(upbeat music) - All right, Jesse, what do we got next? - All right, next question we got. Andrew, he's got some ideas about writing for a technical audience, and he wants your thoughts on that. So let's fire away with Andrew here. - Hi, Cal, longtime listener, first time caller.

My name is Andrew, and I work as a virtual CFO who also builds data pipelines for my clients. I found some interesting topics when combining those two worlds that I'd like to write more about. I'm specifically writing more about timeless business management principles and combining those with the new data-rich world that we're in.

I've written for more of a general audience in the past, but I'm toying with the idea of writing for an academic or research journal type audience. My background is in finance and accounting, which did not have a lot of writing in school, so I feel like this is a blind spot for me.

What advice do you have for a non-academic trying to write for this world, and are there any resources you'd recommend checking out? Thanks, Cal. - There definitely is a gap between general audience writing and academic writing. Probably as much as anyone else in the world I know about this gap, as I'm someone who has done quite a bit of both.

General audience writing in some sense is harder, right, because you actually have to deploy more craft to do general audience writing well. So the actual writing itself is harder to do, the clarity of the ideas, the structure of the writing, the examples you give, the narrative momentum that brings people from one idea to the other, the introducing a lay audience to complicated ideas without overwhelming them, by giving them enough to latch onto so they can keep figuring out what you're trying to talk about.

That's all hard from a craft perspective. When it comes to technical writing for, let's say, a journal, an academic journal, you have to be clear, but no one really cares about the craft. You don't have to have a lot of narrative momentum in your journal article. You don't have to have nice illustrative examples.

You don't have to worry about redundancies. You don't have to worry about the issue of, you know, I mentioned this thing earlier and it needs to pay off here, and I need the end to call back the beginning. You don't need a turn or a nut necessarily in academic writing.

It's more workmanlike. You wanna write clearly, you're conveying the information, but the real craft in academic writing is generating that information in the first place. Here's the theory, here's the experiment, here's the idea. So it's two very different worlds. Now, I will say as an aside, I sometimes bring the craft that I have worked on in the world of general purpose writing to my academic papers.

I will sometimes, for example, as I'm known among my collaborators to do, obsess over introductions, wordsmith them so it flows really well and there's a storyline. Here's the thing, none of that really helps. I mean, I think the readers appreciate it. I have not seen a discernible impact on whether or not my papers get accepted or not into academic venues if I write at a, let's say a New Yorker style introduction to my academic paper.

So I do it because I can't help it, but it doesn't really matter. If you're gonna do academic writing, don't wing it. You have to understand for the venue that you're writing for, what is required for a paper to be accepted for publication? Who needs to be on that?

Like, can you do this as a virtual CFO who specializes in building data pipelines for the journal you wanna write for? Can you just write for them from that perspective or do you need an academic co-author? So who needs to be on these paper? What is the level of original theory or ideas that needs to be in here?

What sort of backing do you need? What type of literature reviewer understanding do you have to convey? This is a big piece of a lot of academic writing is showing a sophisticated understanding of the landscape of existing publications and showing that you understand where your work fits into the landscape.

It's one of the big sins in academic writing that if a reviewer senses you don't know our field well, they're not gonna publish your piece. Don't guess at all this. You really need to know the right answers because your papers will not get accepted if you try to wing it.

There's very specific parameters for each different particular venue that you might try to publish in. So that would mean at the easiest, deconstruct existing papers in the venues you wanna publish. Perhaps more effective, though slightly harder is to talk with people who are publishing in those venues already, people who are writing similar articles.

Talk to them about their work and what's required for these things to get accepted. Even more effective and even more difficult would be get a co-author who is experienced, convince someone who is already publishing multiple times in a venue, the co-author a paper with you, learn on the job what is required, what do we need, what standard of evidence, what review, what does it really take?

But all this comes back to the same idea. You need information. You need hard, realistic, on-the-ground information about how this type of publishing works before you try to do it. And I'm gonna attempt to generalize this for lots of different issues because I think this comes up a lot when people are thinking about new projects or endeavors.

It is very easy to come up with what you want to be the reality. Here's what I'm gonna do, here's what I want it to be. I want to be a novelist, and that means I'll do National Novel Writing Month with a proper Scrivener configuration, and that will make me a novelist.

We want the story to be what we want it to be, but the reality might be, no, there's a lot more training involved. There's a lot higher bar that you have to pass. Here's how you can tell if you're at the right level. And so in general, I like to push that advice.

When doing something new, first do the work of figuring out about what is actually required to succeed. What is actually required to succeed? So there's a story I told in a podcast interview recently. It has not come out yet. I don't usually reveal interviews I've done until after they've come out, but I think Jesse knows who I'm talking about here.

