The Millspaugh method

Friends keep asking me what my writing process is for my book.

Recently I realized that I like to write in the act of learning. While I’m reading a blog or book or listening to a podcast, I’ll instinctively go off and start writing down my questions and connecting the thing to other things I know. My best writing often comes naturally when I’m in a learning flow. The point is to harness creative energy when it arrives. Inspiration is fleeting, and it often can’t be recaptured later. Books like The Artist’s Way and The Creative Act have taught me to ride the wave. It can be a rather chaotic, dog-squirrel way of working, but it’s definitely fun.

It has been quite fun working on the book in this way. So like, while I was reading How DNS Works by Julia Evans I started quickly typing out a draft chapter on DNS. I am closest to the (average) reader at that moment writing the first draft because that’s when I know the least about DNS.

It feels a bit cringe and egotistical to coin a method after my name, btw, but I’m not trying to prescribe a formula to others, nor do I expect it to catch on. The name is a spin on another blog post I just read called “the McPhee method” (more on that in a moment). My aim is more in the spirit of digital gardening, just like my next, next, next job essay was. I had an observation about how I write, then I read something squarely on topic (the McPhee method), and now I’m planting a seed to see how it grows over time. I haven’t written all that much in public, so my “method” really is a seed, or a hypothesis even.

The McPhee method

I just read James Somers’ blog post on “fact piece” nonfiction writing, The McPhee method. It resonated profusely because, without meaning to, I find myself doing work that sometimes resembles journalism for my book. Like, a couple weeks ago I interviewed a domain broker who I’d never met. He was friendly and helpful, but there were things he was understandably unwilling to share. I felt like a reporter toeing the line between information extraction and goodwill accumulation. My primary concern is to be respectful of an interviewee’s boundaries (which a true, capital-J Journalist might eschew), but I also want juicy stories for the book, ofc. On that note, James wrote:

Good facts are rare, so you must give yourself enough time to acquire them. You have to get in close—build rapport with people, and watch them in their element.

Research up front

He talks about tackling all the reporting (i.e. research, interviews) before writing. There’s a disconnect between my realization about writing in the act of learning and the McPhee method’s do-the-reporting-up-front approach. For a magazine-length story, front-loading interviews and research before writing it all up sounds manageable. Especially if your subject is one person. But I’m writing a book, so I’m not sure doing the reporting up front is tenable. The more stones I turn over in my research, the more stones I want to go find. I tend to think of more stones as I write. My pile of research and interview notes would become unwieldy, and I’d grow anxious about the mountain of synthesis and writing ahead. I hope writing along the way will speed up my time to print and improve the quality of the final product.

Having your antenna up

James also writes that:

The beauty of having a piece of writing you’re working on is that it changes the way you think. You can’t help but relate whatever you’re doing to the work in progress.

I think of this as having my antenna up. It’s become one of my favorite parts of having an active writing project. Last week I was visiting rural Canada where I took note of all the .ca domains on billboards, dentist offices, and fireworks pickup trucks (fireworks.ca—they put on quite a show).

There’s more to McPhee’s method, like using note cards to arrange sections logically once you have the puzzle pieces in hand (which I plan to adopt for my book chapters). You should read James’s post if you’re curious about how a writer like James or John McPhee would put together something like a New Yorker fact piece. I’ve started outlining my own method here, inspired by the McPhee method.

The Millspaugh method

As stated up top, the Millspaugh method is predicated on writing when lightning strikes, or as Rick Rubin says, “riding the wave.” But it also relies heavily on engaging with potential readers and the subject matter. As of now, I’d say my method has three pillars:

• Ride the wave
• Work in public
• Experiment

Ride the wave

This is counter to reporting up front, which I wrote about above. My hope is that by writing when I feel like it (i.e. when it’s flowing), I’ll end up with the best writing I’m capable of. As James quotes (Hemingway, I think?), all writing is rewriting anyway. It’s efficient. Interleaving writing with reading and talking to people allows me to write when I feel like I’m writing well and read when I can’t find the words.

I think design is the same—I can’t just sit down and design a website in one go. Design is asynchronous. I’ll have an idea while driving, or I’ll notice an interaction pattern I like on another website. If I ride the wave, over time I can execute on a design to meet my taste of what I think looks good.

Actually, by writing this very essay I am riding the wave. I didn’t plan to write this today—it was hardly a seed. But as I read the McPhee method it dovetailed into place with some notes I’d written on when I like to write.

Work in public

I owe much of my writing habit’s relative consistency over the past couple years to the philosophy of working in public. Organizing this blog as a digital garden is a way to signal that I’m writing in public rather than waiting until a work feels finished.

For my book, I’m working in public by sending email newsletters every week or two and tweeting out neat domain tidbits I learn as I learn them. By doing that, I’m testing what resonates with readers and collecting feedback. One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out as I write is who my audience is. Is it programmers? Or anyone working in tech? Or anyone who’s bought a domain before? Or anyone who uses the internet? Knowing my audience changes what they’ll relate to and therefore what they’re interested in and in turn what I write about (interviews are also super helpful for this, too).

I also want to include readers in my process so that they feel a connection to my work. My friend Steve said that he pre-ordered Etymology Nerd’s book instantly because he’d been following him on Twitter for a while. That also builds mind share with readers so that their antenna is up for domains, plus they can tell friends and coworkers about your work. I think the steady accumulation of readership day by day is more important than the spiky surges that come from big announcements. It gets my heart rate up seeing a rush of new mailing list subscribers from a planned launch, but all the slow days of one reader here, two there amount to more over time.

Working in public also avoids the trap of seeking perfection (a.k.a. the enemy of progress). It takes the pressure off. Julia Cameron says that just as marathon runners log nine slow miles for every fast one, writers should scribble something like tenfold the quantity of writing that’ll make the final cut. Saving your best writing is a myth.

Experiment

Experimenting is my version of what James described as McPhee “participating”, and it pairs well with working in public.

The salient example for my book is becoming a small-scale domain investor myself. It’s instructive to read about and talk to domain investors, but it’s better to take it a step further by becoming one myself. I plan to buy up a portfolio of maybe a dozen domains, working in public all the while to create a feedback loop.

There are constraints, ofc, namely time and money. Domaining is something I can do for less than a thousand dollars. Becoming a registry or registrar on the other hand—something I’d love to do for my research—is prohibitively expensive. It costs $4,000 to become an ICANN-accredited registrar, and it would cost much more to win registry rights to gTLDs in auctions.

Experimenting can be much lower stakes, though. I get the sense that a lot of people read about AI and talk to coworkers and family and friends about AI before actually popping open ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or whatever to just try it. Experimenting is the Learn by Doing school.

Reading about writing

Like I said, it feels early to outline my method. But now that I’ve written it down, my antenna is up for other writers’ methods. I’ll probably read more writing about writing, like Stephen King’s On Writing, which I noticed in a bookstore the other week. Send me your recommendations along those lines by replying below or emailing directly.