People ask me how I write, and I never know what they’re really asking. Do they mean the mechanics — where I sit, what software I use, how many drafts? Or do they mean the harder question, which is how I turn the shapeless mess in my head into sentences that hold together?
I’ll try to answer both.
Where Ideas Come From
I don’t sit down and decide to have an idea. That’s never worked for me. Ideas show up when I’m doing something else — walking, showering, sitting on a plane, having a conversation about something unrelated.
The pattern I’ve noticed is that ideas come from friction. Something doesn’t fit the way I expected. A conversation surprises me. I read something that contradicts what I believed. I visit a place that works differently than home. The gap between expectation and reality is where almost every interesting thought I’ve had has originated.
The coffee essay I wrote recently came from a single observation in Melbourne: why is the coffee here so much better than what I get in most American cities? That question sat in my brain for months, picking up details from other countries, until it had enough weight to become something.
Most ideas don’t make it that far. They arrive, float around for a day or two, and dissolve. The ones that survive — the ones that keep nagging — are the ones worth writing about.
Capturing
I’m religious about capturing ideas, because I’ve learned the hard way that the brilliant thought you’re sure you’ll remember at 2 AM will be completely gone by morning.
My system is embarrassingly simple. I use the Notes app on my phone. Not Notion. Not Obsidian. Not a $300 leather notebook. The default Notes app, because it’s always there and it opens instantly. The speed of capture matters more than the elegance of the system.
Most notes are one or two lines. “The way Japanese convenience stores treat ‘low-status’ products with high care — apply to business?” or “Nobody talks about the relationship between sleep and creativity, they just talk about sleep and productivity.” Sometimes they’re longer — a paragraph or two when something is forming in real time.
I also keep a running list called “Things I’ve Changed My Mind About.” Every time I notice a belief shift, I add a line. That list has generated more essays than anything else.
I review my notes once a week, usually on Sunday mornings. Most of them are dead — the moment has passed and the note no longer resonates. I delete those without guilt. The ones that still feel alive get moved to a different note called “Drafts — Ready.” That’s my queue.
The First Draft
Here’s my secret, if you can call it that: I write the first draft fast and badly.
Not on purpose. I don’t romanticize the bad first draft. I just know that if I try to write well on the first pass, I’ll write slowly, get frustrated, and probably quit halfway through. So I give myself permission to be terrible.
The first draft is for getting the shape of the thing onto the page. Not the right words — the right structure. Where does it start? Where does it end? What’s the core argument? What are the supporting points? I figure all of this out by writing, not by outlining. Some people outline first. I’ve tried it, and it makes my writing feel mechanical. I need to discover what I’m saying by saying it.
A typical first draft takes me about ninety minutes. I write in one sitting. No breaks, no distractions, no checking my phone. The momentum matters. If I stop and come back, I lose the thread.
The first draft is usually about thirty percent longer than the final piece. It meanders. It repeats itself. Whole paragraphs go nowhere. That’s fine. The material is on the page, and now I can work with it.
The Edit
Editing is where writing actually happens. I know this is a cliche, but it’s a cliche because it’s true.
I let the first draft sit for at least twenty-four hours before I touch it. This is the single most important part of my process. Time creates distance, and distance creates clarity. Sentences that felt brilliant at midnight look bloated and obvious the next morning. Whole sections reveal themselves as unnecessary. The piece tells you what it wants to be, but only if you’ve been away long enough to hear it.
My editing process has three passes.
Pass one: Structure. I read the whole thing and ask: does this flow? Does the beginning earn the middle? Does the middle set up the end? Are there sections that don’t belong? I move paragraphs around, cut entire sections, sometimes rewrite the opening completely. The opening of a first draft is almost never the real opening. It’s the warmup. The real opening is usually buried in paragraph three or four.
Pass two: Sentences. Now I go line by line. Is this sentence doing work? Could it be shorter? Does it sound like me, or does it sound like I’m trying to sound like someone? I read suspicious sentences out loud. If they feel awkward in my mouth, they’ll feel awkward in someone’s head. This pass usually cuts fifteen to twenty percent of the word count.
Pass three: Rhythm. This is the one people skip, and it’s the one that separates decent writing from good writing. I read the piece for music. Long sentence, long sentence, short one. Paragraph with three sentences, then a one-liner.
Like this.
The rhythm of prose is real and it affects how people experience your writing even if they can’t identify why. Monotonous sentence length puts readers to sleep. Variation keeps them alert. A short sentence after two long ones creates emphasis without italics or exclamation points.
After three passes, the piece is usually ready. Sometimes it needs a fourth, usually when I realize the ending doesn’t land. Endings are the hardest part. You need to close the loop without restating everything you just said. The best endings add one final thought that reframes the whole piece slightly — so the reader finishes with a new angle on what they’ve just read.
When and Where
I write best in the morning, before I’ve checked email or Slack or anything that fills my brain with other people’s priorities. The window is about 6:30 to 8:30 AM. After that, the creative channel starts narrowing as the operational demands of running a business take over.
I write at my desk, which is boring. I’ve tried cafes, libraries, hotel lobbies. They all work fine for reading and thinking. But for actual writing — fingers on keyboard, building sentences — I need quiet and a screen arrangement I’m familiar with. The environment should be invisible so the words can take up all the available attention.
I use a plain text editor. No formatting tools, no templates, no features. When I write, I want the interface to be a blank page with a cursor. Anything more than that is a distraction pretending to be a tool.
Why Bother
I get asked this too: why write at all? I run an agency. I could delegate content. I could use AI for first drafts and just polish. Why spend personal hours producing essays that don’t directly generate revenue?
A few reasons.
Writing clarifies thinking. I don’t fully understand what I believe about something until I’ve tried to write it down. The act of converting vague intuitions into specific sentences forces a kind of intellectual honesty that thinking alone doesn’t achieve. Several times, I’ve started writing an essay arguing one position and finished it arguing the opposite, because the writing process revealed that my original position didn’t hold up.
Writing builds trust. When someone reads something I’ve written and thinks “this person understands my problem,” that’s worth more than any sales call. The clients who’ve come to PipelineRoad through my writing tend to be the best clients, because they already know how I think. The relationship starts at a different level.
Writing compounds. A conversation is one-to-one and happens once. An essay is one-to-many and happens every time someone reads it. The best things I’ve written continue working years after I published them, reaching people I’ll never meet, building credibility in rooms I’m not in.
And honestly — I just like it. I like the puzzle of taking something complicated and making it clear. I like the satisfaction of a sentence that works. I like the process of discovering what I think by writing it down.
That might be the only reason that matters. You write because you’re a person who writes. The process is the point, and everything else is a pleasant side effect.