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Comment by joewee | Hacker News Reader

I had to write a weekly technology column for a number of years. The best method I found was to prepare a outline of the content you are going to write as a series of questions. For my column I used 5 questions in a logical progression. Example question might be "Why is this technology important to small businesses?"

Once I defined the questions, I wrote in sprints without correcting grammar or spelling to answer each of the questions. Sprints were a few minutes, not more than 5.

When I answered all of the questions I would go back and remove the questions and edit for flow and add references and supporting facts. Last would be a grammar check, but I relied on my editor to review that given that I was often writing on deadline.

I produced more than 200 articles of 800-1000 words. Week over week even when I had writers block or no desire to write at all.

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The same approach works in presentations as well.

By framing your speech as a series of key questions to be answered, your presentation feels more like a real "conversation," rather than just dumping some encyclopedic information in a textbook-like order.

Yes I learned the same thing in consulting, craft the narrative first.

I'm basing a new business (Hostwriting, hostwriting.com) off of this method, but I combine it with other people asking and ordering the questions. I also like to have people verbally answer questions as a preliminary first draft.

That's an impressive volume - was it all for the same technology column? And were they articles that required research?

I choose the topic, did enough research to paint the narrative I had in my head, but a lot of the role of a columnist is opinion based on personal experience and expertise.

I once watched an obscure online course by some Canadian lawyer with a similar method for writing books that way. Wasn't by any chance your inspiration?

Do you happen to know the name of the course? Very interested.

From the recording it looked like a rip from a video tape straight out of the 80s. To be honest I found it in the early 2000s on a now defunct torrent tracker when already all sales pages had gone and only some scam reports still existed. Had a super fluffy title something like 'write a book in 21 days guaranteed' but I gave it a chance because I was curious. It was actually just like OP described, only applied for non-fiction books. The author was really all about hacking an expert-looking book in the shortest time possible - without calling it hacking. The process started by reading the top 10 books in your field, then develop 25 core questions, fill each question with 5 sub questions, use a timer of 5 minutes to write against the clock the answer to that question. The idea was to get into a writing flow and stop reflecting while putting out as much text as possible. He sold the idea by the good old pareto logic, suggesting that by reading the top 10 books you already know more than 80% of the people interested in the topic, making the book good enough to be seen as the expert. In the end he suggested threwing out 10% of the worst paragraphs, then editing it all together and done is the book.

Saved your comment, thanks very much! This was very helpful.

Edit: By the way, the tracker wasn't what.cd, was it?

Sounds like the same method I’m using from the same source. He also recommended expert interviews, preparing the questions for experts in the field and setting up calls to get their answers. It’s a great technique in my opinion, but I never tried to write a book using it. It definitely helped my column writing.

Totally forgot about that! But yes, that was him! I still have issues coming up with topics and the right questions. It is really hard to overcome that self-criticism. What is your way to overcome this?

It was based on a book writing method. Might be the same person. He sold his training material in printed form.

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