"1. Use your skills. You’re a designer, which means you’re good at the same kinds of things writers are good at, but you use different tools. You’re a fixer: you work within constraints to find elegant solutions to complicated problems, and that’s kind of what writing is, too. So, faced with a writing task, do what you do best. Break it down into a problem you can solve. Ask yourself: Who’s this for? What’s the big idea? What are the pieces I’m using? What do I want to say? Like designing, writing can straddle the line between art and craft—half blinding flashes of inspiration and unexplainable moments of brilliance (maybe a little less than half), and half moving words around, making and breaking sentences, typing commas then deleting them. Nuts and bolts stuff. If you get too caught in one side, move to the other. Writing’s about thinking big and thinking small, putting complex ideas into simple boxes, and you can do that."
Maybe we should all learn to think of writing as a design problem.
