I send a lot of emails every day.  Like I once mentioned, that’s the realization that cured me of writer’s block. But emails are super-temporary objects, at least the ones that don’t come back to haunt you, anyway.  They take an hour or so out of every day to write, and then they’re gone.  The next day, the process starts anew.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

If I write an email that’s longer than a paragraph, my new system is to stop and think if there’s ever going to be a chance I’ll write something like it again.  Then I try to think if I can invent a situation that would require a mail like that.  If the answer is close to yes, I take five extra minutes for some magic.

Basically, I take those emails, genericize them, and throw them into either a FAQ library that I can cut and paste, or into an autoresponder marketing chain.  Today’s reply to a prospect is going to be the basis for a seven step email sequence, for example.

The best part of a system like that is that it all forms the foundation for Operation: Replace Myself.  If my business is consistent enough in the kinds of clients I attract and the products and services I offer, the breadth of the emails I write to build and sustain that business is going to get covered over the course of a quarter or so and I’ll have a reusable email library.

Sure, I’ll evolve and enhance some of the messaging over time, but I’m looking forward to a week, not that far off, where 80% of the external mails I send out are either sent automatically or via a cut and paste swipe file that I could teach someone to use.

For now though, the idea that the work I put into an email (and make no mistake, I feel like I “craft” the majority of them, so if you get one, be sure to appreciate it, ha) will pay off more than once is pretty cool, and a new idea for me as I get out of the “well, I’m typing so I must be busy so I must be doing it right” mindset.

Photo by flattop341

I’ve spent the past several months now posting five times a week here, and I’ve recently started extending that practice to a few other ventures, both blogs and email newsletters.  All told, I probably write between 3000 and 5000 words a week on various topics, which I guess would work out to a decent book’s worth of writing a year (minus the need to edit etc.)

And I do it all effortlessly; I just sit down at the keyboard and away I go.  Zero writer’s block. Sure, I spend part of the day planning topics in the back of my mind, but overall it comes pretty easy to me and I don’t get stuck.  Here’s why:

A few months back I was studying the work of an internet marketer who mails his list twice a day, a commitment that I’m not nearly ready to embrace, and it’s a frequency that I don’t think my markets are ready for anyway.  (I’m pretty sure it was John Alanis, but one trick to keeping throughput up is to avoid extensive research.)

So, (probably) John put it something like this: how many emails do you send a day?

And that opened the door, through which I kicked my writer’s block, never to return.  Forget about emails received; I easily send 20 to 60 emails every day, averaging a paragraph or so each.  And somehow, they always just flow out of me.  Yes, they’re often replies, so they’re in response to a stimulus of some kind, usually a question.  But how hard is it to come up with a question or topic?

Once I had that mindset locked down, writer’s block became a thing of the past.  All I need now is a headline, and I can put 300-450 words together no problem.  Then I find a picture to go with them (I haven’t found one yet for this post, but I’m thinking a hammer smashing a block, because hey, literal much?) off of Flickr (I have a Creative Commons search bookmarked,) and I’m done for the night (these posts are usually done the night before, then postdated to some time in the morning.)

So there you have it – blog posts are just like emails, which I already know how to do. Writer’s block cured.

What do you do every day that’s similar to something you want to start?

Photo by razvan.orendovici

The Lettera 32 would be an awesome netbook if you could type silently

Lots of saved browser tabs accumulating (and some old mental bookmarks as well) surrounding Cormac McCarthy, who apparently wrote the book No Country for Old Men and The Road, both of which were movies as of late, though he’s been published since 1965, so it seems shallow to just highlight the stuff he’s written in the past 10 years.  I mean, they guy’s typewriter sold for a quarter million, and it helped build way more than two books.

But hey, it’s not like I’ve read anything by him.  I just accumulate the links and tabs and bookmarks until they spill over.

So.

Item the first, which is the most recent, is from this week by Hugh MacLeod, in which he retells the story of a young aspiring writer asking McCarthy for advice on starting writing.  The response was “Don’t do it unless you have to.”

That reminded me of a post from way way back on MemeMachineGo, which retold comics writer Alan Moore’s (Watchmen, V For Vendetta, lots of other good stuff) 5 tips for would-be comics writers.  The first, almost not surprisingly “don’t,” with tips 2 and 3 mirroring tip 1 in Fight Club style, but the one that always stuck in my head was item 5, paraphrased thusly: “if you’re going to be any good, you have to commit yourself to it like an ancient Greek or Egyptian commits himself to a god.”

That always stuck with me, but before we drill into that, we’re going back to McCarthy, who John Gruber quoted from a WSJ profile: “Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

I liked that bit, but that same interview yielded this gem, which was a little less bleak until you think of the ramifications: “If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it.”

You know, writing good code isn’t that much different than writing great works of literature, at least from a mindset perspective.  I think the biggest thing the blog and Twitter world has exposed is the (not altogether new) talent of making it look like you’re not working very hard on an all-consuming passion.