The Sponge Theory of Writing

“What’s your writing process?”

It’s one of the questions that I’m most frequently asked. I explain to people that my writing process best described as sponge-like. Let me explain.

I’m constantly absorbing material, whether it’s blog posts, videos, podcasts, books, or actual in-person conversations. (Remember those?) More often than not, that material tends involve data, management, technology, and people. (See tagline of this site.) It’s not as if I read a great deal about 17th-century French poetry, reality television, or life in Madagascar. There’s a high degree of overlap between what I read and what I write. Finally, it doesn’t hurt that I speak about these topics.

Let’s just say that the contents of my brain are not equally distributed.

Eventually, the sponge gets full. It can’t hold any more water and I have to squeeze it. Keeping with the metaphor, out comes a book in a relatively short period of time. It’s not that I sit down to do research; it’s that I’d actually been doing the research for a relatively long time.

Simon Says

Different writers follow different processes, and one way is not fundamentally better than any other. For me, though, the sponge method is just natural and intuitive.

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What’s your writing process?