Making What Can't Be Sold
How do you turn a jumble of thoughts into a cohesive project?
Welcome to the 3rd edition of This is Not Advice, my advice column that’s not an advice column for paid subscribers of What Works.
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This week, I am tackling a question that came up during last week’s workshop on media ecosystems (link to replay below!) and that my husband Sean asked me just this morning. It also came up a number of times during a workshop on audio essays that I taught earlier this year.
So I’m going to assume this is something that a lot of folks struggle with—myself included on a regular basis.
Here’s the gist:
I’ve accumulated lots of thoughts that I want to turn into a cohesive project—
maybe a book, a podcast series, an online course, even a single essay.
How do I even begin working on something like that?
Turning ideas into projects is a valuable skill in the 21st-century economy.
Whether your thing is making an app or producing a documentary or organizing a protest, they’re all a matter of turning disparate ideas into cohesive projects. Thanks to some combo of education, self-help advice, and professional growth workshops, even our identities have become projects. So yes, this question is a pressing concern for many.
Anyhow, there was a not-so-long-ago time when I would have had a hard time answering this question for myself. Every project I embarked on and completed felt like the result of luck. Luck gave me a vision of the completed thing so that I could make it real in whatever form it took. There was no “figuring it out;” there was no process. Either my brain produced the spitting image of the final product for me to recreate—or I couldn’t create it.
It was also my luck that I got along this way fairly well. I could churn out enough projects in this fashion that I kept a roof over my head by earning the attention of people who were willing to pay me for these projects. But I’d get frustrated when my ambitions outpaced my luck. I wanted to stretch myself and make more remarkable work, but my luck didn’t reach that far.
So I had to change my approach. In my book, I called this “practice.” For me, practice is presence, process, and groundedness. And developing a practice can apply to all sorts of endeavors. Since we’re talking about a certain kind of project today, I’m going to use a different word—revision.
Revision is a practice, and it happens to be critical to creating remarkable work.
Revision feels unproductive. It’s often slow, inefficient, and results in gobs of work that hits the wastebasket instead of the final piece. Revision flies in the face of everything that we’ve learned as neoliberal capitalist subjects. Productive work is literally work that creates a product. And embracing revision requires making work that won’t be sold.
If writing is 90% revision, as I believe it is, no wonder people claim to dislike writing—we’ve been conditioned to feel like it's wrong. Our resistance to the work of revision is a byproduct of market forces. And yet, revision is the only way to turn a jumble of thoughts into a cohesive project.
I’ve noticed—both in myself and others—that we often try to get the revision out of the way before we start drafting. We try to overcome every mental hurdle before we put words on a page, turn on a mic, or start laying down code. That way, the act of making something feels as efficient as possible. We try to avoid the revision process that would come in later steps and, in so doing, avoid starting.
I realized a few years ago that embracing revision was the only way I could fulfill my ambitions. I had to be willing to produce words, sentences, and even whole drafts that would never be published. Never be sold. I had to make those going-nowhere fragments and notes in order to make the things that should be published, could be sold, would realize my ambition.
If I can only approach a jumble of thoughts when a vision of the final product appears to me, I will be haunted by the specter of projects that could have been, while actually creating very little (or creating little I’m satisfied with). But if I approach my jumble of thoughts in a succession of attempts I’m willing to throw out, I’m not only more likely to make the project a reality, but that product will be better for it.
It’s those attempts—the stabs in the dark—that teach me how to turn the jumble of thoughts into a cohesive project.
I will share my process with you in the terms I know it best—which is composing essays (both written and audio). My hope is that it’s helpful beyond “just” the writing process and can be applied to all sorts of media production.
Sean asked me (as others have over the last few months) whether I start with an idea or a collection of research. The answer is either. Sometimes I start with an idea and turn it into a collection of research. And sometimes, I start with a collection of research and turn it into an idea. This is the work of a first draft. Like Didion, I write to discover what I think. I write to figure out my argument, to find the boundaries of my idea, or to locate the questions I didn’t know I wanted to ask.
Step One
My first draft is often a series of vignettes. Or points in an argument that lack a fully formed position or thesis. Or the impression of networked thoughts that can’t be expressed cohesively yet. In other words, my first draft rarely resembles the form of a completed work. More like a pile of sticky notes. It’s a mess.
The piece that I just published on the rhetoric of work requirements stayed in Step One for a long time. I wrote vignette after vignette. It was truly a jumble of thoughts, and the only way out was through. I had to be willing to research and write out each of my thoughts to find the ones I could stitch together into something (hopefully) coherent and relevant to my readers. All told, I trashed about 2500 words.
Step Two
Between the first and the second draft, my job is to figure out what I want to say. Ideally, I express this in a question or thesis statement. If what I want to say is, in effect, “it’s complicated,” then I’ll use a question. If what I want to say is an argument or explanation, then it’s a thesis statement. Once I’ve arrived at that by reviewing my first draft, I can prepare to create the second draft.
If it’s a particularly complicated (for me) piece, I’ll write a full outline first. If it’s more straightforward, I might copy & paste from the first draft to create a skeleton to work with. I work at the structure in this phase and often find that a few of my vignettes become chapters in the final piece. One vignette might be a story, another an explainer, and still another some insight or analysis. I play with the order of these chapters until I like the way it flows.
Step Three
After the second draft is done, I try to figure out whether I was successful in addressing either the question or the thesis. Did I explore the question thoroughly? Is my exploration cohesive? Or, did I argue my point convincingly? Have I missed any background or connections that need to be fleshed out to make my case stronger? That’s the work of the third draft.
Step Four
Finally, I can start polishing. I consider the best way to present the piece. How will I format it? How will the formatting make things clearer? What does Grammarly have to say about it all—and do I agree?
Now I have something that resembles a finished project—although it often still needs work.
As I’ve experimented with different content forms over the last few years, I’ve noticed that translating my “finished” project into another content form can help me figure out what still needs work. I might make a diagram or build out a slide deck. At the least, I probably record it as a podcast episode, and as I edit the audio, I discover small tweaks that, to my mind, make a big difference.
Part of the revision process also seems to be recognizing that I won’t ever get a project to the place where I am 100% happy with it. But I can get it to a place where I’m satisfied with it. I can feel good that I’ve made my argument or poked and prodded at my question with thoughtfulness and intention.
Revision is a different approach to work.
The only way to transform a jumble of thoughts into a cohesive, valuable project is to start, knowing that the first attempts, perhaps many attempts, will be garbage.
Perhaps you’re thinking, “Wow, that sounds like a lot. I don’t have time for that kind of thing.” And you know what? That’s probably true. I’ve made a series of difficult choices to find the time for revision. And while those decisions have been good for my health, they haven’t been kind to my nearly non-existent retirement savings.
This is one of the reasons I think and write so much about work. We’re so caught up in churning out work we can sell—to customers, to managers, to clients—that we don’t have time to revise. Perhaps worse, we learn to discount the value of revision. We don’t value the necessarily unproductive work that is critical to making things, on our own or with others, that are useful and meaningful.
And if we don’t value that, what are we really doing here?
I believe we need a fundamental reworking of how we work and what we expect from that work because the way we work now is keeping us from making our best work. A good place to start might be finding the willingness to make what won’t be sold.