The Long Way Around: How Collaboration, Collapse, and Solitude Shaped My Writing

I’ve been writing from different angles for years now. Coming at it sideways. Saying it once in fragments, once in confession, once like a warning to myself. Writing short stories and essays and then the work never sees the light of day while hiding on one of my hard drives.

But really, if being authentic and honest is the highest on the value chain- for me it is, anyways…the next natural step is that you don’t wait for permission to speak. That you don’t wait for clarity to arrive like a letter in the mail. That if you’re going to live honestly, with integrity as a writer, you learn to write while things are still unresolved. I’ve said it before in other forms, in other places, in other voices. This is just the cleanest version of it so far.

Most people wait until their work is ready. They tell themselves they’re being responsible, careful, and strategic. What they’re really doing is protecting themselves from exposure. What I was doing was protecting my ideas from being stolen – that has happened to me so many times, I’m like “When do I get to benefit from my ideas?” haha.. Well that’s another post altogether.

But with the potentiality for being seen mid-thought, or embarrassment from rough edges, I write and “put it out there.” Waiting quietly kills more books than rejection ever will. I didn’t understand that at first. I had to learn it by writing in very different rooms, under different conditions.

The first real book I worked on, ROQNROL, wasn’t born out of solitude or self-expression. It came from collaboration. Interviews. Whiteboards. Conversations that stretched late into the day. I wasn’t trying to say something personal. I was working in sales at a Fortune 500 company, and the training department was doing it all wrong. I knew I could do better: To train salespeople how to communicate better with their customers.

So, I was trying to translate experience. To listen closely enough that what people were doing instinctively could be turned into language someone else could use. That book came from a team, from a shared problem, from a practical need. It taught me discipline. Responsibility. How to get out of my own way and let the material speak through structure. I learned how to write for others before I learned how to write for myself. And that training reached hundreds of people in the corporate world. And I’m proud of that.

Then everything stopped.

A layoff will do that. It creates a silence you don’t plan for. I had severance. I had time. Most importantly, I had a supportive wife, a partner who believed in me. For the first time in a long while, no one was waiting on output. No meetings. No deadlines pretending to be emergencies. Just days that opened up and asked uncomfortable questions. When you remove the noise, you’re left with whatever’s underneath. What was underneath for me wasn’t ambition. It was a need for clarity.

That’s where Elimination came from. Not as a career move, but as a way to steady my head. I wasn’t trying to build a platform or chase relevance. I was trying to understand how awareness worked. How Buddhist philosophy had helped me clear space in my thinking. How attention, breath, and subtraction mattered more than accumulation. That book was written alone, slowly, without an audience in mind. It taught me how to sit still with an idea long enough for it to reveal itself instead of forcing it into shape.

Between those two books, I learned something important. ROQNROL taught me how to write with others. Elimination taught me how to write alone. Neither taught me how to stay in the work publicly, over time, without hiding until it felt finished.

That gap matters.

And so, this is how I’m doing it with this new book: Word Grit. I’ve decided to make a website to show the workings of the book, as I write it.

Writing in public isn’t exhibitionism. It isn’t oversharing. It’s a discipline. It’s the decision to let the work exist while it’s still forming. To allow drafts to breathe. To accept that meaning often sharpens through repetition, not secrecy. When I started writing, that’s what I was testing. Whether words could carry weight before they were polished. Whether a short vignette could hold truth without explanation. Whether a character could stand in for a feeling most people avoid naming.

There’s a cost to working this way. You risk being misunderstood. You risk someone reading a draft as a declaration. You risk showing your seams. You risk that your ideas will be stolen. But honesty and integrity are number one for me, so I’m putting myself out there – unpolished.

But polish has its own cost. It creates distance. It convinces you that you’re finished when you’re not. Writing in public keeps you honest. Writing in a way that’s not so academic, and more like writing just the way you talk, it shows your ‘voice’ and writing style most clearly.

And writing ‘in public’ keeps you accountable to the work instead of the performance of the work. Since Word Grit is very important to me, and it’s important to the audience that I am writing it for.. then I think it’s a good thing to be accountable to myself as well.

Readers, in this context, aren’t consumers. They’re witnesses. Some recognize themselves in the material. Some don’t. Some stay for a while and move on. That’s not a failure. That’s how real work moves through the world. You don’t chase everyone. You don’t explain yourself to exhaustion. You keep showing up. You keep shaping the sentences. You let the work tell you what it needs next.

I didn’t start with this philosophy. I didn’t arrive at it through theory. I worked my way here through collaboration, collapse, and solitude. Through listening, through silence, through staying when it would’ve been easier to wait. I’m still writing it, and I think it’s a good way to go.