David Amerland's Blog: David Amerland on Writing

This is the first post on writing I’ve written since December 2021. First, if you’ve been following this blog “I am sorry”. Yep, really I am because there was no conscious intention to abandon it for almost two years and no active thought to not write anything else for a while.

So, what happened? Why the gap? Well, yeah. Intentional came out and the workload associated with promoting it, doing interviews, answering emails and creating content suddenly soaked up all my available bandwidth. Great, but. As things started to ease off a little I discovered that life was simply great. I totally enjoy the freedom I have as a writer of well-received books to do what I like, pretty much and well, I did pretty much what I liked.

I started my days with coffee with my wife and walking my dogs. I put in two physical training sessions a day, seven days a week (making it about 21 hours of exercise each week), meditated, I caught up with friends, reduced the list of books waiting to be read by me, put out quite a lot of social media content about things I found fascinating or interesting or insightful, I improved my muscle mass, got more sleep and boned up on the latest neuroscience research on health, fitness and longevity.

Life became so amazing that it actually felt I was on a break. I wasn’t, in all that time I still worked on the consulting side of my business, I still etched ideas for books, I still put outlines together and read them for relevance and appeal, I still wrote on average 2,000 words a day. But I did it all without pressure, as stress-free as I was on holiday and completely forgot about this blog.

This is revealing it itself. I’ve made no bones in the past of the fact that I use this blog as therapy so completely forgetting about it could be taken as a sign that whatever was afflicting me and drove me to denude part of my soul here, was cured. But there is another theory to this that perhaps the figurative demons I’d encounter in my life as a writer which I’d then have to exorcise here were gone because I had stopped going out to look for them.

As it happens there is an element of truth to both these theories. Certainly, as I stopped travelling due to the pandemic and refused to re-start after it officially ended as a global public health emergency my stress levels remained low. Low, also, remained the stimuli that often led me to consider books and blog posts as solutions to problems I perceived. So in a sense I was ‘cured’ as in I became happier, calmer and more laid back. This also led me to stop digging deeper than I needed to in some things. I learnt to accept the face value of the reasons why we are inefficient, behave in mistrustful ways and refuse to cooperate until circumstances force us to.

I didn’t stop thinking about the issues themselves or the complexities of human behavior and human motivation but I did end up wanting to find fresh ways to make a difference, explore new avenues through which I could surface what I learnt and provide the answers to the questions I encountered in business and life, for others to read.

Without entirely meaning to I gravitated towards a “what’s next?” phase. I don’t want to write more books on SEO. Nor do I want to necessarily write another book on business.

The world is in a phase of deep transformation. Life is changing. The way we do business is also changing. There are fundamental elements to doing search engine optimization well, building trust and doing social media marketing that I have covered repeatedly in books, talks, interviews and blog posts. Repeating myself is boring to me. So I sort of stopped.

Books are born out of ideas. Ideas are answers to questions and insights (or solutions) to a problem. So this now let’s you know why I didn’t really come back here for such a long time. A book is an irritant in a writer’s mind. It itches at their being. Like a foreign object lodged deep inside them that must somehow come to the surface, it discomfits them.

Writers frequently talk about the ‘birthing’ process of a book. The moment of inception. The long gestation. Then the painful birth as they struggle to bring it to light. All of these similes are true. It totally feels that way. When a book is conceived it gains weight, life and power. It starts to take shape and form. And then it has to be written in a way that will make it valuable to the world.

A writer struggles with all of this, at every stage and the pain is real. Books come from exactly the right irritant finding the right writer. Over the last twelve months I’ve written no less than 100,000 words on a project that is not even halfway through. Obviously I will need to prune, tighten up, re-write, decide what to include and what to omit. Right now I am at that long birthing stage where the birth itself feels a little like a death each day. But that is a good sign. Books that are easy to write are, maybe, not worth reading.

So, I will be adding more posts to this blog now for sure. And if this one mystifies you more than it enlightens you remember: it’s here for my sake as much as yours. Probably more mine than yours.

What does a writer do in the age of Netflix? The question encapsulates the transition of an age from the written word to video on demand. The answer solves, I hope, dilemmas that haunt every content provider’s mind.

