Reader,

Over the past week, I combed through nearly four years' worth of my email newsletters.

I cringed in anticipation as I made my way back to the very first emails that I sent. But you know what? As I read them, I thought they were actually pretty good. A lot of those early newsletters didn't make the cut for my first book draft, but that was because they aren't related to The Thrill of Writing.

What WAS embarrassing was my discovery that, just over two years ago, I made this proclamation:

Talk about a confidence booster, eh? As I said to you three weeks ago, "Just because I've helped others [write their books] doesn't mean I'm guaranteed to finish my own."

It begs the question, "What's different this time around?" Or maybe, better yet, "Are things different this time around?"

The answer to the second question is, "Yes." The rest of this email will answer the first.

I don't know why you write in public—assuming you have a newsletter, a blog, a social media feed, or some other outlet to share your words with the world—but I tend to do it as a way to process what I'm thinking about. When I worked my way through The Artist's Way, I wrote daily posts on LinkedIn to share what I was noticing and help myself make sense of what I was learning. The same thing happened when I reread The War of Art, though I processed that book in weekly emails split between my short-lived Substack and this newsletter. Other times, I used these weekly emails to prepare for classes I was teaching ("The Art of a Good Sentence" and "Recovering a Sense of Play in Your Writing").

What that means is that I've already amassed a lot of material for The Thrill of Writing. Whereas my previous book idea, one I'd still love to come back to one day, required a lot of new research and writing, my current project already exists as a very messy, incoherent first draft.

That's the benefit of writing in public. Although very little of what I've written is fit to be printed, I'm not starting off from scratch. Thanks to my efforts over the past week, I now know that I've got just over 30,000 words to work with:

And what's more, that doesn't include anything from history of LinkedIn posts. That'll be the next section I dig through.

If you're curious about my process for compiling what I've written, here's my approach:

• I started by asking myself the same two questions I shared with you: what do I want to write and who do I want to write it to? As meta as that work might sound, it's crucial. Without clarity on those two points, I don't know which pieces to collect and which to leave off to the side.
• Then I started reading my newsletter. As I said above, I started at the beginning and worked my way to the present time. The benefit of starting with the old stuff first is that I reacquainted myself with things long forgotten. This actually served to bolster my confidence: the themes I want to explore in The Thrill of Writing are not new to me. I've been chasing this topic for the past three years.
• Some writers like to keep their entire manuscript in one giant document. I am not one of those writers. Personally, I find that overwhelming at this stage of writing. I'd much rather look at things piece by piece. (Also, long docs tend to be laggy, which is frustrating when you're writing and editing.) So, each email I decided to save has been stored in its own Word document.
• For outlines, I like to use an Excel sheet. That may horrify some of you. Excel doesn't exactly scream "creative" or "artistic." Yet, I've found that it's a remarkably handy tool for tracking one's outline. Not only can I see a clear list of everything, but I can arrange things into sections, use drop-down menus to keep track of that status of each chapter, and record my word count so I have a sense of where I'm at in the big picture of things.

As you can see from my screenshot above, I've got over fifty chapter/essay ideas already logged. I have not edited or rewritten anything yet. I'd like to finish collecting everything before I set to that work. That's why this week's work is to read through my backlog of LinkedIn posts. But once I've done that, I'll tackle one of my favorite parts of this process: organizing all of this content into sections and themes.

And that will be the topic of next week's email.

Do you have questions or comments? I know some of you are working on your own books. I'd be curious to hear about your process if you care to share.

Keep your stick on the ice.

Frank Ewert
Writer, Editor, & Book Coach who believes that writing should be fun
Author of Embrace Your Writer's Block and Blue Ice​