What are the best practices for writing? That will always depend on who you ask, of course. When David Leite and I asked one another for our best practices for writing, out came a list wrapped in some good conversation. Listen in as you read along with this episode of QWERTY and see what you might add as one of your own best practices for writing.
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Marion: I have quite a collection of typewriters, David, actually. So every time you say that about stepping away from your typewriters in our podcast opener, I think of going and getting out one of the Hermes portables I’ve got and banging around on it for a while. I don’t know, have you still got some typewriters?
David: It’s interesting that you say that, because when I was growing up, and I wrote about this in my memoir, my grandfather had an old Royal typewriter. Remember those?
Marion: Yeah.
David: It had the cloth ribbon that went, and I just loved how it catapulted letters. And I wasn’t so much interested in writing as I was that wonderful, sort of barbed-wire ant-crawl across the paper of the letters. So, that’s the one that I had. And then later on I did have a portable one I used in college, but I don’t have any anymore.
Marion: Oh, I love them. I have a huge collection of them. And my husband’s a newspaper man, so he had a collection. So when we got married, I think we could have started a museum. But every time you say that to step away from the typewriter, I think I should go bang around on one-
David: Yeah.
Marion: … which kind of brings us to our topic for today. We were going to talk about best practices for writing and actually how we get to the work. And I found when I was still using a typewriter, leaving the typewriter out was the single best device I had. In other words, if you had to sort of walk around it in the one room apartment in Manhattan, you did tend to use it, not putting it away ever. And I think writers develop a series of such things. There’s certainly lots and lots of listicles as we call them, online by famous writers of best practices. But I wonder if you’ve got a couple that you would share with people?
David: I will. And you know it’s interesting, you’ve said something and I think you hit upon a very important point, that the typewriter was there, and the typewriter had one function and one function only: to write something. Of course now we all go to computers and that is everything. That is my, “I love you machine” through the internet world. And I go there and I write emails and I look at funny videos of cats. And the computer has become so much more. We don’t longer have one machine to do what we used to do, which is the writing element. So I think that’s fascinating.
So yes, I do have some of the, I guess, the best practices for writing. I don’t always follow all of them all the time. But I do follow all of them some of the time. And one of the most important ones for me, and I think about you, cause I learned this from you, when I read your book, The Memoir Project so long ago, is get a clean desk. Clear everything off your desk, get everything out of your way so you can just think clearly. And I think that’s one of the most important things that I do to start my days, is make sure my desk is completely clean.
Marion: That’s a great one. And it’s funny, because I wrote a blog post recently about how I’m a bit grumbly on the subject of Marie Kondo, and how tidying up is supposed to spark joy-
David: Yeah.
Marion: ... because I really don’t believe any of that, and so I did write a-
David: And I’m not a joyful person, so doesn’t work for me.
Marion: Well, I think before you give away your last miniskirt, you should take some notes on it because there’s story there. And just the idea of giving stuff away, sparking joy is very antithetical to storytelling. And your mother’s go-go boots, if you still have them, take some notes on them about watching her leave with your dad-
David: Yeah.
Marion: … to go out on dates together before you give them away. So I wrote a piece, blog post about how even if you have to climb over your stuff to get to your desk, get to your desk. My desk itself had never has my taxes on, never has anything-
David: Yeah.
Marion: … that can get between me and my work.
David: Yes.
Marion: But sometimes around the desk, I’m not going to wait and straighten all my pictures to go to work-
David: No. No.
Marion: … because that’s a problem. And so best practices is a clean desk. But you know the clutter in my house, it waits. The dog, as we call it, the nose juice on the walls from having lived with five dogs in this house over the years. I, my practice, “Marion don’t look,” as I go up the stairs to my office every day-
David: Yes.
Marion: … and don’t stop to straighten the pictures. So I think one of the other best practices is to go to work, and leave that desk clean. But the rest of it ignore it.
David: Yeah.
Marion: Maybe water the plants when you take a break. But that’s about it.
David: Yeah. I find that my house is never cleaner and my bread is never more beautiful and buxom than when I have something to write. I just feel so drawn to do something else, and I have to quite literally tell myself, “Sit down. Put your ass in that chair, and start to write.” Now, what do you do? Because for me that fear every day when I sit down to write whatever I’m writing that day, there’s always this great fear and I have to start all over again every day. It doesn’t get any better for me. What do you do to get over that initial hump of sitting down?
