I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
I’m having a hard time making progress on my book manuscript, even though I work on it every day. While I have evolved to a structure that I think will work really well, and I have all sorts of chunks written, it’s just not flowing as easily as I would hope.
In his book The Art of the Book Proposal, author and creativity coach Eric Maisel offers an explanation for my experience:
The short answer to the question “Why am I making so little progress on my book?” is that the journey from idea to completed book is among the most arduous on earth. It is hard work because thinking is hard work, and writing is about thinking, not physically making marks on a page….
Thinking is consistently experienced as a crisis state. We are alarmed to be thinking, frightened to be alone in a metaphorical darkness, terrified that our brain might be a quart short on oil and not operating properly. We predict that we will make a mess of our thoughts and think garbage. We worry that we will dream up dung instead of a beautiful book. As the author Kenneth Atchity explained in A Writer’s Time, “Most of us hate to think. Five minutes of thought can be more terrifying, more energy-draining than days and days of routine activity.” Although there are many obstacles to writing a good book, this is the primary one.
It is so hard to think of what to say, how to organize it, and how to say it.
Yesterday I bought index cards at King Soopers and wrote one idea or story or subsection on each one. I organized them on my kitchen counter. That was helpful, because I could see that I needed to put more effort into organizing my third section. My first section “Reckless Romance as Encounter” is almost fully fleshed out, the second section “Reckless Romance as Becoming Otherwise” is on its way, but the third section “Reckless Romance as Ordeal” had almost no example stories.
I’ve been writing the manuscript in Scrivener, software for long-form writing. I think it works pretty well but I’ve also been experimenting with alternatives such as Obsidian, a note-taking application that makes it easy to create new short documents, organize them, and link them together, and Google Docs. None is perfect. I tell myself, “writers used to do their manuscripts on typewriters!” so I should be able to use these much more flexible systems. But I have yet to find something that supports good flow while I’m writing.
That may be because I’m just still at the organizing stage. Or, to be more accurate, I’m still in the thinking state. Maisel advises doing this extensively before starting to write:
I’m advocating that you think about your nonfiction book before you begin to write it. I don’t mean that you are to think about it in the sense of “Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to write a book?” I mean that you will sit down and really think about your idea, that you will move it from its current vague state to the state where it is rich and fleshed-out. You will think about what you are trying to communicate, what form your book should take, what chapters it should be divided into, what should go into each chapter, what experiences you mean to draw on to substantiate it, what research you need to do to buttress what you know already, and so on.
I have been engage in that, both by writing successive manuscripts and successive outlines, and by thinking, even when I’m not at the computer, about how the ideas and framework I want to apply to midlife romance can best be communicated. But not only do I have to figure out how to communicate that, I’m also in the midst of developing the ideas and framework as I go. This is difficult thinking work!
Maisel writes:
The first days and weeks of the process may make you feel very uncomfortable as, instead of writing your nonfiction book, you force yourself to think about your book. You may feel unequal to the task of thinking so hard, you may start to call yourself names, you may dream up a million reasons why you are not entitled to write this book or why you should write some other book. You may question your expertise, you may doubt that the marketplace wants a book of this sort, you may announce that you don’t really have anything to say. You may do every dance imaginable to stop the painful process of thinking. But at the same time, if you recognize that this is the process and that you are doing the right thing, if you can keep up your courage and your motivation, then one day some weeks or months into the process you will find yourself working on a good book. That payoff is guaranteed, if you can stay with the process.
I actually feel very positive about the need in the world for the book I’m writing, and I think, after 13 years engaging in relationship after relationship and thinking about those relationships, I have the expertise to write this book.
I just keep thinking it should be easier to write it. I try to find a tool that will make it easier to organize and write. Maisel says no, I am right where I should be: in the thicket of difficult thinking. There is no tool that will make this thinking any easier.
“A book is a bit of newly minted meaning,” writes Maisel, and he says that if you want to write one and can’t make progress on it, this becomes a crisis of a kind:
But an inability to put together a strong book, even though one is smart, hard-working, and literate, is really a manifestation of an ongoing crisis. It is a special kind of existential crisis: an inability to effectively carve meaning out of the universe. The central task of the nonfiction writer is really the profound existential task of sorting through many meanings, selecting some particular meaning, and then advocating for that choice.
Sometimes I fail to celebrate what I get to do everyday of my life: carve meaning out of the universe. This is my vocation, my work, what I do everyday when I get up, here and in Scrivener or Obsidian or in Google Docs.
Maisel suggests a different way to think about the activity I’m engaged in:
The first step in creating your book is surrendering to the reality of the process. Do not suppose that you are writing a book. Substitute a new thought: that you are thinking a book into existence…. Do not imagine that you can get your book done well without willing yourself to plan, think, revise, organize, sweat, deal with confusion, and deal with anxiety. Substitute a new thought: that you will do whatever it takes.