Mike Sowden on Finding Your Voice

and writing a book in 15 days.

Hiya, writers,

We’re back with a Friday Q&A. (Did you catch last week’s with Susan Shain on writing for The New York Times?)

I’m really loving these, and I hope you are, too. Hearing about how other writers approach their work is so interesting to me, especially lately when many of us are trying new things; some of us are struggling and some are re-evaluating while others are just cruising—but a common thread seems to be a commitment to making it work. And when we share what works for us, and what doesn’t, I think we can all win. And I love that. I really want us all to win. Whatever that means.

So. Let’s get to it.

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Mike Sowden on (re)discovering his voice, writing a book, and always trying new things

It’s a little too easy to come up with fun facts for introducing Mike Sowden. He’s currently living in a shed in Scotland. He’s trying to write a book in 15 days. And he seems to find joy in sleeping outside without a tent—even in the rain. He’s just one of those people who always seems to be doing something worth writing about, even though he’s not the professional-epic-adventure sort. (He’s more like the let-me-throw-myself-at-this-uncomfortable-experience-and-see-what-happens sort.) And I have a lot of respect for that.

But I didn’t just want to interview Mike because he’ll occasionally crawl into a glorified trash bag and sleep under the stars. I wanted to interview Mike because he has a relationship with words and storytelling that seems at once intimate and expansive. (He even wrote a course on storytelling!) I could go on and on here but in a nutshell: He’s a writer I greatly admire, and I think you should meet him. So, meet Mike!

I always enjoy the momentum of your writing; the way you pull readers from one sentence to the next. As a reader, it seems like that kind of writing must flow so naturally. But as writers, we all know that's rarely true. How have you been finding your flow with writing during this strange time?

I think my answer's in two parts. The first was ten years of experimenting until I sounded like myself when I wrote. That always comes from practice and underwhelming returns, from the hours spent writing things that leave you a bit dead inside when you read them later.

My earliest writing flows like dried concrete. I was too self-conscious, too much of my ego screaming "BE IMPORTANT AND PROFOUND YET APPROACHABLE AND CLEVER AND HEY DON'T FORGET WITTY TOO." And then I wrote, and it was none of those things. But if you keep going, at some point you've put in enough hours to be able to stumble across your own voice, and then everything gets easier.

The second part of the answer is: I got there, but then I stopped, and for a while I went back to not sounding like myself. From 2014, I began stepping back from writing because of my late mother's increasingly poor health, and that lack of daily writing made my voice wither away until it sounded mechanical and self-conscious again. It's still not exactly back. I did a piece of copywriting for someone just before Christmas, the kind of bill-paying work I used to do a lot of, and it turned out to be flat, lifeless writing; no joy conveyed in the telling or the reading. And I suspect (I hope) that's going to be what I remember about these lockdown months: I finally learned to write for the second time, in order to get the necessary strength & stamina I'll need for my more outdoorsy-focused writing soon, considering all the absurd hills I'll be trying to climb (literally and figuratively).

You started your blog, Fevered Mutterings, many years ago. What's one thing you've learned about writing by keeping up with a blog for so long and developing an audience in that way?

“The main thing I've learned from blogging is the self-deluding idiocy of expecting quick results.”

I've had five blogs called Fevered Mutterings (one of which was briefly called something even more vague & confusing). The first was back in 2004, on a long-gone blogging platform in the UK. It was an online diary, and it had an audience of maybe ten people when the wind was in the right direction, and both of those were fine. It's easy to get a bit pompous about other people's clumsy first attempts by forgetting your own, so I try to go back and reread mine regularly, to remind myself that however bad I feel my voice is, it's a long way from what it used to be. And what I wrote about was all over the place - it was only around 2010 that I put myself into the slipstream of notable travel writers and started getting wildly ambitious ideas about joining them.

But even then, I had no idea what I was doing. I knew I wasn't a journalist, so when I found I had a profile on MuckRack, I thought it'd get deleted when they realised their mistake. And I didn't feel like a blogger either, not really, because I started writing because I wanted to become an author, in book form - and I'm still not there yet! 

