Behind the scenes of a writer’s lifestyle: unveiling habits, routines, myths limiting growth

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Most articles around content writers that project a six-figure monthly income, multiple vacations during a year, a lot of free time, unimaginable family time are very enticing. They are not completely true. To be among the top and shine as the most sought after, you need to work your ass off.

Do Content Writers really enjoy a Great Work-Life Balance?

From my previous article … Wake up at 5.30 am. Run through a few quick stretches, breathing exercises. Slide into the kitchen, grab ingredients from the refrigerator to cook food for your kids and husband. They need to step out of the house by 8.00 am. Grab your book so that you reach your daily reading target. Somehow find 30 minutes before everyone wakes up. Be ready to wish ‘good morning’ to your toddler or children so that you ensure they have a wonderful day ahead.

After ‘Good Morning’ …

Sing along as you give them a bath and dress them up. Oh! By the way, if it is India, also multi-task with your domestic helper. Supervise their work, ensure all dishes are washed, every corner of the house is cleaned, and other work is extracted out of them; so that you don’t have to do it later.

You have almost forgotten the tea you made for yourself. It’s cold now. So, you just gulp it. Half of your sanity is lost by now. But, you have to begin your workday with a client call, who would like to share some iterations to the draft you thought was perfect.

The call is scheduled for 30 minutes, but extends to another 30 minutes, pushing the rest of your day into a roller-coaster ride. Despite sending 6 reminders, you still have a client who is unwilling to share feedback or inputs. You send out the seventh reminder, drafted in a poised and polite tone. You have another client yet to process your last month’s invoice.

You have to complete research for two case studies which involve reading twenty different sources or more! You also have to complete the second iteration for another three drafts. While that sounds tiring, you are excited to close a new client, today. In the meantime, you realize that you need to complete content for two other web pages.

While you somehow manage to complete all this miraculously, including your lunch. You have to be ready by 3.00 pm to ensure that you are five minutes ahead at the school gate or at the bus stop to receive your kids with a smile. You pep them up, hear out their challenging day. Help them with homework and after-school classes, either cook dinner or be supervise your cook to accommodate different tastes.

You give your children a bath, serve dinner to your family, and tuck them away in bed. You just realize you need to give those last few touches to your kid’s pending project.

And then, you are ready to close the kitchen and sit at your work desk to pen down your top priorities. Just then, an email pops up from your client. It is about a new announcement to be made to the media. This should be submitted in two days. Your priority list reshuffles.

One document is still open with the cursor blinking at you. It reminds you that you still have 400 words to close the draft. You sketch some diagrams and flows so that you don’t forget those brilliant ideas.

With a sigh of relief, you sleep in bed. But then, you also remember that you have a personal target to write two pages for the book you dream to publish. You quickly scribble your thoughts and hit the bed. On a few days, your eye shuts at 10.30 pm and on few days they gaze at the sky with the dark roof in between and you sleep by 1.30 am of the next day!

Yes, it can get this crazy.

If this has scared you enough, take a look at the exciting content development process here.

What Really Goes Behind the Content Writing Process?

Wake up at 5.30 am. Run through a few quick stretches, breathing exercises. Slide into the kitchen, grab some ingredients from the refrigerator to cook food for your kids and husband. They need to step out of the house by 8.00 am. So, your clock starts ticking soon. Grab your book so that you reach your daily reading target. Somehow find 30 minutes before everyone wakes up to meet your reading goal for the day. Be ready to wish ‘good morning’ to your children so that you ensure they have a wonderful day ahead.

I will stop here.

If you really want to know what happens to this content writer, read the story in the next episode of this article. But let me tell you, it is not different from the life of any other professional. If writing is just another gig, then you can flex and have a lot of time in your arsenal. But, professional content writing is really not like how it seems.

Calling myself a freelancer invites looks and responses that mean, “Oh! You have a lot of time on your plate. You get to do what you want to. You get to go on more number of holidays than us. You are having a ball of time each day. Your job is easy because anybody can write.”

My answer, “Really, then why don’t you try it yourself.” When someone actually tries they hibernate into an empty synapse zone which is called ‘the writer’s block’. The result of this is to hire a professional writer. While many look for help from professional writers out of frustration, there is little information about how exactly the content process works.