Marion: Well, as our fabulous guest a few episodes ago told us, Lisa Kron, don’t let that go away, because it should be about the fear. You got to ride the dragon’s tail as some people say, or step into the fear as other people say, or whatever your phrase is, it’s not supposed to be easy. And when people talk about the zone, I hope what the zone is for me, is the belief that the annotation, all the things that I’ve read, sought, seen, heard, tasted, are going to come forward as needed.
Maybe not too fast and maybe not all at the same time. But there’s a bit of the fear. I don’t mind because there’s trust. There’s always trust that it will come. And I think that, that’s a place to speak to. If you do any kind of meditating or begging, which is another form of meditating I think, is just begging for this stuff to come. It’s that, and saying I this feels frightening, but also knowing that you’ve been observing things all your life and they’re in there. And you need to marshal them.
David: And that brings up a really important point is for me it’s very hard to sit down every morning. It really is. I have to remind myself that nothing is ever wasted. Sometimes I’ll sit down and I’ll write some garbage for 25 minutes. But then suddenly there’s just this thought that leads to something else, and leads to something else. And suddenly the words start to be strong on string like pearls, one after another. And I get something wonderful. And so I try to remind myself, yes, that junk that I wrote, that quote unquote shitty first draft that many, many people talk about it has gotten me to where I am at that point.
So I have to accept the fact and own the fact that when I sit down and I start to write in the morning, it’s not really going to be that good. It’s just, I got to get things moving. And if I don’t do that on a regular basis, if I don’t exercise that muscle, exercise that particular activity, then the fear starts to mount so much that I just avoid it my desk completely. And that’s where trouble sets in.
Marion: Yeah, that’s the good word is exercise. I think you got to get up there and you got to start writing and it’s not purposeless for me. My signature phrase is to write with intent. In other words, I know that I’m writing, or at least I’m making the first draft, vomit draft, of an essay about X. I spent a lot of time thinking about what my stuff is about, before I sit down to write it, and by honoring the fact that if I’m clear in my intent that the piece will be a bit better shaped than just a big blah blah all over the page. But everybody goes at this differently.
David: Yeah.
Marion: I work with people who blah, blah, blah, a lot onto the page. And then we find the shiny object in paragraph number seven. Or in some cases-
David: That’s how I work, yes.
Marion: … in chapter in 10. You know?
David: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm
Marion: I spend half of my day moving chapter 10s up to be chapter one’s for people and saying, ‘Look what happens to this book when you open with this.”
David: Yeah.
Marion: So, I think it’s getting there. I think it’s writing. I think it’s allotting the time. There are those people who are word count people, Graham Greene, the great Graham Greene wrote 500 words a day. That’s it. And he did pretty well.
David: He sure did.
Marion: And then there are some people, I teach my classes and my Master Classes, three pages a day. And everybody laughs in the beginning. That’s 15 pages a week. That’s 60 pages a month. That’s a 300 page first draft in five months. Don’t sneeze at it. That’s discipline.
David: Exactly.
Marion: And so for me, after the desk, and after the intent, my next best practice is discipline. And I spend a lot of time on panels and talk shows, and Q&A’s and I’m always the Betty Bummer on every panel, because when they ask the question that they always ask, what is creativity? The first guy always says, “Well, it’s a cosmic transformation of your right.”
David: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marion: And I start making, like, oh the rolling of the eyes. And the next guy says, “It’s the combination of the,” and they get to me and I say, “All creativity begins with discipline.”
David: Yes, it does.
Marion: And that’s just true.
David: It is. It really is. And part of my discipline, after I’ve gone through, because I am one of those writers who when you starts something I need to loosen up, I need to get to that sixth paragraph to really understand what I’m trying to say. That’s just the way I’ve always been. And yet when I worked with you, interestingly enough, I did have an entire outline, because I knew what I wanted to write. It was a memoir. It was about my life. Now that I’m writing fiction, I know what I want to say, but boy, the characters kind of pull me at different places that I don’t expect. So I have to kind of honor that. But at the same time, figured out what’s best for the story. But after that point, after I start writing, one other thing I think that’s important, is not to edit while you’re writing. That is I think crucial.
Marion: I think it is. And so if we’re making a punch list, we’ve got the clean desk, the intent, the discipline. But what you just covered there in a second was the wonder, to give in to the wonder.