The main thing I've learned from blogging is the self-deluding idiocy of expecting quick results. I was slow to leap onto social media, a place where feedback is really quick, so I got accustomed to publishing things on my site and listening to crickets.

Instant gratification is a terrible guide when you're building something substantial online. There was a post I banged out in a huge hurry that did nothing for six months, then somehow (still not sure how) it acquired a critical mass of readers and shares, and gave me over a million page views in the following couple of years. If I'd judged its audience-gathering success based on those first six months, it'd have been a laughable failure. So now, anything that I write that is published to resounding silence (which still happens), I figure that either its time hasn't come yet or I missed the target, and since I won't know which it is for months or maybe years, the best thing I can do is have a nap, drink a cup of tea and try to write something that's a lot better.  

You recently made a public offering to have video calls with whoever is interested in chatting about anything.  (And I got in on one.) I think conversations are so important for writers, especially now when we have fewer opportunities for those. What have you most enjoyed about these conversations and what have you learned? Any noticeable trends in what you and fellow writers have discussed? 

I’ve recently learned that as a virtual friend, I was a little too virtual for my own good, and nothing beats conversation in soundwave form. That's a lesson I intend to learn from.

I've seen patterns [in these conversations]: the same mixture of worry for others and calm within themselves, because yes, things are weird but they're also a remarkable personal opportunity for stillness and thinking, immersing yourself in the everyday things that can be so reassuringly grounding, instead of fretting about things outside your control. That's for those of us who don't have a critical role to play apart from keeping out of the way, and thereby honouring the efforts of those on the healthcare & support frontlines right now. (And fact-checking anything before we share it online. That too!)

Another pattern is cautious optimism, particularly in the travel writing space—maybe it speaks to the longterm resilience of anyone working in this fickle field, but most of my work-related conversations have been about what's possible as things shake down. That's heartening.     

This whole newsletter thing is your fault. Thank you for being the one who convinced me to start one! Why do you think newsletters are so popular right now, and what inspired you to start your own?

Hooray! And you're storming it—it's terrific. Really. Because it reads like a really good couple of pages from a magazine you'd pay money for—not the old model for newsletters, thrown together by an exhausted intern according to a rigid formula that's getting diminishing returns every week. (I was that intern, in one of my old jobs.) That stuff doesn't work. Treating it like a quality magazine or blog, and investing proper time and energy in it? That works.

If you recognise email for what it is, the original and best "social media" that never went away, and you use social media to do what email can't do, then you'll get solid results. Maybe even amazing ones. There's a reason so many newspapers are turning into newsletter-creating factories right now: I just saw the Wall Street Journal has reached 3 million paying subscribers, and a huge part of that growth has to be down to their newsletter strategy.

Good emails get read, good emails get people to act, and if you use an email marketing platform like Mailchimp or Substack, you can see how people care about your work by looking at their behaviour. That's the kind of feedback we need—none of this "squint at your impressions and cross your fingers" stuff.

I learned about the power of email by paying attention to people like Brian Clark at Copyblogger, Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income, journalist Ann Friedman and many more. They weren't noisily leaping onto all these shiny new social platforms. They stuck to using email, and quietly kept growing their creative businesses, while everyone else was howling in misery about changing Facebook algorithms and diminishing clickthroughs and the like. And it's by following those people that I discovered paid newsletters (and in particular Substack). I've had a free 5-part email course for a few years now, and a verrrry occasional newsletter piggybacking off that, but this is the year I started making proper plans around email. When Robert Cottrell took The Browser's ten thousand paying subscribers over to Substack, and when CraigMod started using his Ridegline walking newsletter to build a paid offering, that was the encouragement I needed. So I've got a new one (a proper, ongoing one) coming later in the year, about curiosity. I'm curious to see what will happen.

A lot of writers are worried about the lack of opportunities out there as budgets dry up and publications shut down in this mess. You seem to be very good at making your own opportunities, through your blog, your plan to self-publish books, and also launching a newsletter. What advice can you offer fellow writers on making your own opportunities?

