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Sharpen your CME writing toolkit this fall. Standalone toolkits, business kits, and quarterly WriteCME Pro membership — all at 20% off.
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Hi Reader,
Summer flies by, does it not? If you're in the northern hemisphere I hope your summer held some joy and some rest.
Portfolio Camp
We kicked off the summer in WriteCME Pro with Portfolio Camp. Members showed up at every career stage: newer writers building their first needs assessment samples, experienced writers filling gaps in what they could actually show a client, and a few returning to the craft after time away.
What makes a 4-week sprint like this work is a specific combination — accountability, peer feedback, permission to set an intention without knowing exactly where you'll land, and detailed, substantive feedback from me.
But what most people were really building in camp wasn't a portfolio. It was optionality and the ability to pivot, to say yes to a project type they hadn't written before.
Read more about Portfolio Camp →
Pivoting from Outdoors to Indoors
We love summer here in the Pacific Northwest, but this year's cycling, camping, and hiking got cut short by wildfire smoke. So my household pivoted indoors.
I joined Naomi Alderman's reading challenge in early August. She wrote one of my favorite novels, Disobedience, and writes a Substack, Whatever Works. If you love books, relish intellectual life, and believe books may save us, it's worth subscribing. I joined the challenge late, so I restarted on September 1 to do the whole thing properly.
My younger daughter was home from London for two weeks; we saw two summer blockbusters and rewatched Stand By Me, The Matrix, and All the President's Men, among other movies. She's back in London now. I also helped my older daughter pack and ship off to New York for a new job and law school. Oof, I miss them both.
None of this was part of my plan for summer. My speed was more about working in my garden, hiking, cycling, and camping. But all this pivoting worked, because we had the structure in place to support the pivot.
The Value of Pivoting
Pivoting is part of professional life too. (And of course there's a book on this, Pivot, by Jenny Blake).
We often talk about pivoting as what we do when something goes wrong. In CME for instance, the grant doesn't come through, the SME goes quiet, the client's priorities shift, the deliverable you were hired to write turns into a different one three weeks in. But pivoting is arguably a core competency for CME professionals. And to pivot effectively you need structure.
When a client asks for patient cases and you've only written needs assessments, pivoting is a tough ask. When you don't have a working model of how a good case is organized and how information should be sequenced, you either turn the work down, or you spend three unpaid weeks reverse-engineering a format from scratch.
Nobody gives you a structure for the deliverable types you haven't yet worked on. But the lack of training in this field means every pivot costs you far more than it should. This is one of the reasons we hosted Portfolio Camp — to give writers space to build range in their services and be ready to pivot when the moment comes.
Because the moment you need to pivot is the worst possible moment to work out how to do so. You're already under deadline, already behind on the learning curve, already deciding whether to say yes.
Back to School Sale
Being able to pivot is exactly what WriteCME Pro toolkits are for. Each one provides the structure for a single deliverable type: the organizing logic, the sequence, the questions to ask your client. Something to reach for when a project arrives in a format you haven't written before. To help you pivot.
September 8–13, save 20% on bundles and individual kits — needs assessments, patient cases, slide decks, root cause analysis, and more.
WriteCME PRo Fall Line-Up
Over here in WriteCME Pro we're in back-to-school mode, ready to support education providers gearing up for content scheduled to release before the end of the year and to submit final-quarter unsolicited grant requests.
The fall lineup in WriteCME Pro includes:
- Education escape rooms
- Working with faculty: SME interviews
- Using qualitative data in CME
- Seasonal gatherings, and more
If you'd like to join us for any of these, a quarterly membership includes September events as a bonus.
Warmly,