David: Yes.
Marion: And don’t be too rigid. So you said, memoir was one thing, fiction is another, and I get pulled by my characters.
David: Yes.
Marion: That’s giving into the wonder, and allowing the wonder to have a real role. You’re not going to be able to explain the wonder to your sister-in-law.
David: Never.
Marion: Trust me, I have a sister-in-law, and she keeps asking me if I’m ever going to get a real job. So don’t explain that part to them. But you know as to your last point. Yes, absolutely.
David: Yeah. And the reason, I think for me, what happens is the minute the editor starts to come in as I’m writing, the wonder does go away. And I start to look at parallels. I start to look at is there any kind of clanging, and for me clanging is the use of words that sound too similar. And then I get out of that bubble that I was in. And maybe that’s the zone that people talk about.
And what’s interesting is when you are there, you start to go, and you start to create. And what I find fascinating too, is as I was writing this particular part of the novel, which may never get published, our listeners will find out as I do, but I couldn’t believe some of the names of places, and some of the things that I was having the characters do. When I finally stepped back and looked at him several days later, or a week later. The meanings, when you start looking up the meanings of some of these names and stuff, were perfectly suited to what was on. I never could have told you that when I wrote it. And that’s that wonder.
Marion: Right.
David: But if I would’ve sat there and thought, this person’s a very angry person, why don’t I call her Angrina, or something that is ridiculous and suddenly, shoot, find these names that have this edge to it. And you go, “Wow, that really is, that’s very appropriate.”
Marion: Well, J.K. Rawling would agree with you. She’s the queen of names.
David: Yes.
Marion: And sending eight-year-olds to the dictionary to look up fantastic words that characterize someone perfectly. As was Charles Dickens. My very favorite is the, I think it’s in little Dorrit, the Department of Circumlocution.
David: Yes.
Marion: And it’s an office in London that you have to go to if you want to do, I think it’s a real estate transfer, and it’s perfect. It has a circular staircase and they just throw all the paperwork into the stairwell.
David: Yeah.
Marion: And that’s just it. The editor brain is going to see all of the junk in the vomit draft and you don’t want the editor brain there. So I always tell people not to edit as they’re writing-
David: Yeah.
Marion: … the first draft, because my first drafts are filled with bumper stickers-
David: Oh, yeah.
Marion: ... lyrics to Cher songs. Right. Really
David: “I believe I’m in love. I’m in love.”
Marion: Right, I mean, I don’t care what I put into the first draft. It’s about throwing it out, vomiting it up, getting it down. And then again, looking later at the editing is to go in and find what were you exploring? Well, I said before I go in with intent. I go into try to map the history of my aspiration of cooking, let’s say. That how my cooking life really reveals all the women I’ve tried to be in this life, let’s say. There’s an essay I keep meaning to write.
And I can do that by looking at my recipe file, and sort of show you when I wanted to be this kind of woman. But then I grew up to be this kind of person. That isn’t going to benefit from a whole lot of editing in the first thoughts of it.
David: Absolutely.
Marion: I’ve got a throw that open wide and see what comes up and trust what comes up under the rubric, under the topic of aspirational cooking.
David: Yeah. Yeah. And what’s interesting too, I think I got to the point when I was doing my memoir that it was so hard because there was that deadline that was looming, and that was pressing on me, and I could feel that kneeling on my chest the closer I got toward the end. And as you know I contracted Lyme disease, I was getting very sick, and it was harder for me to finish. And there’s actually a program online, there are several programs online, that actually you can go in and start to type and as soon as you type that first line it goes away. So you cannot go back and edit, and reedit, and edit, and reedit.
And I’ll tell you, talk about fear. But once you got used to that idea that that line is just temporary, and you just go and you go. And then at the end of it when you stop your session, you can copy and paste all of it wherever you want. It was a fascinating process, because it freed me up, because I no longer had to worry about looking up or looking down. I only had one line to look at.
Marion: That’s fabulous.
David: Yes.
Marion: So six on our list of best practices for writing is do what’s necessary to write.
David: Whatever that is.
Marion: And there are a lot of things under that category. I just had somebody who I really admire, who’s a big famous writer, turn me down when I invited her to come on to Qwerty, to do the podcast.
David: Shame on her.