Notice two things here: First I chose not to use the word “attention” (until now), even though it is attention we strive for. And second, I chose not to use the word “writer” though that is how I identify myself these days.

There is a reason for my choices. The attention economy has always been there. I know we focus on it these days because we think that it is something that’s become precious because we are constantly bombarded by distractions but, in truth, anything only ever matters to us the moment we focus on it.

I fancy that in a medieval English town open air market the beets we’d buy from a particular beet-seller would be bought only because of the beet-seller’s skill in catching and then focusing our attention on his beets as opposed to those of any other, competing beet sellers.

It has always been the case, which brings me to content, writing and the role of writer in the age of video. An obvious answer to the question of course is provided by the fact that Dune is at the time of writing this #67 on Amazon books a fully 57 years after it was published. The visual medium and the spoken word supplement rather than supplant each other. Video may make it easier than ever to absorb information and watch entertainment but we also read more articles, news, summaries, comments than ever before and, in the truly co-creational universe of the web, write, reshare, curate and repurpose what we consume.

This makes any book, the same as any film, be no different to a picture or an article. They’re just content. And, as such, they’re only as good as the purpose they each serve at the point of consumption. You might find this point to be an epiphany. But you might not. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that content is created to serve a purpose. That purpose is defined by the needs of its audience and the perception of those needs is only as good as the ability of the content creator to exhibit some empathy.

So, there. Now. What have I just done for you? First, I’ve solved any issues you may have with your own perceived inadequacies as far as ‘talent’ is concerned. Second, I’ve just told you that whatever you write, however you write it is only as good as the task it serves at the point a purpose needs it.

In writing the books I do I am constantly aware of this to the degree that each book I write can be summarised as the answer to a simple question.

This approach, in turn, transforms the question about style, stylistics, and everything else associated with them, including ‘voice’ and ‘talent’ into the more functionally accurate one about effectiveness of the answer and its visibility when it matters most. I could, for instance, be a literary genius but if no one could understand what I wrote because of the way I wrote it that would be useless. It would also be equally useless if no one could find my book the moment they asked their question.

So, if you’re looking for writing tips as you dither whether you’re an author or a blogger, a journalist or an auteur consider that what you do matters only if it is seen, heard, consumed and engaged with. Content is always created for a purpose. Every purpose has an intent.

I hope this, now, got you thinking about yours.

Intentional: How To Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully

If we take writing as an act of creation we immediately realize that at least half of it is a conjuring act that manifests things that are mostly immaterial and invisible into things that are material and visible. Writers enter the ethereal domain of thoughts, imaginings and ideas and draw things from it that next appear as squiggles on a page or a screen that can be touched, read and, in the case of a physical book, can even be tasted, provided you are willing to bite one.

This makes writers gods of a sort. Words exist. Everyone can see them. We created them. Books can be touched, bitten (!) thrown and burnt. They contain the words we wrote. Words forms sentences, paragraphs and chapters. Each clustering groups abstract meaning into evidently manifest classes. The very act of classification creates a structure that enriches the underlying meaning that supports it.

Words, then, the building blocks of meaning become the foundations upon which structured knowledge enters into our real world. And it all happens because a person (in this case, me) thinks about something and then writes down their thoughts.

Amazing, right?

Right. Which is where the paradox creeps in. In order for all this to happen the writer has to pull of the impossible. We have to actively reduce the uncertainty we encounter so we can better understand something new, which we then present with such confidence that the reader can accept it.

The process is the same regardless if you’re writing fiction on non-fiction. In the case of the former we call it “suspension of disbelief” and in the case of the latter we call it credibility and expertise of the writer.

The paradox is that if the confidence we felt was 100% real then we’d have no problem with how we feel the moment our work is released upon the world. A chocolatier, for instance, doesn’t sit in the corner, feeling like a nervous wreck when their chocolates are on the shelf ready to be consumed by a chocolate-hungry public. Nor does, I imagine, the factory worker who puts together parts of a Ford car go home at the end of the day wondering if his work is going to be admired and loved by the car-buying public.

