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What does your writing process look like when you set out to write an entire book? I know a lot of HN users have blogs, but the idea of writing a whole book see
by galenmarchetti 3y ago
What does your writing process look like when you set out to write an entire book? I know a lot of HN users have blogs, but the idea of writing a whole book seems daunting. Would love to hear the details of your experience and what it looked like particularly for Tripping on Utopia
- benbreen 3y agoI wouldn't recommend my process to anyone, to be honest! I probably wrote a total of around 200k words over a four year period, of which I ended up cutting around 110k. I find it to be very true that you don't know what you actually want to say until you start writing things that aren't what you want to say. Then it's an iterative process of critiquing, rethinking, and starting over. I'm sure some people are able to start with a clear outline and then just plow through to the end, but I'm not one of them. In terms of research, I used to keep all my photographs of archival documents, PDFs of sources, etc in DEVONThink, but I switched over to using the standard Photos app on Macs. It has automatic OCR now so I'm able to search text that appears in photographs quite easily. I did a lot of oral history interviews to supplement the archival research. This book wouldn't have been possible up until recently because it's only in the past decade that so many historical archives have been digitizing their collections. I was able to visit the key archives in person, but with others, archivists were nice enough to send me scans of key documents. Super grateful to them.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThanks for writing this up. I’m on my own writing journey and it’s inspiring to hear that its as chaotic to others and I’m finding it (while also being productive). So cheers to that!