The Secrets To Cal Newport's Article Writing System

00:00:00.000 | Hey, it's Kyle Newport here. This is my weekly update video where I give you a look inside my

00:00:06.400 | struggles as a professional writer, professor, and podcaster to work deeply in an increasingly

00:00:12.880 | distracted world.

00:00:26.480 | I have two things I want to talk about today. First, I recently published my latest article

00:00:32.560 | for The New Yorker. This was a 5,000 word long form piece. I thought this would be a good occasion

00:00:38.000 | to give you a peek inside my long form article writing process. So I'll walk you through how I

00:00:45.520 | actually put that article together from the original conception to publication. Second,

00:00:50.560 | I want to give you an update on my book, Slow Productivity, let you know what I've finished,

00:00:56.320 | where my word count is, what my plan is going forward for the next month or so.

00:01:00.640 | All right, so let's start talking about my long form article writing process. So this latest

00:01:07.280 | article for The New Yorker was titled something like, "What Hunter-Gatherers Can Teach Us About

00:01:14.080 | Improving Work." That's not quite right, but it was a title like that. But the premise of this

00:01:18.160 | article was to look back at the deep history of the concept of work. So going all the way back to

00:01:25.280 | the 300,000 years we spent during the Paleolithic age, living in small hunter-gatherer tribes,

00:01:31.840 | look back at what work meant for us throughout most of that history, and then compare that

00:01:37.680 | to what work means today for those of us who work in knowledge work at a computer screen all day.

00:01:43.200 | And the premise was where we find big mismatches between what we used to do through most of our

00:01:49.040 | history and what we do today, we might find places where work is making us exhausted,

00:01:53.280 | where work is frustrating us, we might get some ideas for reforming modern work.

00:01:58.160 | So that was the concept I had from the beginning. That was the concept I pitched, but that's very

00:02:04.000 | broad. So how do we get from that concept to a 5,000-word edited piece? I want to bring you

00:02:11.600 | into my process. So I've loaded up here actually on my computer the Scrivener file I used to write

00:02:17.040 | this article. So it's a look back essentially through the history of this piece. And I can

00:02:21.440 | tell you where I started with this piece, as I do for some but not all, was actually with one of my

00:02:27.040 | research assistants. He read a bunch of books, he read a bunch of articles, loaded it all into

00:02:32.320 | Google Doc, came back here to the HQ. We spent an afternoon just talking it through, bouncing

00:02:37.200 | the ideas off of each other. This is me just trying on what seems interesting here, what doesn't. And

00:02:43.440 | it gave me an entry point into this topic area. Once that work was done, I created the Scrivener

00:02:50.640 | project for this article. Scrivener is what I use to do my non-fiction writing. And the very first

00:02:55.760 | thing I did was created a folder. I'm looking at it right now, where I brought into it every article

00:03:02.160 | that my research assistant had found, every note that he had sent me, and a rough summary of the

00:03:09.440 | conversation that we had. So that is now the research seed for this article. The second thing

00:03:16.160 | I do is added a current outline file. So every one of my Scrivener projects in the research section

00:03:25.920 | on the left bar, I always have a current outline file. I put three asterisks on either side of it,

00:03:32.240 | so it'll get eye-catching. I can put at the top and it's eye-catching. It's the sort of master

00:03:37.360 | file. And I began working on an outline. This brings me to the next stage of the writing process,

00:03:41.520 | which is significantly more research to support the specific outline I have now written. See,

00:03:48.800 | the sequencing here is important. I need to know something about the field before I can write a

00:03:53.440 | good outline. But I need a good outline before I know what else I need to know about the field.

00:03:58.160 | And so I'm looking now at my research folders on Scrivener. I see one, two, three, four,

00:04:03.760 | five different directories full of notes on particular topics, plus an additional, I counted

00:04:09.920 | it earlier, 29 different additional files and papers I found along the way that didn't fit into

00:04:16.000 | one of those directories or the other. So I have a large amount of research notes. Everything that

00:04:21.360 | I might use in the article is here. Up to this point, this had been largely second shift work.

00:04:29.120 | So if you've listened to my earlier weekly updates where I introduced this concept,

00:04:33.200 | typically what I do is have a first shift, second shift project when I'm doing deep work. The first

00:04:38.640 | shift gets the morning, it gets the most of my time and attention. The second shift is usually

00:04:43.360 | something a little bit less cognitively demanding. That happens in the afternoon.

00:04:47.600 | When it became time to start writing that first draft, the New Yorker piece now becomes first

00:04:52.480 | shift work. I can't write at that level in the afternoon. As an aside, it has to be my main

00:04:59.040 | point of concentration for that day. Now, I don't know exactly how long it took me to write this

00:05:03.520 | first draft. I think it was three weeks if I remember. And it was a beast. 7,000 plus words

00:05:10.560 | I wrote just day by day, piece by piece writing it. Now, here's an important distinction. As I

00:05:17.520 | write, I keep coming across things where I don't have the right source or don't know enough

00:05:22.160 | information. So I will stop my writing at that point, find that research, bring it in the Scrivener.

