A Pocket guide to Sketchnoting
It was a week ago that the book that I’d been working on for quite a few months launched. On the day I wrote some initial thoughts intending to edit it later, cos that’s what writers do. Looking back over what I wrote, in the spirit of ‘done is better than perfect’ I’ll post what I wrote.
Well, after many months of writing I have managed to produce a book.
It was hard.
I outlined, then threw it away.
I concentrated on one chapter, then rewrote once I’d done others.
I tried to include too much and then took out too much.
I wanted to give up
I compared myself and the book with others - a terrible idea.
I listened to good advice from lots of smart, kind and generous people. I actually did some of it.
I’m glad I did it. Though I can’t quite work out why.
I hope people like it.
I got sidetracked by drawing (no suprise there).
I had great help, support and encouragement all the way.
Sometimes, I rather enjoyed it.
It’s the book that I could write.
One glaring omission is any talk of the actual book. It was my intention to write a useful guide to the practice of sketchnoting with some helpful starting points. I hope that I’ve achieved that.
One intruiging thing for me was the fact that I decided early on not to tell many people that I was working on a book. It turns out that was a very good decision. I recently came across Derek Sivers’ TED talk, where explains that telling people your goal immediately makes it less likely to happen. The ‘social reality’ that he mentions, where you get the feelgood without doing the work, is something that has definitely tripped me up in the past. Go watch it - It’s very short but interesting