I have had some clients who just drop a topic and ask me to write 1000 words about it. The topic often looks like this — ‘write about chatbots for retail industry’ or ‘innovative ways of reducing the costs of your martech business’. While they seem like good topics to write about, the writer is not furnished with anything else apart from this information.

“Like, really !!!” Each topic can take its own course. When you google these topics you will find at least ten different articles with a different scope on the first page of search results, followed by a few other hundreds of perspectives.

Just the topic is not enough for someone to write a compelling article that will convert readers into customers. Sadly, such topics are created with a lack of a decent goal or objective in mind. As much as, marketers need matured and professional writers, awesome writers equally need matured marketers too.

I will hold off my tantrums here and dive right into the content process.

So, how does the content process look like?

Top 3 phases of Content Process

From 30,000 feet high, it looks like this.

It also includes Content management, distribution, and measurement. So, here is the answer to what each phase mentioned above consists of.

Content Strategy

• User Personas User Journey
• Define Content Types
• Audience Strategy
• Positioning Statement
• Empathy and Experience Maps
• Build Your Story
• Content Audit
• UX Writing Flow
• Content Mix
• Content Distribution Mix
• Budgets & Costing

Content Marketing & Management

Most of this deals with practical and realistic planning and finding resources to execute the content strategy. You have to include the 4Ps of marketing. The product equates to the content piece. The place is about where you publish your content: owned, shared, vs paid media. Promotion is where and how you intend to distribute the content. Price is often the CTA combined with the consideration you are seeking: an email ID, reader’s information and preferences, and so on.

• Content Goals and Targets
• Keyword lists
• Content Calendars
• Website Revisions and Updates
• Paid vs Organic mix
• Distribution Plans
• Content objectives
• Call-to-actions

Content Production

This phase of the process is where writers and designers are in full form. It involves editing, writing, and designing.

• Asset creation: content writing and illustration
• Article outlines
• Graphic outlines
• Reference and research links and sources
• Editing

After, production and publishing, you will get down to measurement and analysis.

Many people are involved in bringing out a masterpiece that tells the story of a business. For the benefit of time, I am going to focus on three crucial roles imperative in a lean content production process.

Meaning and Scope of Each Phase

Content Strategy answers ‘why a content piece is being created?’

Content Marketing is all about discovering the channels and media to be used to distribute your content piece. For instance, here are some of the channels that are a must for me to distribute content published on www.nischalagnihotri.com

• Linkedin
• Quora
• Twitter
• Medium
• Google Plus
• Facebook groups
• My Whatsapp Broadcast Lists

Content Production includes the following steps:

• Use the topic to generate an article outline
• Create questions that become sections to an article
• Each question is one segment of the article
• Google each question to find answers
• Have the keyword list by your side.
• Research each question up to at least 4 to 5 layers until all your questions are answered. By this time you would have a skeleton of a story in mind.
• Best articles are created when the writer gains command over two aspects — experience and empathy that comes out of it. Read enough until you have an empathetic sense of the experience that your audience will go through.
• Have a vocabulary list that meets the language standards of that audience
• Mix them up and start writing.
• Edit grammar, wordiness, and facts.
• Read one last time. Push it out for feedback and inputs.

I have also added a guide here that explains the content development process.

Empathetic Writing — Eliminate Boredom while writing

Confessions of a writer.

It takes a lot to commit to yourself to be a writer. And, when you do so, as a writer you expect that your clients should understand what it takes for you to research, research, and research, then write and then edit to complete an aesthetic presentation of thoughts into an article or a story. After all this, you proudly place the first draft before your customer, only to receive iterations which leads to more research and edits! Not fair, but that is how a writer’s job functions.

With uninterrupted back and forth, you probably would reach a point when you are almost ready to bang against the desk and yell at your client to tell him that it won’t work. But, you won’t do that since the ‘customer is king’. You moderate your emotions.

Accept all revisions with a smile. Then, go back to the keyboard to complete the final draft. At this stage, you are almost famished in spirit.

