I was having lunch with Will Wilkinson in Iowa City, and as people who write (or in my case try) are apt to do, we complained about the difficulty and pain of writing. It made me feel better that a New York Times columnist and think tank policy director found writing as immiserating as I tend to.
Why writing is painful
Will brought up that it made a fair amount of sense for writing to be so challenging for most people. We evolved spoken language long ago, but alphabets arose only minutes ago in evolutionary time. Few are competent writers, fewer good enough to be paid for it, and almost none talented and find the process pleasant. This is the place we find ourselves when trying to write. Using a relatively new conceptual tool with a brain that isn’t set up to do it.
How to get paid to avoid writing (or something like it)
We agreed that lots of business travel is simply to avoid having to carefully think through scenarios and write clear emails. As someone who works for a consulting firm, I can attest to the truth of this. The higher you are in a Fortune 500 firm, the fewer sentences you write.
On some level, consulting firms are hired to help organizations avoid the pain of careful thought and writing and what they do is something like writing—if writing means introducing a conceptual model to a situation and explaining it. Many consulting engagements are essentially about finding the right mental model to use for a given scenario or creating one if none exists. Many consultants are quick at applying models and a minority are good creating new ones for novel scenarios. But few end up writing about them in helpful ways. Clients demand easily digestible PowerPoint decks, and overly detailed roadmaps, workstreams and swim lanes. White papers written by consultancies are marketing tools rather than documents intended to guide corporate policy in the way think tank papers intend.
Conversation as a writing hack
Strangely, talking is a much more pleasant experience than writing even for Will, who writes for a living. I find this to be true as well. Our brains are simply better equipped for it, and the instant feedback and improvement of ideas that happens within good conversation feel dopamine-esque to me much of the time. Will said the old days of blogging at a rapid clip in response to other folks’ blogs had a back and forth discussion quality that made it easier and more motivating to write. I’d imagine it’s hard on some level to put think tank white papers into the sort of rage-writing zone that many bloggers found themselves in. However, if you start your process by creating a relatively simple mental model, and then use conversation to flesh out the details, you can create some of the motivation that dialogues create. On average, I’ve been talking about a given idea for at least 3 months and normally a year before writing about it. These sorts of timelines won’t work in many instances, but if you have a week and a sympathetic (or captive) audience, you can increase productivity a significant amount by increasing motivation. Whether writing about sales for BTS or for this blog, I find myself in the lucky position that I can mostly write about ongoing conversations and 80% of the time avoid staring into the abyss.