Tag: writing

I write because I think more and better. Writing makes me better. I’ve developed a daily writing habit, and it’s one of the best things I could do to improve my life. What if I also want to be read? That’s a beautiful creative tension between the force of expressing myself and the desire to have a following. If you don’t explore this relationship, you might fail in serving both: you will write weakly for an audience you won’t engage, and you will create frustration for not expressing yourself fully.

By applying canonical questions with a genuinely curious attitude, you might discover pathways to satisfy your inner desire to express your creativity and find the attention of other people.

Why should anybody read what you wrote?

It’s the research question at the center of our inquiry.

Why

The “why” it’s the starting point. It can be refined and reiterated.

Why should they even start to read it?

They need first to find your writing.

• How did they find it?
  • Are you publishing your writing?
  • Where? When? How?
  • Is your writing findable?

They need to find it interesting.

• What value are you providing to your audience?
• Why should they find it interesting?
• Are you showing up front the value of your content?
  • Do you write compelling titles?
  • Are you packaging your content in an appealing way to your audience?

Once they start to read it, they have to go until the end and extract value.

• Are you writing in a way that keeps the interest high until the end?
• Are you communicating the value effectively in your writing?
• Are you supporting your value with reference?

What form has your writing?

What are you writing? Online articles, blog posts, diaries, newspaper articles, academic essays, social media posts, etc.

How are the media and the style you’ve chosen affecting your findability, appeal, and effectiveness in providing value to your audience?

Where?

Is your audience finding your content in their most suitable environment?

Can they read it online, anywhere?

Can they access it using a mobile phone?

Can they read it even if they have special needs?

Can they read it when there is no connectivity?

When?

When they need it. when it is suitable for them to read it

Can your audience find value in your writing when they need it?

Are you publishing at the right time and in the right place for your audience to take to fullest advantage out of it?

Who?

Your audience depends on who you are and who you want to express when you write.

Do you have a defined identity expressed in your writing?

Are you aiming at particular objectives when you write?

Do you want to be recognized by specific types, classes, categories of people?

Are you address your audience in a way that makes them interested and called to action?

What

Your writing can take other forms. Have you thought about other communication forms: podcasts, live sessions (online, offline), lectures, tutorials, videos, etc.?

Define your communication strategy

When you stop writing for yourself only, and you caress the desire to reach more than one person, you need to start to work on your communication strategy.

All of the previous questions are just the beginning of a framework to explore deeply the reasons and the means driving your writing.

Writing is a creative and a professional activity allowing us to provide a service to others and to achieve our sustainability.

To pursue the ambitious goal of writing for self-development and getting a following, we must clarify our identity, mission, and the people we want to refer to identify the most suitable tools, techniques, frequency, approaches, and media to write.

I’d like to thank Kamil Hatimi, Gabriele Regio, and Tutuwa Ahwoi, for their kind contributions in discussing the draft of this article.,

I don’t like to do things twice. I get bored after one and a half time. It’s my joy and my pain. Neoteny leads to discovery. I’d like to have an insatiable curiosity. But I get bored. It’s painful when I have to accept the compromise of my writing’s outcome. It’s just good enough. It’s decent, maybe acceptable, sometimes good. What if I reread it and revise it? Too much work. Or, better, it might not be too long but, it’s boring. That’s where my cognitive dissonance chimes in at its greatest. Me, wanting to be read, with interest, with passion, and with a following, but not wanting to do the work needed to create such artifact. I am not unaware. I know the cure. To fine-tune a workflow, a method. Just write and rewrite. It’s that rewrite that really puts me in a difficult place—reading again, words vomited in a flow, almost unconsciously. So spontaneously spit. Who am I to revise what I have written? What right do I have to change the immediacy’s shape? If only I could develop more patience to take more care in words I am regurgitating, what would the noosphere reserve to me?

I can only dream about it.

Today, for sure, because I am not going to reread this piece.

Take this Grammarly!

A gradation is a set of intermediate steps or values between two extremes. Why is that interesting? It’s sporadic to find absolute values in nature that are always exactly the same.

It’s more a matter of minuscule differences around a value. It’s immediate to associate gradations with colors. If I think of “red” as a color, it will be something, very likely, different from the exact shade of color that another person would intend.

