How my articles are born, mature, and get rewritten.

I’ve been writing regularly about my profession for a few years now. Beyond the motivations that drive me to face the blank page each week, I thought it would be interesting, just this once, to pull back the curtain on the ideation and writing process itself.

The Birth of Ideas

My writing stems from a lived experience, a feeling, and often an interaction. I catch myself formulating an idea and hurry to jot it down so I don’t lose it. At this stage, it’s just a few words, a phrase, an intuition, often a shaky one. When an idea keeps coming back to me, it’s time to give it substance, that is, to explore it further. Yes, writing is an appointment with oneself, a mind-to-mind battle in an attempt to see things clearly. I write first and foremost for myself, without a doubt. And, more often than I’d like, the idea turns out to be shaky, and I have to set it aside for a while.

This inner journey is very rarely tied to current events. The logical thread runs through the projects I’m working on, the interactions they spark, and my own learning, with software craftsmanship as the connecting thread. Though I wasn’t conscious of it at first, I eventually made it a conscious choice, because I’m wary of current events. It’s too easy to be misled when you lack perspective. Besides, enough nonsense is spouted every day without me adding my own 🙂

Four Ways to Tackle a Blank Page

Writing isn’t plain sailing. I generally observe four patterns:

• Inspiration: the article comes out right the first time; in the days that follow, there are only one or two words to tweak, a few phrases to revise so it “flows better.” It’s rare, but it happens.
• Working backward: structuring the article without writing (Saturday), drafting a first version (Sunday), polishing (Monday), polishing (Tuesday), and sometimes realizing that no, the article isn’t ready to be published. This happens more often than you might think.
• Urgency: sometimes I deliberately wait until Tuesday evening, the night before publication, to choose a topic and write very spontaneously. It’s a way to create a sense of urgency and combat my perfectionism.
• Recycling: recycling an old article, “there are only two or three things to change, after all,” and ending up completely restructuring it. This happens quite often, to be honest, and it’s worth thinking about.

In any case, writing a single article of 3,000 to 4,000 characters takes at least half a day, often more.

And what about AI in all of this?

I use AI exclusively as a sparring partner. I want my articles to remain original works that reflect who I am. In fact, I don’t know how to do it any other way, since my ideas take shape through words.

This sparring partner is therefore there to challenge me as much as possible and shoot down the idea early on, rather than have someone else do so in the comments. It’s a more specific equivalent of the grill-me skill.

Erase the path and keep the work

“Recycling” old articles, while taking care to delete the original, amounts to erasing the thought process, the detours, in favor of the ideas I hold to be true at a given moment. Strictly speaking, I don’t much like this, because I often find the path leading to the work more interesting than the work itself. Perhaps, moreover, it’s a fantasy to believe that one can ever bring anything to fruition.

The result is that I view these articles not as a flow (LinkedIn) but rather as a stock, a form of capital, that must be constantly nurtured. Saying this naturally implies that these articles will eventually be compiled into a book or a white paper, though the exact format has yet to be determined.

Ultimately, writing is as much a pleasure as it is an intellectual necessity, one that has had the good grace to support me financially for the past few years. To get started, two things were essential: defining an editorial direction and creating a backlog of about twenty article topics. Then, just start. Three things, in other words.