My writing - past & not past

While I often do posts with a tag of writing, and in those link to pieces others have done about the putting together of great writing, it seemed high time to ruminate a bit on my own writing as the last time I did so, via a post with a tag of blogging, was in December 2012.

Looking back on that aforementioned post titled "Reading and Writing,"  much of what I wrote then about the point of and approach to writing the blog still holds true with my (A) reading things of interest, (B) attempting to describe those pieces well and make connections between them, (C) creating both a repository of great writing and body of work with my thoughts on the pieces and (D) wanting to both appreciate the time I've spent on the effort and have it serve as a jumping off point to a next step in writing.

Two additional things that come to mind around writing include first how I love the ability narrative non-fiction has to translate to the masses information that would often be just too complex to follow if not written into a story. Two great features that came to mind as examples of this were "Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?" by Jason Fagone and "The Plutonium Gang: CH2M Hill Dismantles the Hanford Nuclear Site" by Steve Featherstone. Just very cool to me this concept of narrative writing enabling the passing along of information and work that may be highly technical and/or brilliant.

The second thing that occurs to me around writing, in this case more around my own, is it seems I'm doing something within a blog post similar to what would be done in writing a story. The idea for me is to find interesting information, look for more details about it and connections between different sources and then attempt to coherently write about the subject. The scale certainly different with me writing a several hundred word post about a few connected stories I've read as opposed to a 6,000+ word feature story for national publication that someone else might be doing, but the comparison seems to hold true.


If the stuff written about above is about what I've done with my own writing, below is focused on what to do going forward and having previously self-published two books with content from the blog; I'll almost certainly go ahead and compile and publish a third with more recent posts done. Beyond that (and as I mentioned above), I like to view my past writing as a jumping off point of sorts with two different (and not mutually exclusive) paths, with both diverging a touch from the additionally possible idea of researching and writing narrative non-fiction pieces on spec.

One thing I consider for future writing centers directly around my blog work already done. I think there’s something to be culled from past blog posts with writing from them as source material, similar to how I've created blog posts from writing by others, and note above as being somewhat similar to writing a piece from scratch. The end result may be fiction writing based on non-fiction, perhaps a fictional autobiography or perhaps something else, but either way it's sort of an everything counts approach to past and future writing.

The second thought that comes to mind around future writing stems from how I enjoy writing quite a bit, but also have a huge interest in writing within a larger picture. The process of putting together great writing and also having it be within a viable business is fascinating to me and perhaps something to explore and pursue. In terms of mechanics around how this more editor or business-centric path could be pursued, I've made a few good connections with established writers and there's also ways to increase education, with things to potentially explore including Coursera, Southern New Hampshire University's online offerings, MITOpenCourseWare, the edX venture founded by MIT and Harvard, Entrepreneurial Journalism offerings like the one from City University of New York, or the Nieman Foundation Visiting Fellowship.

When I think about a career path related to the things I'm interested in around writing, two ideas I've come across in the past come to mind. The first is the concept of jobs to be done, as written about by noted author and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in How Will You Measure Your Life? (which I reviewed here). The second idea is from an anecdote I heard about someone successful in their career and whose path to that had him (A) figuring out an area that someone could both make money in and become an expert in and then (B) doing that.

Maybe it's not really an accurate comparison, but I think about my interest in writing as sort of coming from the opposite side of that. I know an area I'm interested in and want to figure out a career within it. It seems a bit daunting, but at the same time, I can't be the only person with this interest and who's coming at it mid-career, and perhaps that fact also creates opportunity.

Time Magazine writing - on U.S. manufacturing / Uniqlo / 3 of the Time 100 Most Influential People

There's been a few interesting things out of Time Magazine recently with three of them being short pieces on people in the Time 100 Most Influential People 2013 edition and two feature stories from other issues (and all of them requiring a Time account to be able to read online).

The people whose short profiles stood out were that on Jared Cohen (who founded Google Ideas and co-wrote The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt), Perry Chen (CEO of the crowdfunding website Kickstarter) and the team of Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng (co-founders of the online learning site Coursera).

The feature stories of greatest note to me were "Made in the USA" by Rana Foroohar and Bill Saporito and "What They'll Wear to the Revolution" by Michael Schuman. The latter piece was on Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo (which I've previously linked to a Fast Company article on as they make a major push into the U.S. market) and the feature story on increased US manufacturing. In terms of topic, it was very reminiscent of another piece I linked to previously, this one a September 2012 Outside Magazine piece by Tom Vanderbilt on the same trend.

Fast Company Features - on Pinterest, Windows 8, Uniqlo and Coursera

After not reading Fast Company for a few months, I went through three issues recently and found several features that stood out.

The Aug issue had "Cheap, Chic, And Made For All: How Uniqlo Plans To Take Over Casual Fashion" with Jeff Chu writing on the fast-growing Japan-based casual apparel retailer. Very interesting company that recently opened it's first West Coast store in San Francisco and next week is launching it's US online store.

The Sept edition of FC had a piece on a topic of interest in "How Coursera, A Free Online Education Service, Will School Us All." Written by Anya Kamenetz, it's an excellent look at the company teaching hundreds of thousands online, for free. Fascinating topic that I've previously linked to pieces about under the tag online education.

The Oct issue focused on Design and included "Can Ben Silbermann Turn Pinterest Into The World’s Greatest Shopfront?" by Max Chafkin and "Windows 8: The Boldest, Biggest Redesign In Microsoft’s History" from Austin Carr. Interesting pieces both on a new company and an established coporation doing something different.

Businessweek Pieces: Twitter / Coursera / Andrew Stanton / Pulse App / Nextdoor / Olympic Ambush Marketing / Pico Iyer

As often seems to be the case, there were quite a few interesting pieces from Businessweek lately.

Cover story of the March 5-11 issue was "Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn't Die" by Brad Stone. Written on one of my favorite companies, it's a solid look at company providing a remarkable global communication platform for causes, businesses and individuals. Also, the topic gives me reason to reference again an excellent Clay Travis piece on Twitter from a few months back and for the first time "Fast Company: The Women of Twitter" by Jacob Weisberg for Vogue.

A couple of smaller pieces of interest from this issue were the following...

- "Top Secret: Durex's Olympic Condoms" on efforts by the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games to prevent ambush marketing by companies who aren't official Olympic sponsors.

- "Daphne Koller Brings the World Into Stanford Classes" about free online education offerings from major universities and delivered through Koller's company, Coursera.

- "Can a Pixar Whiz Conquer Live Action?" about the upcoming Disney live action movie, John Carter. I ordinarily wouldn't be that interested in the movie (or how successful it is), but hope to see it do well after viewing an interesting TED talk on storytelling with Andrew Stanton, writer and director of John Carter (as well as Wall-E and Finding Nemo).

The March 12-18 issue also had a few pieces of note with the largest being another example of a Businessweek story from a well-known writer who typically writes on non-business topics. "Ballad of the Road Warrior" was from Pico Iyer, author of a book I read back in 2008, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Solid piece from Iyer for this BW that features his really lyrical writing style.

Two other pieces that stood out from the Mar 12-18 issue were both about companies with offerings around local news and connections. "Nirav Tolia: Hyperlocal Boy Makes Good" is about Nextdoor... branded on its site as The private social network for your neighborhood. Second piece was "The Pulse App Goes Local" on the extremely popular (and Flipboard competing) news app from Alphonso Labs.