Marion: I know. But she said I’m too busy on my book tour. I have to say I admired the no, I said to myself, I wonder if I said no more often if I’d get more copy written every day. So I have to say I really admired her no. And I said to myself, if I said no more often, would I have more time to write?
David: That’s a good point.
Marion: And I think that doing what is necessary to write is personal, and you kind of have to fill in the blanks. Those people who are listening, whatever that means, you might have to get a babysitter, you might have to leave the dog at daycare. You might have to renegotiate the contract that is your marriage, that says from now on 9:00 to 10:00 every morning, I just am not going to answer the phone. I’m not going to do this. I’m not going to do that. Whatever it is.
David: Yeah.
Marion: Or as a student of mine years ago had a deal with his spouse that from 8:00 to 10:00 every night, after the kids had done their homework, his time was dedicated to writing, because he ran a company during the day. And his spouse totally went with that. And with that he wrote five books and three screenplays.
David: Oh my.
Marion: And I really admired that discipline. She had things that she liked to do in the evening. They had split the child care. So do what’s necessary to write is a personal list you must make that has to do with boundaries. Anything else on your best practice?
David: Oh yeah. I get tons of them. For me, one of the things I do is after I’ve written something, and go over it maybe once or twice likely, I leave it be, I don’t go back to look at it for at least a week, because I need for what I wrote to sort of percolate in my unconscious for connections to be made. Like if I’m really stuck sometimes too, this is a tip and I got this actually from you. If I get stuck, I take a shower. I do.
And sometimes I’m the cleanest person when I’m stuck. I’ll take a shower because for some reason my mind wanders, and things unlatch, and unhook, and I start to maybe get a connection that I didn’t see. And that’s why going back to your work a week later, you’re like, “My gosh, I didn’t see this. I didn’t see that.” That’s when the editor can come out. And when I do that, I also read it out loud, because I believe as you’re reading, if you stumble, one of two things are happening, that there’s some untruth, something is not truthful, or there’s some sort of syntactical grammatical structural error that you’re having a problem with.
David: And so I always listened to those stumbles and make notes of it, because I realize, okay this is grammatical stuff, or I’m holding back here, and there’s something going on, or I’m not fully telling what actually was going on, especially in memoir. And that’s two things I do. Those are two things that I do a week later, so it’s very helpful to me.
Marion: So the leave it be and then read it aloud. I’m a huge believer in reading it aloud. I was lucky enough to have the best editor in the business as my first editor. Her name is Nan Talese-
David: She’s incredible.
Marion:... and she’s revered in the world.
David: She is.
Marion: And she made me come in once a month, as I was writing my first book, and read aloud my pages as she touched every word with a pencil and we read them on the page together. This taught me a really good practice, which is I read aloud to myself every single day. Here’s what a friend of mine does, who’s a very successful novelist. He writes from 7:00 to 12:00, every morning. Then he eats lunch. And then at 1:00, he goes for a run, but before he does, he records what he’s written onto his iPhone and that’s what he listens to as he runs and he edits from 3:00 to 5:00.
David: Oh my.
Marion: So there are a lot of variations of reading to yourself, but everybody knows that the brain loves it and it works really well. I can’t write very well in the afternoons. I write really well in the morning. That’s another best practice, is to know when your brain works best.
David: I’m a morning person.
Marion: And then to edit. I can edit beautifully in the afternoon, because the caffeine is worn off and I’m not so jittery.
David: Yeah.
Marion: And I can sit still and actually pay attention. So I love that. Leave it be, read it aloud. So good. What else have you got on your list?
David: I believe one last big one for me is accountability. And I learned this from a friend of mine. The idea of, I do this every Thursday morning actually with two friends of mine who are writers. Between 10:00 and 12:00, we say we’re going to sit down and we’re going to write and nothing else is going to happen. And when we’re done, we’re going to text each other, and tell each other how many pages, how many words, whatever our particular marker or measure is. And then we tell them. And that accountability is important.
And when I was working with you as a student, when I was writing my memoir, there was a built-in accountability, because I needed to get certain pages to you by a certain time for you to be able to look at them and get them back to me so I could meet my deadline. So there was always a sense of accountability. And when you kind of strap that on, and accept the fact that there’s some stricture or some sort of deadline or some sort of demand on you, and you accept it, it’s like a harness, and you accept it, you go with it and it becomes very useful.
