Hi, Carl. First of all, I would like to say that I love all your books, the New Yorker articles and the podcasts. Your ideas change my life. Thank you. I'm Fabiana. I'm a teacher and a consultant. I've already written articles for Portuguese newspapers, but left it for lack of time.

I would like to know what your process is for writing articles for The New Yorker. Do you follow the format for writing essays that you present in your book, "How to Become a Straight A Student"? Do you have days to research, hours to write? What times do you schedule for this job?

Generally, what is your process? Thank you very much. Well, when it comes to my New Yorker writing, the process depends on what type of article we're talking about. So there's two categories here. There's the twice-a-month column I've been writing this fall, and then there is the less regular, longer-form pieces that I would write before this and return to at some point in the future.

So I'll focus in on what I'm doing now, which is the twice-a-month column. And I'll tell you what the ideal process is, what I aim for, and then I'll talk briefly about how I sometimes fall off of it. But the ideal process I have for one of these columns is, first of all, the research is typically, you know, I have to pull from things I already know.

There's not enough time for me to do a ton of original research. The primary research that happens for these columns will be if I need an interview. So a lot of them are interview-based. Those will get scheduled ahead of time. They might happen a few weeks at least before the columns come together.

Sometimes I also have to read a book or two just to be up to speed on some things that might be relevant. And I'll do that in advance, and that's fine because we have these mapped out pretty far in advance because the art department needs to know farther in advance what the article topics are going to be.

So that kind of happens just in advance. I schedule interviews, et cetera. When it comes to the writing process, I alternate between one week writing, one week production. One week writing, one week production. That's usually how it works. So an article that, let's say, appears on Monday would be something I would file the previous Tuesday.

And then between Tuesday and the Monday when it comes out is production and editing and fact-checking, et cetera. So when I'm in a writing week that's leading up to, let's say, a Tuesday filing, the ideal thing I'll do is I'll first, step one, outline the article. And I'll figure that out on foot so it doesn't have a, if you'll excuse the double use of the word here, big footprint on my schedule.

Typically walking back from dropping my two older boys off at the bus stop, I'll just work it through. All right, I know the topic. Maybe I've already done the interview. Let me work through the structure. And this is just practice. You write enough of these, you get a sense of the options.

And I'll write down that outline. I'll jot down in Scrivener the outline. The next step is, you know, I will typically do what I call a happy hour writing session, which just refers to the time it happens. So it'll be at the end of a workday, kind of early in the week.

I will stay at the HQ or sometimes I'll go to the coffee shop down the street. Shout out to Tacoma Bevco. And get started. But this is really more of a breaking the seal type thing. What I'm really doing during this session, and again, it's in the evening, so it doesn't have any footprint yet on anything else I'm doing.

I start pulling in more sources. So finding relevant articles or things to quote. And I will put those all into Scrivener in the research folder. So I have everything there in the Scrivener project file for the article. And in a perfect world, I write the first paragraph. There is a huge break the seal effect to getting those first sentences down.

It's very hard to open a New Yorker piece. And just in general, it's very hard to get things going. So that gives you a sense that there's momentum. My ideal schedule, I then do a morning writing session later in the week. So Thursday or Friday morning, where I try to get maybe half the article done.

And then I do a Sunday morning session. And that's when I try to finish basically the article. And then there would be a polishing session on the following Monday or Tuesday morning to go through and polish it and get it ready to file. There's not a lot of time here and I have seven or eight other jobs.

I can't spend too much time on this. You got to get in it and get it done. Nail the structure, write well, polish that up hard, get it out quick. That's the ideal structure. And then I'm filing on a Tuesday. And then there's stuff that happens. Copy edits come back and fact checking.

And that just gets worked into the schedule. But otherwise, that's a breather until the writing starts again the next week. So that's the ideal schedule. I often fall off of that. Falling off of that means that I have to add one or two extra writing sessions. So I don't make the progress I think or my time is more limited than I think.

I will use right now as an example. It's Friday and I have to file on Tuesday. And I have four sentences written. So I'm a little bit behind. I did that this morning. I just had other things going on this week. And for whatever reason, I couldn't get the traction going.

So I have to alter my schedule. And so like this week, what I'm going to do is a Saturday morning and Sunday morning session. Morning with my first cup of coffee is my best writing time. My semester is over. This is why I'm not sweating. My semester is over.

So typically Mondays, I'm on campus all day. I'm not this Monday. And so that's my savior. I can then put in a much longer block on Monday to really finish the article. So I'm doing something different this week. But that is my ideal schedule. For the long form pieces that have multiple interviews and I have to do a lot of original reporting, that's a whole different story.

That takes place over months. I like that because I'm very good at non-urgent but important work like making steady progress on things is a lot less stressful, I think, than every other week something has to be filed. But that's the way I do it. And I will just say, because you said you ran out of time to write, this whole process was designed to have a minimal footprint on my schedule as a professor who works on other things.

So you'll notice when this schedule works properly, there's a happy hour session, a weekday morning, and a Sunday morning. So in theory, when this schedule is operating at full pitch, there's a few hours of one weekday morning is the only part of my normal 9 to 5 workday that gets sacrificed to the New Yorker writing.

Now, I don't always hit that, but at least it is feasible and maybe about 50% of the time I do. And that allows me to actually do a pretty large amount of productive writing here without it taking over all the other aspects of my life. So good question. And that's a good reminder for me that I am behind and I have to get back to writing.