I have written two books, around 100,000 words each, 1500+ blog posts, and sent emails reaching millions of inboxes.

I wrote and published 1000 of 1500 blog posts in the last 1000 days.

Here is my not-so-sophisticated creation process that resulted in all this.

1. I open a Google doc with a running list of ideas to write about. I always keep adding new ideas to it.
2. From those ideas, I pick one that I feel like writing about.
3. I start writing. The idea is to get thoughts out of my head first.
4. If I cannot say anything useful on that topic, I drop it and pick another topic.
5. At times during my daily reading and exploration, if I find interesting ideas I’d like to write about, I’ll write about them instead.
6. At times the draft shapes to be quite organized for the first time itself, and there at times when it looks like a jumbled mess full of disorganized thoughts.
7. I try to make it well-rounded by editing or deleting info in both cases.
8. Then I run it through Google’s spell checker and Grammarly.
9. I don’t accept all Grammarly suggestions, only the ones I think will make my writing tighter without changing the meaning of what I am saying.
10. I then read the written draft aloud. Sometimes I do this late at night, so I skip the ‘readout aloud’ part and just read.
11. This tells me about the part or parts that are not flowing well.
12. I fix what needs to be fixed.
13. And set it out to publish.

The above process works well for most posts on this blog.

For the long-form blogs, I invest more time in rewriting and editing.

The process remains the same for book projects. Except that the step #1 changes to outlining, and two extra steps are added before #1 above,

Step 1 – do an idea dump (putting everything I know on that topic into a doc.

Step 2 – researching and exploring more about topics I don’t know much about.

For book projects, #13 is not there, but there are two extra steps after #12, rewriting and editing. I can rewrite and edit more than once, depending on the quality of the draft I see after one round of rewriting and editing.

For my marketing-focused writing, I end up doing more research than usual.

So that is my writing process.

Let me know where you are on your journey and if you have any questions.