I have also been a victim of this boring cycle of back and forth, but I discovered a better way to deal with it. I call it ‘empathetic writing’. I drew the inspiration to apply empathetic writing after I heard Veronica Roth, the young author of the famous Divergent series of novels, in an interview. While answering ‘why should anyone choose to become a writer?’, she reasoned out that it is not the final output that excites her as much as the process itself. It seemed that she loves the process of writing and editing and writing and editing — again and again.

While it seems easy for expert writers to adhere to this kind of mindset, it is very difficult for ghostwriters, like me, to stick to this regime with discipline.

James Clear, a niche writer throws some light on how to handle this. He believes that a writer who is on the path to mastery needs to embrace ‘boredom’ arising out of repetition.

Mastery is achieved through consistent repetition, deliberate practice and more practice.

While being engrossed in repetition, one can always hit a block that arises out of boredom. But, in Clear’s words, experts who have reached great heights in their respective fields have been able to deal with boredom, embrace it and get over it. In fact, fall in love with it!

However, it is simple to say ‘embrace boredom’, but the challenge lies to put it into practice.

Connecting the dots.

After a long hibernation as a reader, I picked up Satya Nadella’s book titled ‘Hit Refresh’. In the book’s first chapter, he describes how he set himself on a mission to refresh the company’s culture and all that only began with ‘empathy’.

In the first interview that got him a job as an engineer at Microsoft, he was asked to share his response to a scenario where he finds a baby lying on the road. His response was to “call 911”. Empathetic people would respond to the situation differently — hold the baby in their arms and comfort her, and then look for a solution. But, here he faced a tongue-in-the-cheek situation. The interviewer was obviously not very impressed with his answer. He was shown the way out because he lacked empathy.

Difficult situations demand empathy.

Anything that is born is- history. And, what else can speak better than a museum about history. I admire the rich culture of museums that thrives in the west.

I was in awe of the detail and choice of material on display at The Ellis National Museum of Immigration [2], New York. Despite being a lot more recent than many other events in India, the storyboard of the immigration process and movement was captivating.

The museum curators told a story about each era and each object. I had never experienced similar attention to detail in many other Indian museums. Their choice to bring those details to the spectator’s notice meant to me that they wanted to ‘articulate the assumed’. This was not the only instance. I also experienced this at The 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York, and the art museums in Boston and San Francisco.

And, some of my Indian friends who visited museums in Europe also witnessed the same.

So, here I learnt the hybrid form of communication to articulate the assumed messages. Speak about the assumed while self-introduction as well as when you spread the word.

You must be wondering what happens to those messages hidden in Indian history. I will talk about it in some time, right below.

How to Connect With Your Customer’s Heart?

In the world of content, articulating the assumed applies to the website — the self-introduction of your brand. It also applies to PR, social media, and ads which relates to ‘spreading the word’.

Read out this short dialogue between a founder and his friend.

“Why does your website copy not convey the message that you just spoke? Your description and voice have more passion in it than what is said on any of these pages.” asked the new visitor, the founder’s friend, who was willing to provide feedback to a new SaaS company.

The founder said, “I assumed they (customers) would understand it (the message) because that’s what they are looking for.”

This conversation conveys something very powerful to those businesses that are trying to fix their communication. Despite bad grammar, some websites gain traffic, but some with the most high-definition images lack the traction — “Why?”

Simply because those who crave for the customer’s mindshare do not leave any fact about the brand to the mercy of assumptions. Articulating every bit of important information in the form of a story helps connect to the customer’s heart.

So, what should the self-introduction include?

• A one-line description of yourself that is positioned well.
• Any credibility or validation to the description.
• The core value proposition.
• Solutions that you could offer to the problems that your audience is facing.
• What should the audience expect from you?
• Your availability.
• And your invitation. Marketers call this CTA — Call to Action

These are very obvious aspects of your introduction but are often lost in the urgency to deliver too much.

Spreading the word about an idea or concept is equally not obvious. Just because you mentioned once does not mean the meaning is kept intact each time you repeat yourself. Each time, your audience is different.

This is how Indian history is articulated.

