How an Idea Becomes a Book
When I was in grade school, I remember we watched a movie — probably multiple times in multiple grades — called How a Bill Becomes a Law. It was a cartoon that maybe featured an animated piece of paper and followed its path through the levels of government. This memory popped into my mind recently because I have been thinking a lot about the process by which an idea becomes a book, and the sameness of that language — How an Idea Becomes a [Insert short, punchy word that points to a large concept] — summoned the memory.
This kind of thing happens to all of us hundreds of thousands of times a day — we have an idea. In my case, it came to me in the specific form of a six-word title that I felt immediately could be a book. Other people have ideas that come to them in the form of a progression of musical chords, or a skein of yarn the color of persimmons, or an image of a house on a hill with a porch looking east, or a picture of a boy on a train hurtling towards a school in a castle where they train wizards in how to use magic.
Our brains form these ideas while we go about the regular work of the day — making oatmeal, getting dressed, driving to work, talking to our kids about the risks of holiday travel (hello 2020), talking to our spouse about when to take the car in to get the front door fixed. Most of these ideas flicker through our brain and evaporate, but some of them return. Some of them won’t let us go. Some of them haunt us like a ghost in the attic.
And what happens next is what interests me, and has always interested me. I have written nine books in three genres, and they are all about the exact same thing: bringing creative ideas to life. Well, except for the first book. That one was about getting married. But maybe that really is the same thing, too — if marriage can be seen as a story you chose to live.
Some of my favorite books are about creativity, too. The Creative Habit is top of the list. And Creativity, Inc. and The Art of Asking. This is a thread in my reading that goes way back to The Agony and the Ecstasy, about Michelangelo, which I read in high school, and maybe even farther back to Harold and the Purple Crayon.
As a book coach, I work with writers in all phases of the creative process, including the phases where doubt and resistance get in our way, but my most impassioned intellectual interest is not in the resistance to the execution of an idea — the times when we get stuck. There are so many amazing books about this very real pain, including my friend and client Jen Louden’s recent book, Why Bother?, and The War of Art, and Big Magic. What I’m obsessed with is the way the idea takes shape, the process through which an idea turns into the thing it is going to become, which in this case is a book.
And just to be clear, I’m not talking about the production of a book — the mechanics of physically making it and getting it into readers’ hands, or the mysterious workings of the publishing industry, although the mysterious working of the publishing industry is the sandbox I play in. I’m interested in the series of things that happen between having the idea for a book — so in my case, the idea about how an idea becomes a book — and deciding to do something about it, to make something from it, to bring it into existence.
The first steps in that process just happened to me and they look like this:
- I had an idea, which came to me in the form of six words in a very specific order…
- and which stuck in my mind long enough to ping against a memory…
- which caused me to think about the connection between those two things (this new thought, this old memory)…
- which prompted me to land on the idea of a process…
- which suggests some sort of order or structure or shape…
- which led me to believe I had something to say…
- which prompted me to put a title on a blank page and start writing this blog post…
- which I already have a strong feeling is going to become a book.
How does that happen?? And what exactly is it all about? And how can we examine this process and understand it better so we can do a better job of writing books and a better job of coaching writers?
A New Idea and an Old One
I think this idea has resonated so strongly with me — this little six-word flicker — because I have recently started working on another book idea. I firmly believe that creativity begets creativity and action begets action, so this is not a total surprise. But this other idea — an idea for a book about migraine — has been pinging through my mind for at least twenty years. I said above that ideas are like ghosts in the attic — rattling chains, making noise, not letting us sleep — and this idea about writing about migraine has been making noise for two decades.
It was originally an idea of writing a kind of migraine journal — I called it Trigger. It was going to be a journal to help people make sense of all the things that can trigger a migraine — red wine and wind and chocolate and a bad night’s sleep — and all the ways to cope. So I had my idea, it had form (which we are going to see is everything). I wrote it. I revised it. But I never liked it. I put it away, brought it out again. It never worked. It never felt right. I didn’t know why I was doing it or what my point was or who it was for and why they might care; these questions are the sunlight and water of a book idea and if you don’t have them, the idea can’t take root.
I recently started taking a new medicine for migraines and while it has not made my migraines go away, it has reduced their impact. Not being flattened by migraines every 6 to 10 days, and not living under the threat of them, has changed my perspective, changed my mind, changed my life, changed everything — including my idea about writing about migraines.
I went to dig up that old book — and it was gone. There is no trace of it on my computer. For a moment I was devastated — a whole book just GONE? I looked and looked and finally gave up, and when I did, I realized that this was not a bad thing.
That old book never worked and trying to shore up a bad idea to see if you can make it viable never works. It’s better to declare it dead and start anew — and so I did.
I began to ask the key beginning questions that help give an idea shape, which I will turn to in my next post.
An Inconvenient Truth
So now I have two ideas: a book about migraine and a book about how an idea becomes a book.
I wish I thought in song or in yarn or in apple pie, because making those things seems so much easier and faster, but I think in books, so ideas for books is what I have.
And I have them on top of being a book coach who helps other people bring their ideas to life, and running a company that trains and certifies book coaches to do the same, and being a wife and a daughter and a mother and a friend and a citizen. And there is another book close to being done that I am committed to finishing — it’s a book on the Inside Outline, the tool I made to help develop and evaluate a novel’s narrative drive. (If you want to sign up to get a notice when that book will be ready next year, click HERE.)
All of which is to say that these ideas are somewhat inconvenient.
I’m not quite sure yet how I will share or present these ideas to you — they are, after all, unformed (both of these book ideas, and the idea of how to share my thinking about them), but that is the point. That is the entire fiery point.
Will they take shape?
And if so, how?
