysses often. Over the past weekend I broke things down so and made a bunch of different notes in Ulysses to treat as components to put a newsletter together.

Mission accomplished: Now I have a bunch of pieces that I need to put together as a newsletter.

What I don’t currently have is the urge to finish that up. Instead I’m writing this post about finishing things.

When I was planning how I’d break things down it had a familiar feeling of previous times I wrote a little at a time and then let things linger as a giant draft too long. Then I never got around to ever posting anything.

That newsletter post is a few thousand words long and it’s about 80% of the way there. I need to remember just how long everything can take.

Also, the math for motivation doesn’t work that well. Let’s say I have 2 posts:

  1. 500 words long
  2. 2500 words long

It might seem like editing would take 5x as long but it seems to take more like 10-15x as much time and energy. There’s got to be some kind of mountain climbing analogy. It’s a light at the end of the tunnel thing.

(And by editing I don’t really even mean culling words and improving the writing. Pretty much making sure I add links and get rid of all the notes to self. Which is another thing about writing giant pieces. Scanning it end to end takes longer because there’s so much less confidence that you caught everything that could be in there. My point is: Writing a book is probably 1000x worse.)

Ok I’m going to just post this and put it out into the world.

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By Francis Cortez

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Back to homepage • By Francis Cortez (@activerecall)