Writing Secret 4: Effective Nonfiction Writers Cycle Between Writing, Thinking, & Learning

If you've ever tried to write nonfiction, you probably encountered these problems:

• Your readers only understood what you wrote. Not what you meant to write.
• Only some readers got value from your pieces, not everyone.
• The writing you ended up with at the end might have looked very different from the piece you started with. You had to iterate over the piece to get it “right.”

If so, you are a “normal” nonfiction writer.

And, if you ever wrote code, do these problems look familiar? The computer only understood what I wrote down, not what I meant. My initial view of the code was always different from the end reality. I had to iterate over the code to get it right, especially for the ideal user.

If you're like me, you learned and thought as you wrote code.

That's what effective nonfiction writers do, too.

As we write, we learn what we think. We then integrate that learning and thinking into the next bit of writing time.

Some of you learn by outlining or mindmapping. If you do, excellent. Outlining and mindmapping don't work for me as a way to start or keep going. I need to write to understand what I know.

How I lntegrate Writing, Thinking, and Learning

I only learn what I think by:

• Write down. (Often in a 15-minute block.)
• Evaluate the logic and ideas to see if that's what I think.
• Cycle to correct the writing when I realize there's a difference between what I think and what I wrote down. (Cycling is not editing. See Writing Secret 2: Increase Writing Speed When You Separate Writing From Editing to understand more.)
• Loop back to the start, to write down.

If you would like to learn your “system” to be an effective nonfiction writer, please join the Q2 2022 Free Your Inner Writer Workshop. You will learn how you write, and to integrate your thinking and learning as you go. Please join us.