On Writing - John Lennon, Gerald M. Weinberg, Me, You, And Outlook 2007

What do you, me, John Lennon, and Gerald M. Weinberg have in common? Short answer – we all writers.

Longer answer – we collect materials for our writing in very similar way. John was stuffing his pockets with papers, Gerald collects fieldstones, and I dig[g] for gold nuggets. What about you?

by Ryan McD

Most of the bloggers are after writing a book. I am sure you too. I am no exception. Then how do you build up your book?

John Lennon’s way of writing a book

I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book. — John Lennon

Gerald M. Weinberg’s Fieldstone method

Gerald M.Weinberg has written a great practical book - Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. He compares collecting materials for your writing with collecting fieldstones for building a fieldstone wall. The book packed with practical exercises and with healthy dose of humor which makes it very enjoyable for reading that gains results too. It is hard to argue with Gerald’s success– he wrote ton of books…

My gold nuggets collection method

I am no different from John and Gerald (ha-ha-ha-ha!!!). Well, may be a bit – I use different tool for collecting gold nuggets for my writing, I use Outlook 2007. There are primarily three sources of gold nuggets:

• Blogs. I use Outlook 2007 as my RSS reader. The following posts outline how I set up Outlook for gold nugget hunt and the hunt itself:
  • How to Use Outlook 2007 RSS To Effectively Aggregate And Distill Information
  • How To Stay Up-To-Date: 15 Minutes, 150 Posts Scanned, 3 Gems Found
• Emails. Review “Rule #3 – Knowledge nuggets go to personal KB” in Keep Your Inbox Clean , Stay Focused And Productive – My 4 Simple Rules. This ensures I’ve captured emails with gold nuggets for further reuse.
• Personal ideas. First set up the Outlook 2007 shortcuts as outlined in Email Processing On Steroids – Use Built In Shortcuts And Set Up Your Own. Then use “Post in This Folder” to create and categorize notes in order capture your ideas.

The result is well ordered  pipelines of items that can be quickly processed for any purpose, including writing books.

I took my Outlook 2007 even further and developed Outlook 2007 add-in that grabs all the items and generates a document of it - Generate Documents Out Of Mail Items Directly From Outlook 2007.

Too freaky? Guess so… checkout the book I generated from several latest blog posts of mine - download PDF file and see yourself. Does not it look like a book? Few clicks-to-done. [I am aware of few freaky characters in it – call it a bug that I need to fix].

Self Test

• Are you collecting your stones?
• Are your stones easily can be fit into a book?
• Why didn’t you write a book yet?
• Want clear answers and prescriptive guidance on writing a book?

Read Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method and implement the techniques that suits you best – papers in your pocket, Outlook 2007, or other habit.