I mentioned the phrase building in public in a blog post recently. The idea is quite simple. Somebody is building a new product — an app, a website, a service, maybe even some strange little piece of hardware — and instead of disappearing into a room for six months and emerging with a finished product, they talk about the whole process while it is happening. They post screenshots. They explain decisions. They show things that don’t work. They change their minds. They ask questions. And everybody watching gets to see how clever — or perhaps not quite so clever — they are being.
I can imagine that this can feel quite exposing for the person doing it. After all, people don’t just see the good ideas. They also see the wrong turns, the experiments that go nowhere and the moments when something turns out to be much harder than expected. And yes, people may comment on that. Usually, I suspect, in the form of useful and constructive criticism.
But there is also something very clever about building in public. Long before the product is actually ready, you are already building a group of people who know about it. Some of them may become users. Some may become customers. Others simply become interested enough to keep following along.
What about writing in public?
So I started wondering: can you do the same thing with a book? Apparently you can: https://explicatingelle.bearblog.dev/time-for-a-new-writing-project. I don’t know the woman behind this blog, but I stumbled across her new experiment and immediately found the idea interesting. She has decided to spend 30 days blogging every day about the creation of a new writing project. Not just sharing the finished chapters, but documenting the process itself: the planning, the characters, the worldbuilding, the inspiration and whatever progress she happens to make that day. Her stated goals include documenting what she is doing, organising her thoughts and creating some accountability for herself. In other words: writing in public.
And we are already seeing why this might be interesting. Her first progress report (https://explicatingelle.bearblog.dev/project-30-challenge-day-1/) isn’t a triumphant story about sitting down at the keyboard and effortlessly producing thousands of wonderful words. Quite the opposite. She describes it as a rocky start. She managed to do some planning and writing, but had to rewrite the opening scene three times while trying to figure out how the story should actually begin.
That might sound like a problem. But for somebody following the project, it is actually one of the interesting parts. Normally we only see the finished book. We don’t see the abandoned beginnings, the ideas that went nowhere, the characters that changed completely halfway through or the afternoon on which the writer stared at a paragraph for three hours and eventually deleted it. Here, we might.
Something else happens as well. When somebody openly writes about struggling with a project, you start to understand the project differently. You become slightly invested in it. You want to know whether she gets that opening scene right. Whether the characters develop the way she hopes. Whether the story actually survives the 30-day experiment.
Which brings us back to the same interesting effect we see with building a product in public. By the time there is a finished product, there may already be a small group of people waiting for it. Not because somebody ran a social media campaign. Simply because they were there while it was being made.
I have no idea whether this particular experiment of writing in public will work. Perhaps blogging about writing will eventually become a distraction from the actual writing. Perhaps after 30 days the whole idea will be abandoned. Or perhaps a book will slowly emerge while a group of readers watches it happen. That uncertainty is precisely what makes it interesting to follow.
Building in public has become quite a recognisable idea. Maybe writing in public deserves to become one as well. And somehow it feels very IndieWeb to me. People creating things on their own websites, experimenting with formats, publishing unfinished thoughts and generally ignoring whatever the official professional approach is supposed to be. No content strategy. No carefully prepared launch campaign. No need to pretend everything went perfectly. Just somebody thinking: This might be interesting. Let’s try it.