Yesterday morning I dropped the car off at the garage for its annual checkup.

They said they’d be done checking by lunch, so I limped into town.

(The limp being because I tweaked my knee over the weekend and had a brace on it.)

After a bit of limping around and finding nothing in any of the bookshops, I needed to rest my dodgy knee and soothe my aching head, so I looked for a place to camp out for an hour.

(The limp I’ve explained, the headache was lack of sleep from an infant and child.)

What did I need?

• Somewhere quiet.

• A comfy seat with space to stretch.

• Something to eat.

• Caffeine. Lots of it.

• Hydration. Lots of it.

• Plenty of space so they weren’t wishing I’d move on and clear space for another customer.

I glanced across the road and spotted the perfect spot.

In last week’s newsletter I alluded to the song “Heaven is a place on earth”

And if heaven was indeed a place on earth…

…it would be the venerable British institution of…

Spoons!

Which is what this issue of the Write Way is all about.

But fear not, all ye who are new here, for we will bring it back to writing in the end (and indeed, in the middle too).

Now.

I realise most of my readers are American, or other kinds of foreign.

And if you are born with the misfortune of not being British, you will have no conception of the venerable institution that is "Spoons".

Wetherspoons, or "Spoons", is a chain of pubs here in the UK.

It's a slap-up, cheap as chips, chips with everything kind of a place.

They do adequate food and cheap pints with a "what you see is what you get" no fuss attitude. And it’s the perfect place to spend a quiet morning without spending a fortune. Indeed, I left Spoons around three hours, a couple of soft drinks, breakfast, steak and chips and a beer later, and I barely broke a twenty.

(A UK twenty, so that’s about $26.)

And not only did I get rest for my twinging knee, caffeine for my aching head and food for my hungry stomach…

…I also got lessons for my dear readers.

The first is simple:

Get out your ivory cabins!

Go where the real people are.

We writers have a tendency to be an unsociable lot, and as I sat in Spoons and watched the people around me, listening to a podcast I’d been meaning to catch up on for a while, it occurred to me that there’s a real paradox here.

Writing requires silence and solitude.

I’d never suggest you rock up to Spoons to hammer out the next chapter in your book. Maybe that might work if it was quiet, or you’re good at zoning things out.

But you do need silence. You need solitude. You need the ability to sit in a room and be bored for hours at a time.

But…

Writing also requires a keen insight into people. Real people. At the end of the day, it’s all just communication. CAW-CAWs will crow about engagement tricks and algorithm hacks but understand that underneath all the engagement and algorithms are just…

…people.

Human beings with dreams and aspirations and inclinations.

People like the lady wistfully flicking the slot machine for a minute on her way out.

People like the bloke sitting with two pints of carlings on the table in front of him at 10am.

People like the other bloke drinking his first pint of the day with a shaky hand.

People like the young couple on a breakfast date, or the family having a Pepsi in the sunshine.

People like the utterly unintelligible old man who accosted me on his way in for his lunch, or the friendly waitress who chatted to me as I limped up the stairs to the bathroom.

When you forget this, you lose yourself. You start to forget that writing is not a game of metrics and messaging where there’s a “right” answer and a “best” way to do everything. There is no rulebook, no scorecard. No perfect post.

It’s not a tricky puzzle you can solve.

It’s just talking to people at scale.

The second thing flows from that first thing which is to log off. Not to be around real people, but to get offline and away from social media which is just a

destructive dopamine dope-machine

Yes, it’s a powerful tool. But it makes some people into tools too…

Again, writing isn’t a puzzle you solve. It’s people you say things to.

The problem is that when you’re lost in the online maze, you don’t just forget the people on the other side, like we talked about. You also forget yourself. You forget what you were there to say.

You start to get hooked on the dopamine dope-machine. You want another hit so you look at your last big hit. Oh, it was that tweet about the election last year. Guess you’re gonna have to tweet about tariffs even though you don’t understand them.

Ah, but that nuanced take bombed. Better amp it up a bit.

Those videos you recorded about your passion for trading options, well nobody liked those. Maybe you should do one on crypto shitcoins instead? Those are popular right now, five of the top seven videos on the homepage are about that.

