Write right; hand-to-hand books; defiant Harvard: Newsletter 16 April 2025

Newsletter 90: Why writers think like imposters, what it’s like when the Supreme Court argues about your book, Harvard’s $53 billion in “f– you!” money, plus three people to follow and three books to read.

How to write anything with confidence

I have many author clients who say they are bad writers. That may be one of the dumbest things they ever say.

They are almost always good writers. They just don’t know how writing works, which makes them feel incompetent. They think writing is about writing. If you go to write something and you haven’t thought enough about what you’re doing, of course what you write is crap.

This should not be a surprise. No one does anything important without planning first. You wouldn’t start a garden by digging — you’d start by figuring out what plants you will include, and how they will be arranged and then obtaining those plants. No one with any brains starts a software application by typing code, or begins a project at work by collecting people into a meeting and assigning tasks; you start by thinking and planning. Why do people think writing is any different?

Writing is a five-step process.

1. Idea. What are you trying to say, in one sentence? Every piece of writing needs an idea.
2. Plan. What do you need to get started? How will you collect it?
3. Prepare. This is where you get the things you realized you needed in step 2 (for example, research or interviews). It can also help to create a fat outline of what you are going to write.
4. Write. Start creating content according to what you did in steps 2 and 3.
5. Revise. Identify the flaws in what you wrote and the opportunities to improve it. Then make it better.

Writing is step 4, not step 1.

Do not tell me “I do not have time to plan.” Writing without a plan is always a mistake. The only thing that changes is how much time you dedicate to the planning steps, and whether the plan is mental or written down.

If you have one hour to write an essay, take five minutes to consider the idea and make a quick plan, five minutes to find information and prepare a quick outline (even if it is just in your head), 35 minutes to write, and 15 minutes to read it through and revise it.

If you have a week to write a strategy document, take an hour or two to consider the best idea, possibly with the help of colleagues; spend two days planning and preparing; spend two days writing; and use the last day to revise.

If you have a month to create a report, road-test ideas with others for a few days, gather information for a week, create a fat outline, write a draft in a week, get feedback, and take the rest of the time to revise it.

If you have nine months to write a book, spend a month on ideation and building a detailed table of contents, spend two or three months on research, write chapters and get editorial feedback on them for several months, and spend the last month revising the whole book from beginning to end.

It’s the same process. What changes is whether you do it at warp speed or in a more extended way with deliberate planning and steps, and whom you involve to help you.

The more times you do this — quickly or slowly, rigidly or idiosyncratically, but always and habitually — the more it will become embedded in your thinking about writing. It will become instinctive. You won’t have to think about the process, so you can spend all your time thinking productively about what you creating.

You will be a writer and you’ll feel like a writer. Which makes everything easier.

News for writers and others who think

The residents of a town in Michigan formed a human chain to move 10,000 books from a bookstore’s old storefront to its new one. The video is pretty cool.

In the Boston Globe, Sarah S. Brannen writes about how her children’s book about two men getting married, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, is now the subject of a Supreme Court case about book banning.

The ABA (American Booksellers Association) is maintaining a page with information on how tariffs will affect the book industry. As I write this, the page says books are exempt from tariffs, as is Canadian paper often used in printing in the U.S. — but that could of course change between the moment I write this and when you read it. They plan to update the page based on the latest whims of our nation’s chief executive.

The Trump administration froze $2 billion in funding for research and other services at Harvard University, ostensibly because it allows antisemitism on campus. Harvard rebelled, because as a private institution, it’s unwilling to subject all of its activities to oversight by the government. Trump responded by threatening to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status as an educational institution. Harvard has a $53 billion endowment, which may be the largest collection of “f— you!” money ever assembled.

Smith Publicity invites students interested in book marketing to submit their pitch for a $2,500 scholarship.

Three people to follow

Jorge Camoes , Portuguese data visualization author and expert.

Erin Bury , entrepreneur and parenting/personal finance columnist.

Beth Kowitt , Bloomberg opinion columnist writing about CEOs’ contentious relationships with Donald Trump.

Three books to read

Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk by Faiz Siddiqui (St. Martin’s, 2025). What happens when you treat an innovative CEO as a god?

Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein (Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster, 2025). A new political perspective on the world’s problems in what should be an age of abundance.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz (Harper Business, 2018). A memoir of tough choices in a life dedicated to tech innovation.