Indian history is left to the assumed. And, this is where the grapevine helps. Yes, owning parts of a grapevine network always helps in filling the dents and potholes of diluted messaging.

Though India has a heritage and culture that dates back to about 500,000 years ago and is considered the cradle of civilization [1], there is little proof to boast about it. That is because the articulated is lost due to invasion and geographic metamorphosis, and little is left to the museum.

Now, the articulated is among the assumed culture of stories, fables, and folklore. To keep them intact you need a trusted authority. I mean it. You need to trust that person and she should also be an authority in that field of affairs, who could be further trusted by your audience. Analogous to the head of the large Indian family is the safe keeper of Indian history. None, but an influencer in the marketing context.

They fix the holes and fill the dents. That is how you articulate the assumed.

What has the story got to do with ‘Empathetic Writing’?

I narrated this story because as a writer, I sometimes lack empathy. When empathy disappears in the middle of the writing process, I resort to an anxious and reactive mode of speech, adding frustration and stress to my writing. At that moment, writing does not keep me happy any longer.

These stories explain more about empathy and writing, together. Empathy is to coalesce in spirit and soul with the person whom you are working with. Writing is the process that leads you to manifest into a writer; who obviously loves the process more than the story.

So here we come to empathetic writing.

I mostly ghostwrite. Most of them who I write for are business professionals or entrepreneurs. Empathetic writing works best for ghostwriters, as one needs to literally wear somebody else’s skin, think like him and speak like him.

Empathetic writing is the process of experiencing the vision of the ideator, and his urge to communicate his ideas to the rest of the world. As a ghostwriter, you are offering some noble help. So let’s begin to empathize before we write.

Process of Empathetic Writing

All through my writing career until now, I have written about a variety of topics that ranges from organic farming to AI chatbots, and to education.

Whom should you empathize with?

The person whom you are writing for is in a situation of deficiency. He is handicapped with the lack of ability to craft a written story, or of time, or both. So, you become the driver and start steering his story in your words. In this process, if you step out of writing to actually assess how that person goes through to accomplish his mission, you would probably understand the pain and pleasure behind his vision.

Step #1: Identify the goal and target audience

While writing on any of those topics, I used to vex my client to share their objective of writing that article (goal or CTA) and with whom they intend to communicate this idea (target audience).

Step #2: Research about the idea and the person

Once, I have these details, I research their activities in the industry, industry updates, and company updates to start thinking like my client. By now, I have the story and tone ready. While researching I think a lot like the client and here apply the emotion of empathy.

Step #3: Setting the tone using his vocabulary

Then, I gather the most common vocabulary used by the person whom I’m writing for. This actually adds muscle to the article. Someone who heads a retail chain of stores would speak differently from someone who runs a casino or works on AI bots or is solving healthcare issues. Bringing these three pieces together I build the story for the representative.

Step #4: Outline the Story

With all the information that I have, I create a screenplay which is also referred to as the outline of an article. With the outline, I fill in facts, analogies, and opinions that I gathered in Step #2, during my research.

Step #5: Empathetic writing

This is where I spend time presenting ideas like my client, as closely as possible. There is always room for disagreement. After completion of the first draft, I read it once again to measure the tone. It should not sound like Nischala’s words (my words). It should like ‘my client is speaking to me.

Once, I am satisfied with this, then the work of a writer begins. Edit, edit, and edit. This is where I need to hold myself tight until I generate a draft that satisfies my client completely. Over time, I have been able to achieve an edit of one iteration. Of course, this means spending more time on research.

Happy empathizing.

Finding your triggers and anchors

Let me introduce myself before I tell you why the chemistry between my orthopedics and my maid is worth your reading time.

I am a writer. A typical writer’s life revolves around two things — writing and research. Sometimes, when we get lucky, we tend to meet people over networking events. I mostly work from my desk that I set up in my study room, back home. I work for long hours, just sitting. Without a clock hanging on the wall in my workroom. I know it doesn’t sound too healthy. Just as expected, I faced a severe neck and backache.

This took me to meet my orthopedics, handsome, and young. He suggested that I should and must walk or take a break every 20 minutes and recommended a few physio exercises. He also asked me to schedule a follow-on visit after 3 weeks, just to ensure I am on the right path.