Bit by bit, compromise by compromise, you lose your way.

One day you find that you don’t have a captive audience, you’re a captive to your audience instead. “Captive creator” as one of my friends called it.

Which neatly leads on to our third lesson from Spoons.

It’s almost like I planned this…

…even though I genuinely didn’t, I just started writing and saw where it took me. But it really does lead nicely into this third thing.

Because the the solution to prevent yourself from becoming a captive creator is to break out of your “niche”. To be human.

CAW-CAWs and online gurus are keen to tell you to niche down, to focus your efforts, to be the one guy for this one tiny thing. And that’s not terrible advice at first.

Power at a point!

…as Tacticus would say.

You can break through much easier by focusing your efforts. But as you gather readers unto yourself, what then? Do you want to be the shop that they drop into, look for the one thing they want, and leave?

Or do you want to be the Spoons where they sit down and stay a while?

The place where they feel comfortable. Where they can linger as long as they want, and hey, this place sells steaks and I don’t need to move so even if it’s not the best…

…it’s the one for me.

I stayed in that Spoons for three hours because it was a comfortable place to be. And as I stayed, I bought. The breakfast turned into a mid-morning Pepsi in the sunshine outside which turned into an early steak lunch and a pint which would have turned into a few if I hadn’t had to head on out.

I could easily have stayed there all day if the circumstances allowed.

And that’s what you need to be for your readers. The place they can stay. The writer they read because they enjoy reading, not because they’re dropping in for something they need and getting out asap.

This drives my whole writing strategy.

I never tweet to get engagement, I tweet to find readers.

I never email to get clicks, I email to build relationships.

I never sell to make money, I sell to find customers.

It’s all about building a world that my readers feel at home in. Creating the cozy cabin that they enjoy visiting every week, every day, every so often. Where they can pull up a chair, light up a pipe, kick up their feet and linger a while.

And while you’re here, I have a children’s book you can read to your kids or buy for your friends’ kids. Or if you’re struggling to write fast enough and keep on top of your deadlines I can help you with that. Wait, you’re struggling to make the most of your money and keep ahead of inflation? It’s funny you should mention that because*…

…you get the idea.

It’s all about providing a space for a conversation. Not about hard selling and sales hacks and all that guru nonsense. It’s just building a relationship one step at a time.

It’s why I love getting replies to these emails and try and interact with them as much as time allows.

And it’s why I’m going to stop this newsletter here.

Because I did have one more thing I learned from Spoons, specifically a lesson I shared from an earlier trip to Spoons back in January 2024. And it’s a lesson on one thing that writers should NOT do like Spoons. Well, not unless they want to be utterly miserable.

But we’re already running long and I want to hear from you.

So if you want to know the one thing that writers need to avoid that I haven’t shared with my list for over a year, well, just hit reply to this email and tell me:

What problem did you last pay to fix and what did you buy to fix it?

It could be a book you bought, a course you snapped up, some coaching you paid for… whatever. Preferably writing-related, but if you can’t think of none then any other problem works too.

I shall then reply with my thanks and the relevant email from last year.

But only if you do it in the next day, I don’t want to be digging it out in six months when you get round to asking. So let’s set a deadline of Thursday midnight eastern time, being five AM uk time, being around 36 hours from this newsletter being delivered into your fine inbox.

And meanwhile, may your pipe grace the courtyard of many a Wetherspoons, and your prose be inspired by the realities of life,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

fin

*This one is a referral link, if you did happen to sign up for Low Stress Trading, the framework I use exclusively for all my investing now, I would earn a small commission and you would get a free bonus call with the founder.

Speaking of which, I’m actually getting on a call with Ben Settle and Troy Broussard on Friday at 5pm Eastern to talk about exactly that framework and you can register via that self-same link, which I replicate here to save you scrolling back up to find it. If you do show up, I recommend reading the sales page first and showing up with all your hardest questions.

I think Ben is offering free swag for the best questions but I can’t promise. Either way, it’ll be a fun discussion, no lame sales presentations, just ask what you like and see behind the curtains.

More on all that (probably) in the Cabin tomorrow and Friday, sign up below the line.