How To Write a Book
I have been writing privately for more than 26 years and publicly for 10 years. I find it remarkable that right now, a majority of my livelihood depends on my writing ability. Though I have wanted nothing more than to be a writer, it is only in recent years—when I was diagnosed with a chronic illness—that I intentionally built my career in this way.
The steps I have taken have helped me step closer to my ultimate dream: to be a published book author. Steps like self-publishing my first e-books.
Unexpected
Later this month, I’ll be publishing an e-book. It is the second edition to the e-book—my first—that I published last year. It is also the third book I have ever finished writing in my life. (The first was a novella I wrote at 17 years old as my high school senior project.)
Like last year, this year’s e-book is not a novel, a collection of short stories, or a memoir. It isn’t any of the genres I thought would be part of my published repertoire. I also never thought that the way I would be putting my work out in the world is through self-publication.
This slim, precious e-book of mine is a selection of 21 weekly letters I send out to my newsletter mailing list every Sunday. The best way to describe it would be as a nonfiction-self-help-how-to hybrid of personal stories and encouragement.
Childhood abandon
I have written a lot in my life. I have lost count of how many short stories and starts-and-stops of novels I’ve written since my teenaged years. As a public writer, I have written more than 300 articles and blog posts, about half of which are for publications that are now defunct and have disappeared into a cyberspace black hole.
As with any writer or artist, my confidence has waxed and waned. When I first started writing as a child, I didn’t think beyond the stories I wanted to tell. I spent hours writing un-self-consciously. I had no preconceived notions about what genre my work should fit in or how I should share my work with the world. I wrote for the joy of it.
But then I became a teenager filling out college applications and thinking about viable career choices, and my ability to write with childhood abandon shrank to nothing by the time I was a freshman in college. I still wrote, ferociously, but with a sense of shame and sadness that my passion was not the “right” path to choose.
Going all in
The confidence to go all in on my writing came years later, born from my diagnosis with trigeminal neuralgia in 2017. Literally overnight, I was pushed to make decisions and changes that would support my new normal. That meant that my young evolving business now needed to support my new limitations, such as an inability to talk for extended periods and low energy levels. And the choice was clear to me from the get-go: writing, the only work I’ve ever truly loved, would do right by me.
And it really has supported me in monumental ways. I have spent most of my life writing for an audience of one—myself—but now I found myself wanting to write for someone else. I started writing all the time, arguably more than I ever have before: freelancing, my weekly newsletter, genre writing classes, long-form essays, and most recently, a novel. I’m not writing with childhood abandon, but with adult eyes, experience, and ease.
And I am infinitely grateful.
A calling
Typing words across a screen has given me and my pain a purpose: to help you feel less alone in the world. The mornings that I sit down to write my Sunday Letters feel spiritual: I usually don’t know what I want to say, what message feels essential to share, until my fingertips are on the keyboard. Then I just let my mind take over.
Then on one fine January day in 2019, I decided that I’d curate a collection of my 2018 letters and publish an e-book. I didn’t tell anyone about this project whilst I worked on it. I just did it, step by step. And when it was done and I put it out into the world on Valentine’s Day—my labor of love—it didn’t matter how I wrote this book. It just mattered that I had.
Commitment to completion
A weekly newsletter is not how I thought I would start writing books. And it did take many private pep talks for me to not diminish writing and publishing in this way. But what I learned last year, and again this year as I get ready to publish again on Valentine’s Day, is that writing a book never happens the way you think it will. Even that first novella I wrote in high school was completely unexpected: I just let my imagination take over without preconceived notions, and the result was a completed work.
And that’s what matters: committing to a process that results in completion. When you are focused on the work, on the baby steps you choose to take daily, there is no room for pressure or punishment. There’s just the work and that most fantastic of all questions, what if?, to carry you through each twist and turn, helping you make decisions as you move forward.
This is about you
I am proud of what I have written, even the less mature, overly verbose, strangely worded masterpieces I wrote early on. I am proud of my self-published works, e-books, articles, and all. All of the hours and energy and love I have poured into my work have helped me become a stronger writer. Writing is precious to me, but I have learned to not be precious with it.
I want you to know that writing your book will only happen if you commit to it. That seems like a stupidly obvious statement, but tattoo it on your mind. Your commitment has absolutely nothing to do with whether your work is perfect, genius, or sellable. Those are pressures that will distract you from doing the work. They will become excuses to not even try if you let them.
It’s more important to have something to work with than nothing at all. It’s more important that you hone your craft through experimentation and lessons and putting yourself out there. It’s more important that you try, if writing a book is something you really want.
When you’ve written your book, you can decide what to do with it. Publish it, rewrite it, shelf it, toss it out (though I wouldn’t recommend that). Whatever you decide will not determine the forever course of your creative life.
It is just a decision you make now that will help you take the next step.