Being the non-obedient type, it took a while for me to start this regime. I would most often skip my routine of taking a break every 20 minutes.

Now, let me tell you about the romance! ‘Why did my orthopedics fall in love with my maid?’

I hired a young girl to help me with my domestic chores. She was new to her work and constantly needed guidance from me. Almost every few minutes she called out for help or guidance to complete a chore that was assigned to her. I was completely annoyed by the amount of guidance she required from me. But, the interesting part was that I was almost completing my 10,000 steps, rushing up and down the stairs every day to monitor her work in the kitchen. Even better, I started tracking the intervals and it was almost close to 20 minutes!

After 3 weeks

My doc re-examined my x-rays and said I was doing better!

I shared with him that it is my new maid who ensured that I walked enough and exercised with timely breaks. My doc was very appreciative of my maid’s influence

Funny, isn’t it?

Now, you would have already about the real romance between my orthopedics and my maid.

A lesson for This Year

Being at the beginning of this new year, it is important for us to find anchors and triggers that help us achieve our goals.CLICK TO TWEETI found my trigger with my domestic maid, and it is often funny these triggers manifest themselves to offer us help. Though it was a matter of frustration, it helped me. Sometimes, people work better than alarms.

Everything comes back to the content and the writer. Not necessarily, a picture speaks a thousand words!

I strongly feel that a Picture is a canvas that invites more than one perspective, determined by your interpretation. Every interpretation is influenced by your personal experience and exposure to environments.

Why do I say so?

Look at this picture. This is the picture from the cold mountains in Northern China. The dystopian call it the “dark sun”. What you see here is a rare occurrence, to be precise, it is repeated once in 588 years. During winters the sun seems dark, losing its charm. What you see in the image below is what happens only one night. Though the local oracles predict the date accurately, a week in advance, this is a sight that can be enjoyed by only an informed few. Four years ago, the photographer of this picture, of course, went on to win the International Photographer’s award.

Here is another image. This is the image of a victim who was abused and threatened by her pedophile father for straight 8 years. The father was eventually arrested and sentenced to death in Indonesia.

The first picture leads to emotions that make you feel triumph, maybe envious, curious, adventurous, and disappointed because you won’t get to see it for yourself in this lifetime.

The second image raises questions about the existence of society and law, distress, anger, and a lot more aggressive yet sympathetic thoughts.

Now, I am going to tell you something even more interesting. This is very important to understand why a picture is not necessarily the best way to communicate. Here is the bomb.

I lied. Both the images are computer-generated.

The first one was used as a cover image of a book, and the second one was used to arrest a pedophile in Australia.

The apparent is not always what builds it. Your ability to see through the not so apparent is what creates the depth in your output.

Nischala Agnihotri

An image can only communicate what the storyteller intends you to see. And, if it is abandoned by words, then it is left to the imagination of the audience.

Words have the ability to strengthen a context, provide direction to the audience, and converge the thought process and imagination of the author and the reader.

If you felt deceived after reading the description of the image, then the idea of focusing only on visual aspects while building a content structure would fail the intent of accomplishing a call-to-action for a marketer.

Everything comes back to the content and the writer.

Blogging is the warm-up exercise to Write something Bigger. A Book?

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I borrowed this title from someone I know. “Blogging is a warm-up exercise for writing a BookCLICK TO TWEET“, this is true. It prepares you to get back into the battle ring just before the final call, though you are brutally bruised during the writing journey.

Blogging begins with writing those few hundred words every day. Polishing each sentence over several rounds of editing. Publishing each script, though you know no one may like it, share it, comment on it, or even view it! Despite knowing that your piece of art will not be acknowledged, you will set yourself up to wake up every day and write those few words before you sleep.

It helps you become think-skinned towards rejection and criticism. It helps you learn fast. It helps you fix things faster and publish a better version. It trains you to consume a routine of writing that soon becomes your second nature.

What really matters is to stay committed until your words mature into a Book that is published…

Then, writing still continues.

P.S. Thanks to Mangalam, Author of Lean Product Management.