How to Write a Book: Actually, How to Write Four Books, Maybe More

So much for focus: as I’m working through my zero drafts, it’s become clear that I have at least four books in process. This wasn’t my intent at all, but when I’m called to write something, I write it. And when I’ve examined my recent writing after the fact, I clearly see four different projects.

The first project is the book I’m working on with Jerry about his training techniques, in which my role is to share my experiences with those techniques. Going into the zero-drafting process for the project, it seemed that it would be simple to keep my focus narrow. However, I’ve practiced Jerry’s techniques for long enough now and seen such substantial changes in my life as a result that it’s challenging to not write about it all from my current perspective, now three-and-a-half years into the process. I still recall the exciting unfolding-into-the-unknown that were my initial experiences, but they’re far enough away now that they’re not easy to tap into.

I say it’s challenging, but I also see that there’s no need to fight too hard against that challenge. The deeper-into-the-process writing–the kind of stuff about meeting potential that we explored on Training Tiger Woods–points to an obvious follow-up to the first book. This material is far too valuable to throw away, but including too much of it in the first book only muddies the waters.

The third book is a little too personal to speak of publicly right now, other than acknowledging it for the sake of this piece. (Ooooh, intriguing!)

The fourth book has the working title of How to Write a Book, and I’m working on it right now as I write this, as well as every future time that I write about the process of writing these books. My operating assumption here is that I’m learning enough through this process that I am immediately discovering things of sufficient value that I can teach others. Writing about it as I learn can only amplify the teaching potential. Declaring that there’s a book in this material adds in the power of intentionality. (That said declaration may also interest people and draw attention to the writing is a side benefit not to be ignored.)

As I progress with the work, it’ll be interesting to see if the zero drafts ultimately come into a sharper focus without much energy from me, if I need to discipline myself into creating that focus, or if I can simply continue to allow the zero drafts to progress as they progress. The process of discovery has me fascinated, if perhaps feeling a bit trepidatious. I vow to keep on plugging, regardless.

On Handling Complexity

When I’m faced with a number of disparate tasks, like for example today, when I had to get a bunch of stuff packed in order to travel between two of the places I’m staying these days, do a bunch of clean-up at the one I was leaving, get some writing done, and finally do a little admin work that I’ve been completely putting off, I find a useful technique is to write each task in my little notebook as it occurs to me, and then cross each one off as I complete it. This technique helps me draw signal out from the noise. I end up being much more effective and don’t end up getting overwhelmed.

A far less effective technique–but the one I chose instead–is to take a nap, then play Game for a while, then have no real plan to tackle all of the tasks so that I proceed willy-nilly through/between them.

An upside of this second technique is that if I’m trying to foment anxiety and a deeply embodied sense of hopelessness, this method really works.

A Thought on the Perniciousness and Persistence of Self-Diminishment

This thought isn’t fully formed yet, but I thought I would share it as I start to play with it.

It struck me as interesting how often we use our best moments against ourselves. We’ll take a successful moment and then extrapolate from that moment a story of, “Every moment should be like that moment.” We then hold it against ourselves when it doesn’t work out that way.

We could instead be grateful for that success, and accept that not every single moment will be that way because, hey, we’re human. But that’s not at all what we do.

How to Write a Book: An Obvious Side Benefit

I think 750 published pieces in the last three years, backed by however-many consecutive weeks of hitting my writing quota suggests that my bona-fides as a writing coach are pretty solid. I assert I know some stuff about overcoming blocks.

(Of course, it isn’t exactly for me to say, is it?)

But how much does my authority expand once I’ve actually written a book? I mean, let’s face it, even in the age of the Internet, writing a book is most writers’ real goal. Right now I can demonstrate that I know how to deal with blocks. In the very near future, I’ll be able to demonstrate that I know how to see a major project through.

This process portends good things.

How to Write a Book

Let’s discuss my qualifications. I have four or five novels in process, but none of them are especially close to done. That puts me in pretty good company among aspiring writers, but doesn’t speak particularly well of my chances to meet my goal with respect to the book Jerry and I are working on, for which we hope to have a finished first draft by the end of April.

The last time I worked on a novel in earnest was early 2013. I have three years of the Free Refills project under my belt but no experience, none whatsoever, with writing a non-fiction book.

Nevertheless, I’m confident Jerry and I are going to pull this off. Because of the past three years, I trust my ability to zero draft and to cut through perfectionism. I trust our topic and I believe in our motivation to see the work get done.

