Craft Your Content - As you wish 🌠

Welcome to The Writing Rundown, a weekly newsletter that offers advice, short essays, and reading suggestions to help driven writers (like you!) improve their writing craft. It's nice to see you here! If someone forwarded you this email because they love your writing, you can subscribe here.

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

“I'm interested in the moment when two objects collide and generate a third. The third object is where the interesting work is.” ― Bruce Mau

Elisa’s Thought for the Week

I’m thrilled that so many of you liked last week’s Writing Rundown! (Missed it? You can check out the archived version here.)

One of the top replies I got last week?

“How do you come up with ideas like this?”

So I wanted to give you a dirty Writing Rundown on the process last week’s essay went through.

1. Saw a video about the life cycle of a butterfly from a nature documentary in February 2023
2. Had the thought “Huh. That cocoon/chrysalis period is kinda like the incubation time in the creative process.”
3. Made a quick note in Google Keep to research that idea more for a newsletter essay
4. On Sunday, as part of my weekly review, I pulled ideas from Google Keep
5. Looking in Trello (where I’ll add newsletter ideas to a card, so I can collect further research and information) I found that there were no essays planned yet for the last two weeks of March
6. Made the connection between butterflies and spring, planning the essay for the newsletter closest to the spring equinox
7. Found some links and videos to watch, to learn more about the science of the life cycle of a butterfly (since the essay needed to be based on that, with a connection to writing)
8. When I sat down to review all the notes and research I’d collected at the beginning of last week, I kept seeing this phrase “imaginal discs” and wondered “Is the word imaginal related to the word imagination?”
9. Looked up the etymology of each of the words, and further researched the proto-etymology of the Latin root word (turns out they ARE derived from the same word)
10. Adjusted my focus of the butterfly life cycle to include more references to the imaginal discs, to reinforce the connection between butterflies/imaginal and writing/imagination
11. Once all this was rough outlined, I wrote the shitty first draft of the entire newsletter in about 90 minutes
12. Came back the next morning to review and revise that first draft and make some updates
13. Sent the essay to Joaquin, our Senior Copy Editor, to dot i’s and cross t’s and get the newsletter publishing ready
14. Reviewed his suggestions, approved them all (usually do, he’s kind of brilliant at this stuff!)
15. Tagged our Director of Production Erika Rasso to get the final draft scheduled into our email marketing system

That’s it!

Of course there are a few steps in there that were more involved, and I’m happy to share more about those parts of my process if you are curious.

Like the butterfly, it works better when you follow your natural instincts and don’t overthink this.

Eat your leaves, develop those imagination discs, sit down in a little cocoon, make your goopy nutrient soup, grow a slimy first draft in there, clean it up and soak up that sauce, and eventually let it explode out of its chrysalis for the world to see.

The world around you will always be your greatest writing inspiration.

And the best part? It might turn out better than you first imagined it.

What You Missed on Craft Your Content …

Our articles have the same mission we do — to help you to make your own words even better!

• (From the Archives: September 2017) As we continue our shift into spring (or autumn for our southern hemisphere friends), it’s worth looking at how the seasons affect our writing, and fortunately Melissa Lewis Grimm has all that information on CYC.

In Other Reading This Week …

Need more insights and inspiration for your writing and mindset?

• Why am I not terrified by AI writing? Have you seen autocorrect on a smartphone? Navneet Alang explains on The Atlantic why autocorrect is still this bad, but I think we’re ok for at least a while.
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• I’m committed to helping people improve their writing craft, but I don’t want you to toil away. As Thomas Frank explains, you can use this rule to push-back that perfectionist tendency and still grow.
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• Whether you are in content marketing or trying to market your content, we all need to be writing at least a bit for conversions. Liudmila Klimusheuskaja has a good 15 step process to content writing on Marketing Profs that makes it a lot easier!
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• As we get older, it is easier to isolate little by little, until we don’t meet a lot of new people. Especially writers who live in their heads. But Zac Solomon has some good suggestions for how to make friends as an adult over on Startup Social.​
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• Negativity is easy, and so is praise. Genuine criticism is much harder. So how does that apply to book reviews? Bookstagram reviewer Laura Sackton dives into that, and why she loves writing love letters to books, over on Bookriot.

Weekly Writing Tip …

A quick chance to learn from the masters.

“I'm so involved in the process that sometimes at the end of a day, I can look at the piece on my desk and really wonder how it got there. At other times, I really have to struggle with a piece to turn it into what I had in mind. Sometimes, I give up and leave it half finished to work on something else. Then in a few days, when I come back to it, I can see what it wants to be... which sometimes is not at all what I had in mind. When I just let that happen, things seem to go more smoothly.” ― Wendy Froud

Untranslatable …

Exquisite words from other languages.

Bricoleur [brih-CO-lurh] (n.) – From the French language, a bricoleur is someone who takes whatever materials and resources they can find, and creates something from it. They create bricolage, which in writing is shaping your text by referencing other sources (through quotes, translation, parody, etc.) Sorta synonyms: DIYer, tinkerer, pantser, jack(jane)-of-all-trades, improviser

This Week’s Writing Prompt …

We often do our thinking when we write.

What’s the last idea you had, that you never finished incubating or writing? Maybe it’s time you got around to it this week, eh?

This Week’s Writing Resource …

Why not use the tools at your disposal?

​Shift Happens — This cool little website simulates a typewriter (warning, turn down your volume before you start typing, unless you want a coronary like I had!) and you can save what you write as an image. Make your own typewriter art with your words!

For the Upcoming Week …

Because we all need a good chuckle to start things off right!

Real talk, though. It’s like summoning a demon some days.

Till next time! ~ Elisa