Yet, writers, the moment our work is complete have to go from a frame of mind of total immersion in our subject and confidence in its quality to one where we feel distanced, incomplete and vulnerable. At that point the variables we don’t control: readers’ mood, experience and expectations, reviewers’ context and sensibilities, the vagaries of fashion in reading material and external events that may draw attention away from a book, are so many that it becomes exceedingly easy to slip into a mode of helplessness and panic. Angst and depression are the next stops on that path.

While the transition from virtual god to virtual supplicant to the goddess of fate is easy it needn’t be necessary. Sure, as writers we expose part of our self every time we write. And yes, a bad review can hurt as much as a good one uplifts. Yet, it is impossible to appeal to everybody. The best writing in the world and the most carefully produced book can still miss their mark and sour a reader’s mood if the circumstances are wrong or the reader is mismatched with the book.

Just like chocolates have to be produced and cars need to be made there will always be a need for books to be written. The writer who feels this knows how to handle the paradox of the transition from ‘god’ to ‘mortal’ and back again without, each time, losing sense of who they are and what they do. It takes thought though and a far from small measure of a true sense of purpose.

Intentional: How To Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully

Let’s start with the unlikely proposition that a writer has to, at some point, seek to better understand his own journey as he writes. I said it’s unlikely because if we suppose, which we must, that books non-fiction and fiction alike; are a highly structured form of narrative that helps us make sense of the world, then it is fairly safe to assume that the writer who writes them has a deep sense of understanding of the world that is being created through their words.

That assumption however, safe as it may seem to make, is not a given. To illustrate this better consider that the world is a puzzle made up of many unconnected pieces. A book then is just a piece of that puzzle. But if the book itself is not part of the whole it may well end up being a piece of the puzzle that simply refuses to fit in. A writer could be an exquisitely skilled maker of puzzle pieces but unless those pieces can fit well together then the bigger sense that we crave is never going to take shape.

That makes sense, right?

I’ve said before that a book, as a whole, works best when it can be summed up in a single line answer to a question. Google Semantic Search, for instance, answered the question of “What do I do to market my website and business in a semantic search world?”. The Sniper Mind, had an even simpler question: How do I make better decisions when under pressure? The question directed at Intentional was even pithier: How do I behave?

Even this approach of boiling a book down to its core essence is not enough when it comes to writing books for a living. Giving piecemeal answers to questions fails when those answers and even the questions themselves are not part of a grater whole. You can call this, as I often have, purpose or you can call it vision. In a different context it may equally easily be called strategy.

The label is immaterial. What matters is that it is a roadmap that makes every step you take meaningful because it is getting you further towards a destination you seek. For me that destination is empowerment. In Google Semantic Search, for instance, I made a point of saying that knowledge is power but only if it leads to comprehension. In The Social Media Mind that predated it I said that social media is the empowerment of the individual at the expense of the system. In The Sniper Mind I wrote that. “To know who you are in a crowd gives you control over your own destiny.” Each book was a step towards a greater sense of empowerment and a greater sense of control over our life.

In Intentional the standout quote is the one that synthesizes personal confidence with beliefs, values, attitude and grit. every book has been a carefully crafted step taking my readers towards a destination where they can feel more, achieve more and be more.

Has all this been by design? In retrospect, obviously. But in truth not really. In crafting this writing journey I let myself be led by my own passion and my own vision that refuses to accept the arbitrary limitations imposed on the individual by the system. My writing makes sense in retrospect because each choice I made and each book I wrote, made sense to me at a deep, personal level at the time. Purpose gives meaning to action in the same way that structure gives meaning to data.

Life is a series of actions. Make yours a meaningful one. Have a deep sense of purpose and stay true to it no matter what.

Intentional: How To Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully

A writer’s journey is one of self-discovery. This, of course, sounds self-indulgent and were that to actually be the case then, my guess is, that writer would have few readers the same way self-indulgent people become isolated and feel lonely.

This is something I covered in more detail when I wrote about the many faces of the writer so I won’t waste your time by going over it again. This post, instead, is about something every writer agonizes over even as they are busy writing: the question of “what’s next?” Whether you’re working on a book, an article, a blog post or even a social media part of your mind, as a writer, is busy stitching together your next step.