And sometimes I find that I free float on those days that I’m not writing with my friends or after I wrote the memoir, I didn’t touch anything major for almost two years. I didn’t know to get back to where I needed to get back. And I’m finding that some of these practices we’re talking about right now, what I’m using almost daily while I’m writing.
Marion: Accountability is really important. I put a post it note up on the kitchen cabinet in the most public part of my home when I’m writing a book, and I put my word count or my page count depending on which way I’m going for that project up on it with no explanation. But everyone who comes in the kitchen says to me, what’s this?
David: Yeah,
Marion: And that’s the way I live up to my goals.
David: That’s terrific.
Marion: Is it’s up for all the world to see, and my family’s so used to it that they don’t even ask about it anymore, which is very funny. But I’m always amused when people ask about it. So we’ve got accountability. And then I think that if there’s 10 of these, and I think then we will have 10 at the end of this, I think we should make sure we reinforce that one that we discussed, but I didn’t put in the list, which is making and meeting the deadlines.
David: Yes.
Marion: And that’s part of the accountability I guess. But then it’s the word count, or page count thing. And I just want to go back to that for a moment, because you need to set an end point for each day of writing. And if you’ve only got 45 minutes a day to write, and lots of my clients have only 45 minutes a day to write, you have to say, “I’m going to get 500 words. I’m going to hit 500 words every day, five days a week. If I miss a day, I’m going to do it the next day.” I’m never going to, however, ever double up and try to do a thousand or 1500 on one day. You just start again the next day that you can go back to the job.
This is how I teach it, with the 500. So it becomes habitual. So this is the 10th of the writing best practices I think we’ll present, which is habitual. And you do that by using this idea of making and meeting deadlines in a way that you cannot not make your 500 words every day. And those 500 do add up. I think those are some great practices.
David: They are.
Marion: I’d be so interested to hear other people’s.
David: I just want to finish one little thought, then you can sit and hear what you guys have to say. In talking about deadlines, either word count or page count, what I find my word count right now is 750 a day. And when I sit down and I get my 750 words a day, there’s a sense of joy and there’s a sense of release I experience. I don’t walk around the rest of the day going, I didn’t do my 750, I did 300 I’m a bad writer. I’m a bad person. I’m just going to eat six pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Something happens and I release myself. And then the next day is slightly more joyous than the day before, because I actually met my goal. It’s positive reinforcement.
Marion: Absolutely. A work is a value in itself. And just because this is creativity based, doesn’t mean it isn’t work-
David: Right.
Marion: … which is why I’m so intolerant when people tell me that when they retire, they’re going to become writers. And I get so snotty about it, because I’ve spent my life at this and I really believe in it.
David: Yeah.
Marion: So we had a bunch of questions come in from people that we wanted to get to.
David: We did.
Marion: And as starting up as a regular feature answering those questions. So let’s take those. How about that?
David: That’d be great.
Marion: So we have one from Heidi Ferber who lives in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. And she wants to know about writing the hard stuff. And she wants to know how the actual process of writing helps tell your story, when it’s something that’s impossible to talk about.
David: Yeah.
Marion: And I think that you’ve dealt with some very hard topics in your first book.
David: Yes.
Marion: And I certainly have some experience with all of the clients I’ve dealt with. So what do you think about-
David: And your first book too-
Marion: And my first book-
David: … was tough.
Marion: … with dealing with my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.
David: Yeah.
Marion: So I’m happy to ask you to go first if you’d like-
David: Sure.
Marion: … to think about what the process of writing did for you to tell your tale.
David: Well, I think the first thing that had to happen on some of the elements, for instance, when I talked about attempt, well it was sexual abuse, childhood sexual abuse, I needed to just admit that it happened. I had to agree that it happened. And make an agreement with myself and how to be gentle with myself as I wrote it. I also told myself I may not need to or want to include this in the book if it doesn’t serve the story. So when I gave myself the freedom of it may never go any farther, then just right on this page, I was able to relax and release and start writing it.
And what happened was, there’s this out-of-body experience that kind of happens as I wrote it, and then as I read it and then wrote, we reread it and rewrote. Then I was able to get a different perspective on actually what happened. And I saw that, while it was a horrible thing that happened, it was such a crucial point in my life. I didn’t realize the impact, the profound impact it had until I started seeing it. So not only was I writing something that hopefully would help other people, it also helped me start getting a perspective on my life in a way that therapy, or talking, or being with friends and sharing never did. So, that’s kind of how I approached some of the really hard stuff.
