Thoughts and Notes Ideas that stay with me long enough to get written down

My writers don’t even realize that they get it, and that makes me happy

For those of you that haven't been following along all these years, let me restate one of my fundamental beliefs - writers shouldn't ever worry about layout.  Writers are incredibly good at writing.  Some writers are also really good at layout.  Those two things are very, very different though.  Good writing works no matter what the design is.  The converse isn't true, though.  Good design fails when the content isn't valuable.

My job is to make the writers more effective.  When automated publication gets in the way of writing good content, I've made things worse, not better.  On the other hand, when a writer has gotten to the point where she's complaining that the automated build doesn't do something she can easily do manually, and she's complaining not because she wants to do the formatting herself, but she's complaining that the build doesn't do the thing she could do, I smile.

I've gotten through to her.   She gets it.  Not just logically, but viscerally.  She doesn't want to make the fix manually, even though it's easy for her to to do it.  She wants to write and leave the layout, the publication piece, to me.

It's a good Friday.