Because I don’t know what I’m doing, but nevertheless still believe that we’re going to meet our goal, I’m betting the process is going to be pretty interesting. As it unfolds, I’ll share what I learn. Watch this space.

From the Zero Drafts: 4 Jan 2018

The bulk of my drafting so far this year has been trying to find my way into best telling the story of the early work Jerry and I did together. I don’t feel like I’ve quite hit my stride so far, but there have been a few bits and pieces that I’ve really been proud of. For example:

I had the depression to teach me that in order to be living in the way I was living, I had had to send my energy very far away for a very long time, in order to not just kind of naturally find a way to shine.

Despite using “in order to” twice in that sentence–all hail the zero draft, in which it remains impossible to make a mistake–that sentence sizzled when it came out of my fingers.

One Week Before Solstice (IV): A Vision

So how might I do this period of the year better, next time around? Not quite twelve months from now, the holidays will arrive again, and there will be a million things, because that is the way the world in which I live works. But there will also be the strong energetic pull to slow down, to slow down, to slow down, which is the way the world on which I live works, and that world is the far deeper, more profound of the two.

The tension between the two is the main stress of the holidays, and I don’t want to live that way anymore. I want to experience the shift in seasons and the parts of our culture that dance around it (no matter how inelegantly, sometimes) as an experience of joy. It will be even more important next year, because there is the strongest chance that next year my holidays will look far different from how I’ve ever experienced them before.

I will not be juggling deadlines during this period next year. My writing and my work will be quite different then. Next year, as I enter the time when my body is really trying to slow down, I will make sure that there be nothing related to my work, literally nothing, that will demand my daily attention. I will have finished with that part of my year. I wish to meet those days next year in joyful immediacy, so that they enliven rather than drain me.

There will be social demands, and I will meet them. Some invites I will jump on. Others I will smilingly decline.

Gift-giving is a yearly stress for me. I butt up right against the deadline every year, for I have to this point lacked the easy imagination of the natural gift-giver. But 2018 will be different. With a little luck and a lot of hard work–hard work which has, I assure you, already begun–my relationship with abundance and thus my ability to give from center will radically change.

What you are reading here exists in resonance with the rest and rebirth of winter. It resonates with rest because it is a call to rest, a recognition of a failure of sorts at the end of 2017. It resonates with rebirth because I am describing a vision for a different me.

Here he comes.

How can I be so sure of his arrival? Because I look back twelve months ago and shake my head in marvel at all that’s changed.

That change is only accelerating.

One Week Before Solstice (III): The Writing and the So-Much-More

I had been scrambling that week to finish my writing for the year, to be able to enter into that weekend with everything done, to get to experience it joyfully as the first days of my sabbatical. I had other things to attend to, but because of how I have built my writing up in my world, it felt like the most important thing. I do not fuck up meeting the demands of my writing. And so everything else I put aside.

I have built the writing to be the thing that has to get done first, always. Everything else has to wait. And this is powerful and lovely, this dedication, and from the vantage of today, I admire the ferocity of my devotion. I wield it like a sword.

But I have bigger tasks now, and I discover that this all-else-be-put-aside dedication no longer serves me. I have proved to myself and everyone, beyond every shadow of every doubt, that I am capable of the demands of this devotion. Now it is time to show myself and everyone, beyond every shadow of every doubt, that I am finally ready to welcome the so-much-more that I and they have for so long seen within me, crying to get out.

One Week Before Solstice (II): Too Much

Before bed, in the dark of night, I realized I was again ignoring my own teachings, and the stress I was feeling was proof. It was a week before the solstice, and energetically I was supposed to be slowing down, but I was not slowing down. Of course there was the hot buzzing feeling of intense stress in my body. Of course there was. How could it be otherwise?

There were things to be done. I had Christmas shopping to do, and it was eleven days until Christmas, and as is true almost all of the time, I had few ideas for gifts, imagination for gifting not being one of my strengths.

What else? Later that day, I was to go away for the first part of the weekend, and with a good-sized group, and there was a lot of freneticism in that planning, and that freneticism demanded my attention and energy. At the end of our time away, we would all rush back to Denver in order to go to a party. It would probably be a fun party, but it would be a highly social experience immediately after a few days of highly social experience. And then a few days later, there would be holiday travel, and then the holidays themselves, and then five straight days of work on the mountain, and then the excitement of New Year’s Eve, and then I would have friends visiting. Everything I just described was intended to be experienced as joyful, and much of it I experienced joyfully, but all of this came at a time when my body was asking me as best it could to slow the fuck down.