The reason you need to think like this (if you’re not doing it already) is that the active process of writing a book opens up potential opportunities for your next one which you may otherwise miss. My writing evolution, so to speak, started with the earliest reincarnation of SEO Help back in 2010. I then wrote about social media in The Social Media Mind. From there, it was just a short step to writing Google Semantic Search which, quite naturally, led to me researching and writing about trust in writing The Tribe That Discovered Trust which became the natural stepping stone to decision-making and The Sniper Mind.

In writing Intentional all I did was follow my ‘True North.’ I let my growing knowledge and interest guide my footsteps. But this inevitability of broadening, deepening subject matter is only inevitable in retrospect, which is why it’s important for me to detail it here. It makes sense, for sure, but at the time of my writing The Sniper Mind it was anything but. I was deep in research in subjects that fired up my curiosity and absorbed my attention, and I was also drawn, in the external world in many different directions at the same time.

Coming up with “the next thing” when you are that deep in the woods is a process. You start to think about what you would like to tackle next, in the knowledge that it is going to absorb at least three years of your life and the writing of hundreds of thousands of words.

This struggle is the same even if you’re writing fiction. So, how do you resolve it? The same way you resolve any dilemma you face as a writer. You ask yourself two key questions. First: What question does writing this book answer? And second: Who would benefit from this answer?

The first question boils everything down into its most essential parts. Your research, the writing, the plot devices you use (if you’re writing fiction), the characters you create, the format of your book’s construction, all of this artifice, falls by the wayside when you condense everything into a one or two-line answer. The second question shows you if your writing journey is going to have value for anyone beyond yourself.

Writing may, indeed, be a journey of self-discovery for the writer but it is a journey of discovery for the reader. If the reader can’t see benefits, if they cannot feel themselves change and grow as a result, then the writer has failed them. These two questions are the tools we use to make the decisions we must as writers. By being honest in our answers to them we also learn to be honest with our self and honest with our readers. And that is what makes the proposition of a new book valuable.

So, Intentional grew out of a question that formed at the back of my mind as I was writing The Sniper Mind. If you can learn to make better decisions, the question went, how can you make sure that those decisions serve your life, your goals, your vision of who you are? There was no clear answer I could give at the time. I understood that snipers, who formed the core of my interviewees during the research and writing of that book, were not just tools to be pointed in a specific direction. Nor, were they proxy fingers poised to press down on a trigger.

Instead, they learnt to make decisions that became indicative of who they were as people. Their choices and their actions, reflected their deepest beliefs and their dearest values. Delving into how they created that sense of self that made them into whole people, capable of exercising their will and acting in an entirely intentional manner was what made this book, inevitable.


Intentional: How To Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully

Unlike most of my peers, when it comes to discussing writing, I make no distinction between fiction and non-fiction. I know that from a neuroscientific perspective they are both forms of communication that create a shared basis of understanding in those who read either form. Both fiction and non-fiction try to answer specific questions about the issues we face and guide us on how we should behave.

Each form of writing does this, of course, in a different way. Much like television informs, educates and entertains different from a shadow-puppet theatre, or a book. But the essential function is the same, which is why we are going to discuss emotions.

Traditionally, non-fiction was the kind of writing which was less likely to appeal to the reader’s emotions and fiction the one to do so the most. That’s why the latter is so separated into genres like: ‘Horror’, ‘Drama’ and ‘Romance’ and the former into ‘History’, ‘Biography’ and ‘Travel’. The contradiction becomes evident only when we expand the classification. Then, under fiction we also get genres that seem to require less attachment to emotion such as: ‘Science Fiction’, ‘Crime’, ‘Speculative Fiction’, and ‘Historical’ while the non-fiction genre delivers seemingly emotionally-laden categories such as: ‘Travelogue’, ‘Humor’ and ‘Self-Help’.

In truth emotion needs to be present in every form of writing. If there is no appeal to emotion through the writing we may as well be reading a dictionary. While dictionaries are undoubtedly useful they are not memorable, life-affirming, or life-changing. And that is actually what formal writing is designed to be.

