Steve's writing process?

[Gallivanter]

Hello,

I find Steve's writing to be usually very clear, logical, and lucid. I am impressed and very curious about how he consistently maintains such high quality of writing while being so prolific!

Does anyone know if Steve has written a detailed account about his writing process? I did a quick search, but couldn't find anything that specifically talks about what his process is for writing his posts.

Steve, if you read this, please consider writing a post on what your process is for writing -- from idea formation, to organizing your arguments, to getting it down on paper, to editing.

Thanks!

[supertom]

This ones more about the idea forming of his articles.
My Experience of Creativity
and how we can experience this too.
7 Rules for Maximizing Your Creative Output

[NSS]

How I Write

[asleep]

Some of my opinions (as well as some facts) on something I've thought about quite a bit over the years:

- Steve's values clarity and simplicity/minimalism. Add that with the habit of journaling. Steve has also read a lot, programmed a lot, and written a lot. Each word in a program is critical and requires scrutiny. In other words each word must be consciously selected for a defined purpose. He's had practice doing this a lot. Large vocabulary, lots of exposure to making good sentences. He can make a sentence well. You don't say in two sentences what one could say. You don't use two words to represent something when one could do.
- Linear thought. He doesn't skip from A to C, there's clean progression.
- Purposeful. Focused. Doesn't try to talk about more than one thing at a time, and it's generally all focused around one primary theme.
- Audience. He's genuinely talking to you, but he can craft his work to be delivered to you as best as it can be as a monologue.
- Has a large amount of knowledge about what he's writing about. He can shoot it out of his mind quickly.
- Has good taste and experience for organizing all this knowledge after he's written about it.

[Gallivanter]

Thank you all! I'm reading your referrals now.

[asleep]

1. Define a primary objective for the article (inform, persuade, entertain, or inspire).
2. Brainstorm topic ideas, or review the list of reader-submitted topic suggestions.
3. Select a topic.
4. Do a quick and dirty, free-form writing session to get ideas down without regard to structure.
5. Decide how to organize the ideas for clarity (chronological, topical, hierarchical, sequential, etc).
6. Sort the output of #4 based on the desired structure. Define the main sections and subsections.
7. Identify supporting material to include (examples, analogies, quotes, statistics, images, stories, etc), and add it to the outline.
8. Refine the outline from #6 and #7 for completeness and balance.
9. Expand each section of the outline into paragraphs (and bullet lists if appropriate).
10. Insert meaningful subheadings into the article.
11. Write the opening.
12. Write the closing.
13. Edit the article for content, clarity, and conciseness.
14. Spell-check the article.
15. Brainstorm possible titles for the article (clear, interesting, keyword-rich).
16. Select a title.
17. Select blog categories for the article.
18. Decide when to post the article (now or future-post).
19. Publish the article.
20. After the article has been online for several hours, evaluate reader feedback and fix any reported typos.

(Steve wrote the above - I had it saved from his blog)