I did a podcast interview recently with a relatively large podcaster. You'll verify it was a pretty large podcaster. - Yes, for sure. I'm a fan of his podcast as well. - All right, that's all we'll say for now. And that's coming out in the new year at some point.

But one of the things we got into in that interview was how did I get started in nonfiction book writing? And I got into detail about the path I took because I was 20. I was 20 years old when I got serious about writing books. I signed my first book deal with Random House right after I turned 21.

So we're getting into it on this podcast interview. How did I make that work? And what I did, I think this is the biggest differentiating factor between me and the other sort of weird, nerdish 20-year-olds who might think about writing books, is I said, "I wanna get the real answer about what would be required for someone my age to get a book deal." And so I used a family friend who was in journalism and said, "Can you connect me with a literary agent?

And you can make it clear to this agent that I'm not gonna try to sell them something. I'm not gonna get her to sign me. I just want 30 minutes information." And so my memory is he hooked me up with a phone call with an agent. She was a fiction agent, so this was good.

There was no chance I was gonna try to sell her. She primarily focused on fiction, but she was very well-established, knew the industry well. I said, "Look, I'm a 20-year-old. I wanna try to sign a book deal. What would really be required?" And she gave me the reality. And honestly, it's probably not what you'd wanna hear.

I think what I wanted to hear was like, "You're great, your idea is great. Just start writing every day and your book will be published." And it's not what she told me. She's like, "Look, there's gonna be a huge bar for you to cross as someone that young trying to get a book deal.

It's a risk. So here's the things you're gonna have to do. I think what you need to do first of all is get more publication credits. You have to start writing articles that are on the topic you wanna sell the book on. They're gonna wanna see writing samples in this genre to see that you really know how to write.

So you gotta sell it. Also, you're gonna wanna do a lot of research in advance. They're not gonna trust you to come up with the right idea. So you need to do that all in advance. I would do as much of the research for the book as possible in advance that you can give the agent followed by the publisher a really detailed table of contents.

Here's what I'm thinking. So I can write on this topic. People have paid me to write on this topic. I've done all the research. Here's the content. You can see exactly what's gonna be. She said, "You're probably gonna have to do some pretty extensive sample chapter writing." So I took that all to heart and it took me a while.

I went out there and got commissions. They were small publications. My first books were aimed at college students. So these were student-focused publications. Some of these were online only. Some of these were paper magazines that they would distribute for free on college campuses. There used to be a publication called Business Today.

I'm sure if that still exists. Came out of Princeton University, students would run it. But whatever, there's these publications. They weren't high bar publications, but they were publications. And I began pitching articles that were student advice oriented. And as part of that effort, I did all of the research for my first book.

It was one article commission that required me to talk to a small number of Rhodes Scholars for the article commission. And I took that commission and interviewed 25 people. Way more than I needed for that article, but it was all the research I needed for the first book I was gonna pitch, How To Win A College.

So I did that work and it was a pain and it's not what I wanted the answer to be. And it took me a year. But then when I was done, I could get an agent like that and she could turn around and sell that book like that. And we were off to the races.

If I had done what I wanted the right answer to be, which is just people will recognize your brilliance when you give them a one page summary of your idea and they'll just give you a lot of money. I never would have started writing. So this is my broader interpretation here.

If you wanna do something new, regardless of what it is, face the hard truth by talking to experts about what's really required. It stinks in the moment because it's usually more than you wanna do. But it is a huge competitive advantage in the longterm because it means you're actually gonna put your energy on the things that really matter while all of your potential competitors trying to get started in the same world will be doing National Novel Writing Month and optimizing their Scrivener configurations and they're never gonna get there.

All right, I think that works. Jesse, would you be excited to read a book about virtual CFOs and rich data pipelines? - Possibly, that was a good answer though. I mean, you gave Andrew a lot of content there. Andrew's gonna be happy. - I hope so, yeah. It'd be funny if what Andrew was really wanting to write was like a thriller novel, but about virtual CFOs who through the construction of a rich data pipeline, saves the world from a meteor strike and gets the girl in the end.

I'd be there for that book. - And he also throws like a mean fastball 'cause he plays baseball on the side. - He plays baseball on the seat. Richard, we're giving you the secret here. That's the book you need to write. Forget what everyone tells you, just start writing, man.

10 pages a day, follow the muse. You're gonna be Dan Brown this time next year. The baseball throwing virtual CFO who's rich data pipelining. He's been using just to attract women but decides to put his skill to use and takes a break from his pitching responsibility slash data pipeline responsibilities to save the earth from a meteor.

I love it, man. You're set. (upbeat music)