I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 182.

I'm here on my Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse.

I should explain why I was a little bit late, getting to the recording session this morning.

It's for good reasons.

I was writing, and sometimes when I'm writing, especially in the morning, I lose track,

I lose track of time, but I figured this would be an interesting peak inside what's going

on in my writing life, until recently I've been working on book proposal writing.

And then that change, I handed off the latest drafts of those to my agent, and I shifted

this morning back to working on a new article for The New Yorker.

And it was a huge relief, and I got lost in the writing.

And the reason why I was a huge relief, and it's a little bit of insider baseball, but

I really dislike proposal writing.

And a lot of authors feel the same way, authors do not like writing book proposals.

There's a couple reasons for it.

One, there's no craft to it.

When you're writing a proposal, you're not trying to produce good writing, so it's kind

of frustrating.

A proposal is more like you're putting together a business plan.

It's expository, it's information, and there's no reason to make it be written really well,

and it's not the style of writing that you're used to doing, it's not narrative nonfiction,

it's not idea writing, it's let's walk through bullet points like what you need to know

about this book.

...