Are Bad Books the Product of Bad Writing?
We ask for a lot of feedback in our book coach training courses because we want our programs to deliver excellence and because there is always room for improvement.
Sometimes the feedback points to areas of weakness — like when someone recently pointed out that almost all the books we were recommending in the Business of Book Coaching course were written by white men, or when two people in the same week told us that one of our mini masterclasses did not meet the standards of quality they had come to expect from us.
Other times, the feedback reinforces to us that we are doing a good job and that helps to sustain and motivate us.
And still other times, the feedback offers a mirror that helps us see exactly what it is we are actually doing.
This is what happened recently when a coach who had just been certified filled out our “you’re just been certified!” feedback form.
We asked: “What is the most valuable piece of advice you’re taking away from the training?”
And she wrote:
“That writing well can be taught and that bad books aren’t necessarily the product of a bad writer — they are the result of a bad process or a rush to do something that cannot and should not be rushed.”
These words stopped me cold. I read them once, then twice, then a third time. They were just so TRUE, and they captured so precisely what I believe that I just sat here saying, “YES — THAT’S IT.” And also silently thanking this newly minted book coach for her beautiful description of my intention.
The entire philosophy on which my businesses are built is that the creative process can be managed by using systems and processes. One writer’s process for writing a book may be different from another writer’s process for writing a book, but each of these people moves through the same stages of creation. Perhaps they move through them at a different speed or in a different order or with a different intention or emotion, but they move through them all.
I captured what these stages are in the following list.
The Universal Constants of Creativity
- The Initial Spark — the moment an idea comes into your mind. You’re so excited and you love your idea. It feels so real you can practically taste it.
- Granting Yourself Permission — the moment you decide that you are going to bring the idea to fruition. You’re not just going to talk about it — you’re going to create it.
- A Sense of Faith — a belief that what you are going to create has some kind of meaning to you and a hope that it might have meaning to other people as well. This faith motivates you.
- A Clear Intention — you consider your audience, set an objective. Your idea is no longer fuzzy — it has shape and structure and a clear purpose.
- Gathering Resources — collecting the thoughts, ingredients, materials, and tools you need to get the job done. For writers, this can include the quiet needed to write, or the space and time needed to write.
- Commitment — you put a stake in the ground and make a start. You are no longer dreaming — you are now doing.
- Persistence — you keep going, despite setbacks and despite doubt. If you are rejected, you push past the pain to continue bringing your idea to life.
- Communion — you connect with other artists who speak your language and support your efforts. You form relationships that allow you to see yourself as a creator in your own eyes and in the eyes of other creators.
- Immersion — the exhilaration of engagement. You are in the zone. You feel like you can do no wrong. You feel alive and on fire.
- Perspective — you stand back to assess and analyze what you have created. You look at it with a critical eye to determine what is working and what may need more work. This step may include some judgment on your part. Is it any good? Will people care?
- Revision — you shape and refine. For writers, this is editing, revising, and rewriting.
- Letting Go — you decide to finish. You put a stop to the creative work. There is no more tinkering and refining. It is what it is. It is done.
- Public Offering — you share your creation with the world. You put it out there for other people to connect with, to consume, to ignore, to judge.
Bad Processes at Every Turn
The problem so many writers have — the reason they feel frustration or overwhelm or despair or doubt — is because they rush through the steps or they get stuck in one of them. These scenarios are both the result of bad processes.
If, for instance, at Step #5 — Gathering Resources — you don’t have a process for moving out of this phase, you can spend years researching your topic and researching how to write a book and taking courses and wringing your hands about starting and talking about writing a book, and you never actually do it.
At Step #10 — Perspective — if you speed past this step and don’t figure out a way to get useful distance from your work (which can be about letting it rest for a period of time, about sharing the work with other writers who can give effective feedback, about intentionally approaching the work in a different way, or about hiring a professional like an editor or a book coach who can provide the perspective you need), you risk writing something that doesn’t have a chance of making the kind of impact you want your work to make.
So often, we think of creativity as being equal to freedom — the freedom to imagine the world in whatever way we wish to imagine it, the freedom to raise our deep and authentic voice, and say whatever we really believe. We think of this freedom as necessarily chaotic — ideas just come to us, they ping around in our brain, and we sort of race to follow them and pin them down.
Good writing gets done when some sort of discipline is married to that chaos, when you combine that free-spirited energy with processes and systems to contain it. I first truly understood this idea when I read Twyla Tharp’s inspiring book, The Creative Habit many years ago, and I have been thinking about it and studying it and designing those processes and systems ever since.
Bad books are indeed NOT the product of a bad writer. They are in fact the product of bad processes.
What this means is that anyone is capable of learning to write a book that will impact other people if they commit to learning and practicing effective processes and systems. This is the belief on which all my teaching rests.
Will it be fast? No way.
Will it be easy? Almost certainly not.
Is there a guarantee at the end that if you do all the hard work, you will get a juicy book deal and a ton of sales and a movie option and fame and fortune so big you can quit your day job? Absolutely not.
But is it still worth it? I deeply believe it is.
