An Email Players subscriber asks about my writing process:
“Do you write down every thought that comes while navigating your thinking awareness or do you just go deep to see where it leads… Curious to know – Can you elaborate on your thinking process?”
I’ll take a wack at answering his question:
I live inside my head, and write literally everything of note down, file it in a folder on my desktop where appropriate, determining if it will be an email, content for a book, content for Email Players, content for a audio or video… or maybe used for something else entirely or totally lost in the abyss, never to be used and totally forgotten, ignored and passed over for younger, hotter ideas as the original idea hit the wall. Then often ideas sit there for weeks or months or possibly a year or longer (several years in some cases)… and in the time between I write it down and do something with it, my brain is connecting dots, looking for connections to other stuff, maybe hitching a ride on something I’ve already written or created to parasite off that or build onto it or change it somehow.. and it’s all very organic and chaotic in many ways, and not something that is methodized other than the above.
Some of my emails and books and content and even fiction were “written” 1-2 years prior this way.
Ideas I had back as a kid or in college have made their way into fiction and emails 30+ years later in some cases.
I have whole Email Players issues already plotted out for the end of 2025 and at least one in 2026 (for the 15-year anniversary issue of the newsletter) — all based on filed away ideas that came to me out of the blue, while driving, in the shower, while walking, reading, watching something on TV, or from a stray brain fart someone said somewhere online or offline or maybe just something that occurred in a dream.
After that timing is everything.
Timing of offers, timing of when something will have most impact, timing of how something will relate or fit into the context already created by other content before it, or how it will effect what comes after… Sometimes timing changes and something I thought I’d do later gets done immediately (that happened a lot right before the lockdowns)… while stuff I want to do now gets put off for months or over a year for maximum impact and benefit to give the reader the best experience.
It’s just one strand, one string, one tentacle at a time.
All of them sally forth’ing out, looking to plug into something else, often being diverted, or enhanced, sometimes deleted… based on whatever else is going on in the world, with my own interests, with mistakes made, insights gained, opportunities arising… or just changing trajectory based on what I think may go on, what has gone on, what is suddenly going on.. or could go on, or that I want to happen or not to happen.
A guy can go a bit bat shyt existing like this sometimes.
And it can be hard to quiet your mind, almost like slipping into despair.
It can even cause some weird dreams, too.
But at least you don’t get bored.
So that’s my answer to that.
All right, enough of this.
To learn more about the paid Email Players newsletter go here:
Ben Settle