00:05:27.120 | So those six folders and 29 or 30 pieces of extra research I talked about, that's where I ended up.

00:05:33.760 | Not where I started. That grows as I write. I just write day after day, slow and steady.

00:05:39.520 | If the next section I need to write in the article needs a lot of research and that takes up the rest

00:05:44.640 | of my time that morning finding the research, that's what I do. So I get to the end of this.

00:05:48.400 | Now I've done three weeks of writing. I've been doing research on this article for well over one

00:05:53.280 | or two months at this point. 7,000 words. I give it some breathing room, put it aside, work on

00:05:59.920 | something else, come back to it, I look at it. And in the case for this article, I looked at those

00:06:03.360 | 7,000 words and said, "This isn't it." That's all just gut. But it was a little flabby.

00:06:11.120 | The through line of the logic in certain places I thought was not as rock solid as it could be.

00:06:16.880 | The structure wasn't pulling me fast enough through. I thought the structure had a little

00:06:22.000 | bit of extra weight on it. It just wasn't right. And what I did at this point is I just told my

00:06:28.000 | editor, "I've written a bunch. I don't think it's right. I'm taking another swing." Back to first

00:06:33.600 | shift work, blank page, pulling stuff from the old draft as needed, wrote it again from scratch.

00:06:40.880 | This time I came in at 5,000 words and this was something I could work with. That was the piece I

00:06:47.200 | then went through several editing drafts. Again, first shift work until that was ready for

00:06:51.920 | submission. And then it goes into the whole production process. Those details I'll leave

00:06:56.160 | aside for now. That's when I've been working with the magazine to get it ready. And the only thing

00:07:00.880 | I want to add to that is figuring out how to start over. This was largely something that was

00:07:06.400 | accomplished on foot. And again, my memory for this piece, it was one walk, one long walk where

00:07:12.240 | I started working through why wasn't the original piece working? What might work better? And it was

00:07:18.880 | in that walk that I came up with a brand new construction that was a little bit ambitious for

00:07:25.360 | me, but I thought would work better. If you read the article, you will see it's a construction in

00:07:29.120 | which I interleave Apple computer and the protest among their employees about the return to the

00:07:35.840 | office. I interleave that with work from the 1960s of a pioneering anthropologist studying an

00:07:41.440 | extant hunter-gatherer tribe. I go back and forth, go back and forth until the connection is finally

00:07:47.120 | made clear. And then I keep this intertwining through the rest of the piece. The other thing

00:07:51.920 | I figured out as I was going along on this article, just to let you in a little bit, was the

00:07:56.080 | strip back, strip back, pulled out detail, tightened, get in, get out, make the point, give

00:08:02.000 | the evidence. So that's what it looks like to write a piece like this. It's a chicken and the egg

00:08:07.200 | problem up front where you need to know enough about the topic in order to actually figure out

00:08:10.960 | what to write about the topic, which teaches you what you want to figure out about the topic. That's

00:08:14.960 | all circular. Then you have to just write. Then you have to just be ready to say this doesn't work.

00:08:19.600 | Then you're walking, then you're thinking, then you take another swing and you do that till

00:08:23.040 | you get it. Let's give another quick update on my book, Slow Productivity. I'm loading up the

00:08:29.760 | Scrivener project for that right now. So as mentioned in previous episodes, the book has two

00:08:35.360 | parts. Part one, part two. Part two is the longer. I'm done with part two. I finished that last week.

00:08:41.600 | I have a nice draft of that that I'm ready to submit to my publisher. I'll load it up here.

00:08:47.760 | Part two ended up being, this was a good 30,000 words of well-edited text. And I am now,

00:08:57.600 | have begun part one. Three major chapters to write in there, about halfway through the first.

00:09:03.280 | My goal for the rest of November is I would like to finish that first chapter. I wanted to finish

00:09:10.080 | the second chapter in November. Right now I'm aiming at be significantly into that second

00:09:14.560 | chapter by the time I get to December. So again, I'm a little behind still where I wanted to be,

00:09:22.080 | but roughly on track. This is back to my first shift work right now. It's what I did this morning.

00:09:27.520 | It's what I'm going to do tomorrow morning. Write first thing, write first thing. The research

00:09:32.160 | collection, the Scrivener for this book is getting pretty big because it cites a lot of things.

00:09:36.720 | There's a lot of quotes, a lot of show don't tell in this. And so I'm getting a pretty rich

00:09:41.440 | collection of folders and subfolders and subfolders full of articles, but I'm still having fun with

00:09:46.320 | it. Progress is still happening. So that's where the book is more or less on track. That's a look

00:09:51.440 | inside my long form articles. I'll be back next week for a new update.

The Secrets To Cal Newport's Article Writing System | Weekly Update #6

Chapters