4 P’s Formula to Structure Your Writing, A Man With Iron Lungs, and More
An issue for writers, history enthusiasts, book lovers and curious people
Grand welcomes all new and existing members to this new form of Be Curious.
With a new month, I have decided to add a little variety to the letters.
Earlier, Sunday's issue contained one longform article on mostly history-related topics.
With this new form, I have tried to maintain that aroma and add a little more to it by building on it.
That's why from now it will have four sections: Writing, History with a Message, Book-ish, and Let's Muse.
All the sections' names are self-explanatory, I guess. If not, over time they will be. I don't like to force-limit anything that's why I'll leave it here. Let's see where it goes.
I don't plan to overwhelm you with the details. That's why I will put a "Today's issue at a glance" topic in the very beginning so that it can assist you in navigating the post if you think it's too long.
Let's dive right in.
Today’s issue at a glance:
Writing: Four P's to structure your writing
History with a Lesson: A story of a man with Iron Lungs
Book-ish: How to go from zero to one in real life?
Let's Muse: Do you know cyclists are behind all the problems of the economy?
Writing
Lately, I have been reading a lot about polishing my writing and how I can improve my craft.
A constant question I'm exploring remains how can I take my writing to the next level?
It turns out, more than going on a quest to find shortcuts, we should try working out our basics.
Continuing with that, though I find too many articles and resources around how to style your articles, today I want to dedicate this section to the basics.
So here are the four P's to structure your writing:
Planning: Plan what you will write. Don't jump straight just with a random outline. Ruminate the budding idea in your head instead of hurrying to your laptop.
Once you're done with the basic outline, run for the laptop or paper and pen. Note or type it down. Try to gather all the necessary resources you think will be required to put this article together.
It can be research pieces, book excerpts, quotations, poetry or prose, or just useful URLs that you will need to visit to annotate or credit.
Producing: With all the necessary tools and techniques at your fingertips, it's now the time to put it together.
You'll find it's a lot easier to write when you have 99% of things already figured out, unlike the other way where you decide to do it all in one go.
Your first draft will be the end result of this step. So don't overthink it and “just put it all together.” Literally.
Polishing: Give your produced piece some time to rest. Take a walk, or come back the next day to lay refreshed eyes on the piece. This way you'll have the viewers' perspective and not the writers'.
This will prove substantially useful in catching errors and deciding what needs to be changed.
Actual work: Edit, edit, edit. Delete, delete. Check. Check if everything from grammar, punctuation and spelling to word choice, flow and style are in place.
Presentation: In the above step, we polished our work, so it reads well. In this step, we will present it so it looks good.
Because we are talking about writing online, we can leave behind margins and handwriting. We should focus our attention on titles, subtitles, use of cover images, etc.
Remember, your eyes are a superior guide to your brain in this step. You have to be more creative than you have to be logical in this step. Just keep the flow in check and go with whatever feels good to your eyes. Your readers will reciprocate.
Simple, eh? Just keep this framework in mind and develop it as your own mental model if you wish.
History with a Message
“Every time I’d make a friend, they’d die.”
Meet Paul Alexander, popularly known as the man with an iron lung.
It all starts in July of 1952 when Paul Alexander, a six-year-old boy, gets infected with polio.
One day he was playing in the quiet Dallas suburbs in the summer rain when he suddenly started to feel sick. He told his mother and when she looked at his little child’s feverish face, she gasped. She suspected it was polio.
In a few days, it became clear the little boy had polio, but still, the family doctor advised them against taking him to the hospital.
“There are just too many patients there. Paul had a better chance of recovering at home,” the doctor said.
In just five days things worsened so much that he wasn’t able to hold a crayon, swallow food, move his hands or legs, walk or cough. He was rushed to Parkland Hospital.
Fortunately, he survived. But because polio had permanently paralysed his body, his lungs could not work on their own. For decades, he relied on a machine called the Iron Lung to help him breathe.
“My breathing out of the iron lung is voluntary: I have to think about it, and work at it, so I get tired,” he tells Gizmodo.
He is one of the last few survivors of polio who is stuck with an iron lung. He faced many complications along the way. Each one cast shadows on the line between his life and death.
One such event was when his iron lung stopped working. No one had the parts to fix his machine as this was outdated. The last iron lung was manufactured more than half a century ago.
But all these hardships didn’t stop him from living a normal life.
He went to law school, passed the bar exam, and started his own practice. He wrote a book, his memoir, using only his mouth. Not only this, he draws and sketches using his mouth.
That’s not only a story but a testament to willpower and optimism. We just need a small fraction of what he’s shown. It’s truly incredible.
Book-ish
Lately, I was reading my highlights from the book Zero to One by Peter Thiel.
It's got one of the most amazing opening lines you'll ever encounter in a non-fiction book.
Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them.
Later in the book, he writes, “…every time we create something new we go from 0 to 1.”
This book, as well as this idea, has become quite popular in the startup ecosystem.
But what about real life? Can we apply it in some shape and form there?
I think the answer is a big fat yes.
Blindly copying someone in the name of inspiration is not how we grow. We grow by learning a little from everyone and coming up with our rights and wrongs, our own mental models.
Some might misinterpret going from 0 to 1 as doing something totally out of the box; waking up one day and having a voila or a eureka moment.
That can't be any farther from the truth.
Many social networking sites existed well before the advent of Facebook. The same goes for Google, just replace social networking with search engines. And while Bill Gates was building Microsoft, they didn't build a totally new product to sell to IBM.
The point is, though having a brand new idea does count as going from 0 to 1, it need not be the only way.
Here's how we can go from 0 to 1 in our real life:
Take inspiration from everyone, but don't copy them.
Act on things immediately. Procrastination is your actual competition.
Be creative and focus more on execution than fancy strategies or growth hacks.
These are some of the lessons I absorbed from the book. Context has changed, obviously, but it works just as fine.
I'm sure if you have read this book, you have more to share. Hit the comments.
Let’s Muse
We all have read some version of a satirical post about how every McDonald's creates 30 extra jobs apart from people working in its outlet. 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists and 10 weight loss experts.
Let's now see how a cyclist is bad for the economy. Let me know what your views are on this.
We are terming a cyclist “bad” not because he's doing something illegal, but because he's spending so little compared to others. Let's see.
A cyclist will not buy a car. That's why they will not take a car loan.
They will spend $0/year on gasoline, unlike their counterparts who will spend $5,000/year on average, according to a survey.
They will not pay a premium in the name of car insurance. Nor will they spend a dime on services, maintenance and washes.
If the car owner lives in an urban area, they'll also save on parking costs and toll charges.
Note that many of these are recurring costs. And because they are micro-transactions, they may seem negligible at the moment but compound exponentially over time.
The list doesn't end here.
A cyclist is healthier on average. That's why he will visit doctors less, buy drugs and medication less, and save on hefty hospital bills.
All in all, they will spend close to nothing on their transportation and much less on healthcare when compared to their non-cyclist counterparts. That's why they are referred to as a disaster for an economy, but for a good reason.
What are your thoughts on this topic? Let's continue the discussion in the comments.
I hope you enjoyed today’s issue.
P.S. See you soon on Wednesday. I still haven’t decided what topic should be included but let’s see.