“I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.” E.B. White said that; the man who gave us Charlotte’s Web, revised Strunk’s Elements of Style into the writer’s bible it became, and by most accounts agonised over his own sentences more than almost anyone. If a writer that accomplished still found the nerve required worth remarking on, it’s probably worth taking seriously.
What struck me most, digging into how he worked, wasn’t the admiration. It was how precisely his process maps onto something I’ve been noticing in my own writing lately: sketching out an experience is straightforward. Making it appealing, making it land for someone who wasn’t there, is an entirely different piece of work.
Two disciplines, not one #
White described writing as having two faces. One lets curiosity lead; if the mood strikes to wander off and look at something, go and look at it. He once found himself at the Bronx Zoo just as two fawns were born, and wrote about it immediately, purely because it happened in front of him. The other face is less forgiving: mood or no mood, a writer eventually has to sit down and get the words out.
I recognise both faces in how these pieces get made. The eclipse piece arrived because I happened to be out walking when the sky did something strange. The catastrophising post came from a stray thought about an email snippet. Neither was planned. Both were curiosity, followed somewhere. But neither would exist at all without the second, less romantic discipline: the Monday-to-Friday rhythm that gets something written even on the days nothing in particular has struck me.
The sketch is never the hard part #
Here’s the distinction I think matters most. Retelling what happened is close to reporting: the sky went dark, then light returned quickly. I had a thought about catastrophising during a walk. A prospect said something kind about email-then-call. None of that takes much courage or craft. It’s simply noticing, then writing down what was noticed.
White drafted the same way, by his own account: in a rush, carried along by feeling, rather than agonising over each sentence as it landed on the page. The sketch was never where his discipline showed up.
It showed up afterwards, in the rewriting. He described knowing a piece was right by something closer to a physical signal than a logical checklist; an almost bodily certainty once it had finally been rewritten enough times. Charlotte’s Web took two years to draft, and then, dissatisfied, he put it away and spent another full year rewriting it before it became the book people know.
That’s the part I recognise most in my own process, and it’s the part that takes the nerve. The eclipse only became a piece worth publishing once “the light came back quickly” turned into something about disruption not always being permanent. The catastrophising thought only became useful to somebody else once it had a piece of Stanford research sitting underneath it, and a few practical techniques attached. The sketch told me what happened. The rewriting is what made it worth someone else’s few minutes.
Trusting your own instinct #
White was candid that he wasn’t entirely sure what equipment a writer needs but felt strongly that the ability to judge your own work honestly was one of the more valuable pieces going. That instinct is worth trusting rather than second-guessing. It’s usually the thing that notices a post is missing the detail that would make it land, or that a piece of research doesn’t quite support the claim being built on it, long before anyone else would spot it.
The guts White admired were never really about the first draft. Anyone can retell what happened to them; most people do it every day, over coffee, without a second thought. The courage is in doing the second, harder job afterwards: taking something only you experienced and shaping it into something a stranger would want to read.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
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