Marion: That’s great.
David: How about you?
Marion: So for me, it’s that I am able to make others and myself characters. And I think we’re saying the same thing just differently, that you can turn them into characters and thereby look at them. As opposed to only inhabiting it from the inside, you can inhabit it and do 360 around the experience.
David: Yes.
Marion: To have a good look at somebody, and also to have the ability to do some reporting on the story reminds you that there are different takes even on your story. In other words, your sister might say, “It was really no big deal when you did that.” And to you it’s this most traumatic embarrassing thing you ever did, and she barely remembers it. So doing a little reporting, reporting around it, asking the people in your life what that thing looked like to them, gives you a perspective that’s very, very helpful.
David: Yeah.
Marion: So I think the process of writing ends up helping the nearly impossible to be told. So we had another one. Let’s just do two for today. How about that?
David: Sure. That’d be great.
Marion: We had one from writer Allison Hong Meryl who asks, I would like to learn more about how to effectively self promote and market my book.
David: That’s a big one, isn’t it?
Marion: It is. I have a quick answer.
David: Oh great. What is it?
Marion: And that is, and we’re going to have her on the show in a few months, I go to Jane Friedman.
David: Yes.
Marion: Jane Friedman dot com is the world’s leading authority on the business of writing. In fact, her most recent book is called The Business of Writing, and I just simply take everything to Jane. Meaning I just go to her website and search for the answer, whether or not a book proposal needs to include the entire book or a synopsis, whether or not a blog post should test your material of your book on the public, whether or not you should serialize a book. But everything having to do with promotion and marketing, I just go to Jane, and she’s brilliant.
David: Wow, that’s great. I knew Jane, I just never went to her website. But for Alison to have some practical things right now, besides going to Jane’s website, and this is a cliche, I know it is, it wasn’t a cliche when 20 years ago when I started, but getting a blog. And why that’s important, the first thing someone does when they hear something they like or they read something they like about somebody, they go to the internet and they try to find them. They need a place to find you.
Marion: Yes.
David: They need a place to land, to get into your world. And while social media is such a time suck, finding those social media platforms that work for what you’re trying to do. So when I write about food, and photograph food, and everything and promote what’s on my website, I use Instagram and I get such traction there, and I get some on Facebook. But when I’m talking about something I’ve written, I go to Facebook because I don’t get that kind of traction on Instagram. So knowing what social platforms work for you is very important also.
Marion: Yes. Even if you just get a landing page, which is in your name-
David: Exactly.
Marion: … so that we can find you, so that you start by doing a couple of guest posts on some large blogs.
David: Yes.
Marion: And an agent or an editor reads it and wants to find you and they can. Two of my four books came out of shorter pieces I had written that got the response from somebody of, “Hey, would you like to write a book about that?” So I think it’s huge that you be able to be found. One of the things that editors and agents will ask immediately if they like an idea, is what’s your platform?
David: Right.
Marion: And that just means how many different ways can you attract people to this book? And so you do want to start platform building before you start pitching a book, even if it’s just having a landing page.
David: So something that an editor in chief over at Harper Collins told me that, they’re kind of changing their model. They’re not so much looking at how big your platform is, which of course is important, but another marker and a more important marker for them was how interactive were you. How much do you write back to your readers? How much do your readers write to you? That interaction back and forth is really, and that kind of engagement, is very important to them because it means that these people are so dedicated to you and you to them that there’s this force that is around you as you write. So that’s something also besides platform, is engagement and interaction is very, very important.
Marion: Well, that’s wonderful. I love that-
David: Yeah.
Marion: … because I consider all my Instagram friends, friends now. And we’re swapping everything on Instagram.
David: Exactly. Right?
Marion: So I love that. And why don’t we leave it there in terms of our first foray, at least into best practices for writers.
David: Terrific.
Marion: That was fun. Thank you so much David. I loved everything I learned here, and I think we’ve got a nice little 10-point list of best practices.
David: And don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to us wherever you go. Until next time, thank you for listening. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey, and this podcast was produced and recorded by Overit Studios. Reach them at overitstudios dot com.
Have you got a question you’d like us to answer or to ask our authors? Send it along to us and we’ll choose a few each week and answer them on QWERTY. Just drop me a line at my contact page.
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