Tag: MVW

As I’m putting together this series of articles about becoming a Minimum Viable Writer, one thought keeps coming back to me: why bother? I briefly touched on this in the last article, but feel it deserves more explanation. On some level, MVW might seem like just another backup strategy or a guide about how to work more efficiently on the road. The MVW concept covers that and more, but it has also grown into a mindset for me.

The MVW is a writer who can work in any situation while maintaining almost full productivity. The question becomes how to get there and what’s needed along the way? I envision the MVW as someone who is hardware agnostic as possible. There’s no harm in having a favorite platform or writing app, but when the chips are down, the MVW can get by without. Also lurking around the edges of the MVW idea is the question, why bother?

I like to work on a variety of computers. Only one of them is a non-Apple product. It’s a cheapo Lenovo laptop I got three years ago at Black Friday sale for $300. The original Windows 8 didn’t last much longer than the first battery charge. Now it runs Xubuntu Linux off of a small solid-state drive I installed. Overall, its 11″ screen and poor battery life make it a mostly pathetic specimen soon to relegated to the scrapheap.

With all of the changes that are happening in the world as we dive headfirst in to 2017 I’ve started to inventory my needs as a writer. My name for this project is the MVW or Minimum Viable Writer. This is a play on the idea of a “minimum viable product” that is popular in the culture of tech startups. It’s an idea rooted in the concept of doing as little as needed to launch a product or service.