That's very kind. I think it's down to sheer ignorance. Coming in, I had no formal training other than a few good grades at English at school, and what I learned about writing during my Archaeology degree. I think I just blundered in and made more mistakes than most, because I didn't know better.

Along the way, I discovered the huge difference between working with someone and working for them. It's a lot easier to become essentially a low-paid temporary employee (with no job security) for a bigger entity when you're a blogger. It's a lot harder to build a more traditional business model, where at least some of your daily readers become your customers.

When I learned some writers were really successfully doing the latter, I started wondering what the travel conferences I was attending were for; they seemed to be more interested in helping brands pseudo-recruit writers than helping them thrive as independent operators. Then I paid more attention to traditional journalism and saw that dwindling ad revenue was killing it from within, so there were chronic problems there too. Now, the wheel feels like it's turning again, and subscriptions and membership models are finally taking centre stage. If we weren't in a global pandemic, it'd be a pretty exciting time.

As for advice, I honestly don't know much! (I pay a lot of attention to people who do - that's probably good advice, do a lot of reading outside of your chosen niche.)

But one thing I've learned is the danger of thinking you have 20-20 foresight. It is so, so easy to be talked out of testing a good idea because someone—maybe up on stage, throwing up Powerpoint slides, or in a confident-sounding online rant—says it's a waste of time. If it feels like a mad idea that might just work, then please, test it. Give it a go. Experimentation is the only decider.

Against my advice, a friend chopped up the second-to-final draft of his book, stuffed it into an email autoresponder sequence, and thereby gave the entire book away for free to anyone who wanted to sign up. I thought he was mad—but he used feedback from readers to make the final draft and he pre-sold over a hundred copies before it even launched, because every email had a nice big "Buy Me!" banner at the bottom. When it went up at Amazon, it had a bunch of loyal fans already primed to give a good review. He discovered all that by simply having a go. You never know until that go is had. And if it looks like a daft idea, good! That means it'll get noticed.

OK. Real talk. What on Earth possessed you to try and write a book in 15 days?

My answer is connected with the previous point. I need to experiment! I've never written and published a book and I'd like to practice doing it. I already have two books on the go (one fiction, one non-fiction) but they're proper book-sized so they're going to take a good while to finish and edit properly.

And I'm stuck in a corner of Scotland right now with nowhere to go for at least a month, so it's the time to test some stuff out. I'm already making a short podcast (with my friend Candace Rardon), I already have a plan for another small newsletter experiment....and a book is the third on a list of things I'd like to try out!

I recently read Pico Iyer's gorgeous "Art Of Stillness". Apart from how lovely it was, it also struck me how short it was: essentially, six essays strung together on a theme with an intro and outro. I got to thinking: hey, that's like writing six moderately longform articles or blog posts and publishing in book form, making sure they perform the double-act of being stand-alone readable and forming a coherent whole with a beginning, middle and end. Then I got to thinking about the role of short nonfiction books in business, as manifestos and longform business-cards—some of which are...not so good, yes, but when they work, they really work. And I thought about Kindle Singles, and Pressfield's "The War Of Art", one of the briefest, punchiest creative how-to books you'll ever read.

Then I put it all together when I was standing in the rain, after I saw writer Al Humphreys challenging his followers to write a book during lockdown. The book is draft-titled "How To Be Rained On" and will be about my love of being recreationally uncomfortable because of what it teaches you (and because of the opportunities to invite people to laugh at you, which is always good for business when you're doing travel writing.)

My friend Tasha, like me, has never written a book (and entirely unlike me, she's a supremely accomplished adventurer, so she has books and books inside of her), and we got talking about the possibility of her writing a short book—and then she challenged me to write one, and...here we are.

The short answer: rampant egomania and bullying. That's how.

You can follow Mike on Twitter and read his blog for updates on the book writing and all of his other upcoming projects!

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That’s all for today, friends. Enjoy your weekend, and I’ll see ya next week.

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