I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
In Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman suggests you ask yourself “what if this were easy?”:
And so instead of asking how to summon the energy or motivation or self-discipline to do something that matters to you, it’s often more helpful to ask: What if this might be a lot easier than I’d be assuming?
Ironically, this isn’t generally an easy question to bring yourself to ask. It feels like cheating; or else it seems obvious to you that the output you’d produce, were you to approach life in this manner, would lack value. So it takes guts: you have to ‘be willing to let it be easy,’ as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it….
When some daunting challenge barrels into view, just decide that you’re going to experience it as easy instead. I realize that sounds like the worst kind of denial of human limitation, as if you could get your way merely by commanding the universe to fall in line with your desires. In fact, though, it can be surprisingly effective – because it functions not as a mystical command to the universe but as a reminder to yourself not to fall into the old habit of adding complications or feelings of unpleasant exertion where neither need exist.
I’m thinking of whipping my 182 pages of Things Men Gave Me draft memoir into something I can publish as a Kindle book sooner rather than later. I’m still planning to publish story-painting pairings online as I do this; that’s helping me figure out my voice and the bones of the story. But I also want to just get my first book out. Ray calls this first book a “sacrificial” book based on the advice I shared from book marketing expert Matt Holmes yesterday, that “your first book teaches you how to write and publish.”
If it’s just for learning how how to write and publish, why make a big deal out of it? Why not make it easy and fun? I love to write, and I do it everyday without having to motivate myself. This work will be a little different—it requires editing and rewriting not simply quickly churning out a blog post—but all the same, working with words and narrative and essayistic ideas is something I enjoy.
Burkeman quotes from entrepreneur and author Tim Ferriss: “What would this look like if this were easy?”
I want to add another question also, based upon what Haruki Murakami said about how he found his rhythm as a novelist: he drafted his first novel in English, then translated it into Japanese. This helped him write in a style that he found compelling, and apparently other people did too, as he won a new writer’s prize for that novel. Without that, he says, he may not have continued as a writer.
I’m okay with my first book being sacrificial but I still want it to be uniquely mine, in my style, and expressed in a way that is energetic and engaging.
So the other question I want to add to this is: How do I rewrite the memoir so that it expresses my own unique voice and style, in an engaging way?
What would my rewrite process look like if it were easy and if it produced a memoir with a unique, engaging voice?
That would mean that the rewrite is both easy and fun because it’s fun to write work that is in my unique voice and feels like it will be engaging.
Clearly I can’t just feed the whole thing into ChatGPT and ask it to rewrite. That would be easy, but it wouldn’t result in something that is uniquely mine.
One reason I started publishing stories one by one is that I’ve always found that blogging (writing a quick article, editing it, and then getting it out for people to see) brings a lot of energy and verve to my writing. Perhaps there’s a way to capture that? I could rewrite a chunk a day in the order I plan to publish it and share with someone. I could even share it with my future self: rewrite a chunk, and then email it to myself or otherwise have an action that says “this is ready now.”
I can also leave memo-to-self annotations about why each scene belongs, as well as notes about what I might eliminate. I could note a rating for each section: 1-kind of generic and not that intriguing, 2-getting a little more interesting and unique, 3-this is the style I’m going for.
I can do freewrite rewrites for parts that feel stilted or stagnant: write a scene or reflection from scratch rather than starting from language I already have.
I could use this morning coffee time as rewrite time and leave my daily blogging for later in the day. That seems like that could be really effective, and I may start that this week.