Through the magic of the written medium we become privy to the thoughts inside another person’s skull. Neuroscientists consider the brain to be a universe in itself. Writers, in that sense, then become explorers providing a glimpse into a place that is largely unknown.

Good writers, of course, do much, much more than that. They mine their emotions, exhibit deep states of empathy and manage to connect with their readers at more than just one level. A non-fiction book then can answer a pressing, practical question, can offer suggestions that help with real world problems, can educate, inform, amaze and entertain all at the same time. The same list, in reverse, can be applied to great fiction.

Notice, I’ve used third person above, when it comes to talking about what good writers do. Do I consider myself a good writer? I know I can write and have been able to since I was twelve. But that doesn’t make me a good writer any more than the ability of someone to mix great colors and know all the different types of brushes and brush strokes, makes them a great painter.

My books sell. But connecting with my own emotions and mining them to bring them to the page is a struggle I am working on. Which brings me to the ‘moral’ of this post on writing. It really doesn’t matter what you write and oftentimes it doesn’t really matter how you write it. If you succeed in capturing the emotional content of its context, you’re onto a winner.

I’ve used a title for this piece that is no-nonsense and business-like but really, right now nonsense and unbusinesslike is exactly what’s inside my head. I am working on a new book and I’ve finished the research and note-taking phase and I’ve completed the planning which means that now this is the moment that the writing needs to happen, but it’s not quite as straightforward as that.

Because I use this blog as therapy where I write down my own personal writing journey I will tell you that I am apprehensive, do not want the journey to start and right now I am like that proverbial mountain climber who’s made it to the foot of the mountain but right now has the long, arduous journey ahead to get to the peak. And inside his head all he can think about are the struggle, the risks, the pain the effort and length of time that stretches ahead.

I know you’ll say “but it’s only writing. Sounds like the hardest part has been done already” and you will be partly right. The writing part rarely takes more than six months. Sometimes less. The hardest part is always the research and the planning, the thinking and the quest for more information as each bit I uncover takes me down different paths. But the writing is the journey. It’s the climb to the top of the mountain. It’s the ten rounds in the ring at the end of the three months’ training. It’s the race at the end that decides the winner.

To happen your head changes (or rather your brain) which is why it’s so hard. You need to synthesize everything you know, present it in a way that makes sense and still be fresh, innovative, educational and maybe, even, entertaining.

To do that you have to balance everything you know, everything you found out, everything you can think of, your perspective, your readers’ perspective and what the book publishing industry expects of you. You have to do this for up to eight – ten hours a day, every day, for maybe six months. Maybe more.

Now you see (I hope) why I am here kicking the proverbial dirt at the foot of this mountain.

There. It's out of my system. See you all at the top.

SEO Help: 20 Practical Steps to Power your Content Creation, Marketing and Branding in the new AI world of Google Search

It’s 2020 so I feel quite justified in borrowing a Victorian literary device Dear Reader so that you can see for yourself the struggle of a writer’s mind as if you were here sitting right beside me.

Consider how, right now, the existential issues facing us as a civilization and threatening our survival as a species require that I focus my writing on what helps us make better decisions under pressure. At the same time, as I write about what are essentially tactics you can use my mind grapples with and wants to chase the big-picture strategy that attracts my curiosity.

Now, you will say, this is didactic to some extent, certainly but hardly earth-shattering enough to warrant yet another piece. And I would be obliged to point out just how inaccurate that belief is. Let me explain, if you please, by transporting us both into the neuroscientist’s bag of tricks where motivation is always a struggle between pain and pleasure. And I call it a struggle because pain, of the right sort, is itself highly instructive and pleasure of the wrong variety has the ability to waste time and lives.

With that insight laid bare it becomes evident that while I write about the things I have to write about, their level of inherent interest notwithstanding, their difficulty and the constraints I labor under serve to increase my level of cognitive discomfort. The pursuit of other ‘dreams’ so to speak then, is nothing but a whimsy. An illusion created by my mind that wants me to procrastinate and engage in tasks less arduous and chase fields of enquiry that, at first glance, will always be more amusing and captivating than what I am doing just now.