The word “gradient” comes to my mind, a transition between two values. The gradation can be smooth, or it can be jagged with perceivable steps.

The color spectrum is a scale of colors, the visible between red and violet and the invisible to human, the infrared and the ultraviolet.

Talking about scales, I think about music. If you want to practice with an instrument, The first thing you do is playing scales. You play each note in increasing sequence from the lowest to the highest, and then you go back. In this case, the gradation is made of steps.

The step size determines the granularity of the gradation. The larger the step, like a staircase, the bigger the walk to climb it. With infinitely small steps, you would have a ramp or a slide. 

We also can have a gradation of emotions. In a wheel of emotions, between being angry and happy, there are many gradations. And this comes along with the related words to express those emotions. From calm to quiet, agitated, nervous, anxious, excited, happy, elated, hilarious, there can be a nice progression of words in a gradation.

Something similar happens for tastes and cooking. For instance, different mixtures and quantities of ingredients combined can create different gradations of flavors. The same goes for smell and perfumes. Think about how a cook or perfume designer will create the recipe the same as a musician or a writer, or a painter would do with notes, words, and color.

A gradation is associated with intensity, value, scales, and precision because the more diverse gradations you know, the more precise you can be in your expression.

The same will be with color. Think about “Rosso Ferrari” or the darkest color ever invented, the umami taste, or the captivating and weird notes John Coltrane composed in his musical pieces.

A creative game of finding all the gradations around the key and putting them in a circle or a sequence or a gradient can be a valuable way to organize your tools. According to the context, you can assign different gradations.

Gradation is a phenomenon and a range of tools. The more gradations you have in your toolbox, the more precise and effective you can be when you want to express, design, and communicate.

Knowing gradations means recognizing more patterns, having a richer perception, and a richer capability to express yourself.

I am applying my structured writing method, and I like it. I started from version 2, I developed a couple of problems per article, I merged the six drafts into a 1’500-words essay. It must not be just an exercise for the sake of it. I want it to become my mission’s foundation.

This blog could be the idea development log where I write about how I worked on it and publish the progressive drafts.

In my notes, I would put, instead, the most current version.

This relieves pressure on finalizing and publishing articles as deep as this one. It creates quite a redundancy, though, but I have to live with it for now.

I don’t know if I will also be able to do the revision, but I am happy I could follow a structured process to write about a complicated topic like this one.

This is the perfect material to work on my Personal Knowledge Management System: a central prompt, many connected concepts, connections between them, multiple revisions, and refinements. A great start.

So, for the time being, I would declare myself satisfied with a hard-earned draft of:

My 12 Favorite Problems Version 3

I’ve been failing in the past when I needed to write a long article dealing with complex topics containing many details. I made another try by splitting the writing task into question-driven prompts. Then I assembled all pieces into a final draft.

I followed this creative process:

1.  Explore the topic/problem from multiple perspectives. Write an outline using the following questions:
   1. What is the problem? What is the solution?
   2. Why is the problem interesting and meaningful?
   3. Who is affected by the problem? Who has already solved it?
   4. When does the problem occur?
   5. Where does the problem manifest?
   6. How does the problem happen?
   7. How much is it affecting your life?
2. Develop each perspective in a dedicated article.
3. Integrate each component into the original outline.
   1. reread components
   2. integrate into the global article
      1. extract
      2. copy and paste
      3. concatenate
4. Revise the final draft
5. Share the final composition.

This process is promising and I will use it again, I have now to execute steps 4 and 5 as an iteration on the initial draft.

I am aiming at publishing 365 blog posts in a year, one per day. I have a good pace. I’ve reached 174 with this one, and I am almost halfways. I am risking making it a vanity goal to write just for the sake of it, only to say that I did it. While deliberate practice as this contributes to my writing skills, I am procrastinating the creation of longer and deeper pieces.

How would I feel if I stopped now? I am terrified I could never write again. In the end, I have not written daily for decades. How would it be like to write weekly? That’s how I started in 2019.

It’s a stupid idea. I won’t stop. Instead, I will plan a whole week of articles, and I will schedule writing time early in the morning instead of late at night.