Writing a Book: The Interview Method
Both James and I have been blogging for years, presenting for years, engaging on social media for years so you’d think writing our book would be easy. It’s not.
We set out to write a practical, conversational, usable book in Social By Design to help companies keep those critically important social connections in their organizations as they grow. A simple message based on simple principles. We chose to work with Sense & Respond Press because we absolutely loved their approach and the fact they aligned to the right audience for this book (check out their offerings). I live in New York and James lives in Vancouver. We communicate regularly and use collaborative tools to write and edit together. We have unique experiences and perspectives too. I have been more a “social insider”, working to bring connection and collaboration along as an employee in several companies. James has been more a consultant, working outside in, helping companies leverage various platforms and tools. But it’s not our diversity of perspective or the time and miles between us that create our challenge. The issue has been to write the book as it’s meant to be read. The issue is in presenting the ideas bluntly and conversationally because it’s not meant to be some academic like text and it won’t be full of plug-n-play examples that are dated by the time it goes to press. No, this is to be a principle-based guide to speak to different business models and designs so it needs to be conversational and adaptable.
So we’ve written much and much has gone to edit but we both had this gnawing feeling the tone was wrong. So we’d tweak and rearrange and add to various chapters repeatedly to limited success (in terms of our own satisfaction). In the meantime, we’ve been invited to be guests on various podcasts to talk about social, social learning and their relationships to organizational design and in each, we simply riffed about our beliefs, observations, and practices as we answered some great and challenging questions. And that’s when it struck me, THIS is how to write THIS book. We had to toss out what we’ve learned about writing, the book structure, and the formal processes, to write the book that this content was meant to be portrayed. With that, James and I paused and started writing ourselves interview questions and asked others to ask them too — dozens of them. Each one, like a good interview, was conversational and challenging and dovetailed to the next and the next. We did this for each of the remaining chapters and we are now moving to interview each other or maybe writing answers to each in an interview-style (we haven’t decided). Either way, we see how this will help us answer the questions organizations need answers to AND in the format that will truly speak to them as human beings. More importantly, the open, honest, conversational tone aligns to the whole point of the book — creating a sustainable conversational company.
More on this approach soon!