Lesser writers than yours truly would, of course, fall for this. They might even convince themselves that their desire to chase the new and the interesting is the result of it being truly new and interesting in which case they’d abandon what they’re working on and start something else, only to have to repeat the cycle anew once the internal balance of discomfort versus comfort shifts once again; as it will.

Luckily this one writer does not engage in such pursuit. The fortitude that is required is there by virtue of awareness of the nature of the illusion; an awareness that springs from the knowledge of its root cause.

So here we are, Dear Reader, you and I now inhabiting the very same page; sharing a deep understanding of motivation and perception and how these two affect, directly, human endeavor and human behavior.

Is virtue then, I know you will ask, a simple case of denial? A requirement that one turns away from that which appears attractive and embraces the discomfort of writing; like a hair shirt to be worn at all times? And here too I have the answer for you. Of course not. Awareness brings self-knowledge. Self-knowledge helps differentiate between direction and distraction. More importantly it helps identify when distraction leads to direction through the serendipitous connection of fields of overlapping interest.

So writing then in truly a balancing act. It is discovery and exposition, organization and explanation all rolled into one. It is about making better decisions and recognizing the implications of the choices we alight upon. It is what creates shared truths and common understandings with you, Dear Reader, so the sojourn that drains us both delivers delights of mind that make it worth the punt.

The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions

So, this Friday ended on a high with Book Authority picking “The Sniper Mind” as one of the best new decision making audiobooks of this year.

Writers know that those of us who write for a living live in a state of perpetual fugue. Yesterday’s books vie for headspace with fresh ideas, new suggestions, exciting research that takes us down new rabbit holes, talks, meetings and new book outlines that need to sound coherent long before the ideas behind them have truly crystalized.

In addition there is all that other work that revolves around the marketing of previous books, talks, podcasts, interviews and presentations. Keeping it all together requires either more than one brain (I’d really like evolution to get a move on, on that) or the ability to compartmentalize things a little and add perspective.

I currently possess only one brain. So, in order to keep it together I employ the compartmentalization technique I just mentioned above. Namely I keep everything in my head in different compartments and I am careful about not letting them spill over. Case in point, today’s announcement by Book Authority. I am working on a couple of new projects at the moment and I am also busy finishing some market analysis for clients so the temptation to just drop everything and focus on this just now was pretty strong.

What I did, instead, was treated it as another piece of research/news to be analyzed, assessed and then placed in the normal stream of data that I have set up regarding The Sniper Mind. The result is that by the time I got to it so it can be processed I was in a more detached, analytical frame of mind and could then deal with it, without it derailing my day.

A little split-personality-ish; I know. Then again, it actually works for me. It might work for you too (if you’re writing, or multi-tasking).

I am writing this now instead of working on my treatment of a next book. So I am procrastinating. Or at least this how it would appear. But consider that I am actually writing instead of writing so this is not what’s going on here at all.

Which begs the question, right? Maybe you’re not entirely dying to understand what’s going on inside my head but seeing how I use myself as a petri dish, running metacognitive analyses on how I write, part of this perhaps helps you understand how to write better too.

So, what is going on?

I am working on something complex. As most non-fiction writing, I need to find a way to make it simple without losing the essence of its meaning or the cohesion of its ontological structure. And it’s frying my brain. I know I will get to it. I just need to find the right semantic pathways that will enable me to express it correctly so it makes sense.

While my brain’s whirring away at the problem I still need something to write and, well, here we are. I am now explaining this piece of writing which is to say that I am also showing you part of the writing process you don’t get to see.

This is what I find: if I engage in an activity that is associated with the problem I am trying to solve but not directly involved with it I can usually find insights that help me arrive at the solution I am looking for, faster. Plus, by focusing on the mechanical as opposed the cognitive aspect of the problem (i.e. in this case, the fact that the words I need to explain the concepts I want in a simple yet powerful way, escape me) I tend to understand the way my brain works a little better and that somehow helps me get to the solution of the problem I am dealing with, easier.

So. Stuck in your writing? It’s not “writer’s block” (that’s a myth!). You just need to give your brain a different perspective by engaging in something similar that it can actually do. It then works things out in the background and presents you with the solution you were looking for.

The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions