How an Idea Becomes a Book, Part 2: Welcoming the Idea
I wrote about a progression of an idea last week that went 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.
This week, I want to look at that second step: something stuck in my mind. This step may seem ridiculously obvious, because if you don’t have an idea that sticks around, nothing can come of it — so doesn’t that mean it’s a given? To have the idea stick? Doesn’t that mean we can assume this part of the progression just sort of… happens?
I don’t think we should, because the problem most writers have is not that they have no ideas, but that they have too many ideas.
When people come to me for coaching on nonfiction books, they often present two or three or even more book ideas. They might say things like, “Should I write a memoir or a self-help book or something that is a combination of both?” or “Should I write this for an academic audience, or a trade audience, or a combination of both?” Or “Should I write this for college students looking to get into my industry or first-time managers in my industries or CEOs?” Or “I have five books I want to write around this one topic and I just need help deciding what order to write them in.”
Even if they know what they want to write, they may have a dozen ideas for how to write it — different structures, progressions, paths through the material — and the result is identical to having too many ideas: chaos and overwhelm, and creative paralysis.
All these ideas are pinging around in the writer’s mind and they have no framework for evaluating them. The fallback way forward is to try to write their way to an answer. That path almost always involves writing hundreds of pages that go nowhere, or polishing the same few chapters over and over again but never doing anything to actually turn them into a book.
Welcome the Idea
It helps to embrace the reality that writers are not fishing around for a good idea, or hunting down a good idea. They have ideas — hundreds of thousands of them. So if the ideas are already there, what they are doing is selecting the idea. They need a process of pruning and honing. A process of narrowing and deciding. A process of welcoming.
In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert says that the idea (which she believes has will and consciousness) chooses the writer. I still have not decided what I think about that concept, but regardless there has to be a moment when the writer allows that idea in and makes room for it. Gilbert writes about this, too:
“There comes a day when you’re open and relaxed enough to actually receive something. Your defences might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration (the chills up the arms, the hair standing up on the back of the neck, the nervous stomach, the buzzy thoughts, that feeling of falling into love or obsession). The idea will organise coincidences and portents to tumble across your path, to keep your interest keen. You will start to notice all sorts of signs pointing you towards the idea. Everything you see and touch and do will remind you of the idea. The idea will wake you up in the middle of the night and distract you from your everyday routine. The idea will not leave you alone until it has your fullest attention.”
I’m also not sure that relaxation is important in the process, because many times ideas come to people when they are most unwelcome — when the writer is working on something else or they don’t have time to do anything with it or they have some other project demanding their focus. I often wonder if the busy mind is a more fertile place than a relaxed one, but that could just be my mind. But in any case, you have to welcome the idea, accept it, and hold onto it, and that means choosing that idea, or elevating it, at the exclusion of others.
That means, in other words, actively letting ideas go. This one instead of that one; this one better than that one. In order to write a book, you have to make room for and settle on just one idea.
The Idea That Matters Most to You
No one idea is inherently better than another. The decision-making has to do with desire — with knowing the idea matters to you in some way.
Ideas are personal. They are 100% unique to the writer who has them. No one else on the planet could possibly write the same book you are going to write. Give a prompt to ten or twenty or two thousand writers — about, say, Thanksgiving leftovers — and you will get as many stories as there are people. It’s just the nature of humans and of ideas.
As Twyla Tharp, choreographer and author of the book, The Creative Habit, says, “When I walk into [the studio] I am alone, but I am alone with my body, ambition, ideas, passions, needs, memories, goals, prejudices, distractions, fears. These ten items are at the heart of who I am. Whatever I am going to create will be a reflection of how these have shaped my life, and how I’ve learned to channel my experiences into them.”
It’s the desire to do something with an idea that makes the idea yours. I decided to write a book about migraine because there is something in me (my body, ambition, ideas, passions, needs, memories, goals, prejudices, distractions, and fears) that causes this idea to resonate with me — not just in a random way but in a this-could-be-a-book way (which, as we will see in future posts, has to do with the shape and structure of that idea). There are probably hundreds of people reading this post who also have migraines, and perhaps are also wanting to write about it — but there is no way they are going to have the same idea I am; they couldn’t possibly have the same idea I am because they haven’t lived my life.
It’s the unique perspective you have on the idea, the unique desire you have to pay attention to it, the unique choice you make to bring it into the light that gives that idea its power.
We will talk in the coming weeks about defining why the idea resonates with you — a critical step in how an idea becomes a book — but the first step is simply noticing that it matters to you.
A Story About a Commuter Van
So how do you notice such a thing? Here is a story about that.
My younger daughter is a school teacher. Last year, she lived in Oakland, CA, on the other side of the San Francisco Bay, and commuted across the Bay Bridge to her campus on the peninsula. She rode in a van pool with other teachers — taking on the responsibility of driving the van on her given days. On some days throughout that year, the van left in the dark of morning. On other days, it arrived back in the dark of night. With no traffic, that commute can be about 30 minutes. With traffic, it can be more than two hours, and most of the time, it was closer to that side of the equation.
At some point during the course of the year, Emily began to take notes on riding in the teacher van. She didn’t know why or for what purpose. Something about the teacher van resonated with her. She noticed it as an idea that mattered to her. And out of all the other ideas in her mind — from what to make for dinner, to what to do about a tricky roommate situation, to lessons plans, and career plans, and everything else — she gave this idea enough space to take some notes. She let the light shine on it. She elevated it.
I asked her why she started taking notes. She said:
“Every time I would talk to someone outside my immediate circle of friends and families, I would tell them about the teacher van. I thought it was the most interesting thing about myself.”
So she recognized the idea of riding in the teacher van as being meaningful to her, and worthy of sharing with others. Part of that recognition was a sense of why it mattered. She said:
“I was also thinking about the fact that we often think we have to write about Big Ideas, but there was something about the teacher van that made me think about finding sacredness in the mundane and ritual in the routine. That commute was brutal, but it was also often the most sacred part of my day.”
Look how small that moment of connection is: a tiny pinging between a societal expectation about what makes a good story, an experience about riding in a commuter van, and a reason that experience had meaning. It’s such a small spark in the brain — something with a slightly different reverberation — but for a writer, it’s everything.
When I think of this resonant pinging and the power in noticing it, I can’t help but think of a now-infamous moment in creative history, when Lin Manuel Miranda had the idea for the musical, Hamilton. As the New York Times reported it:
“…while reading Ron Chernow’s exhaustive 2004 Hamilton biography, Mr. Miranda was struck by the parallels between Hamilton — an illegitimate immigrant from the West Indies who rose to power largely by the sheer force of his rhetoric — and such hustlers-turned-moguls as Jay Z. `By the second chapter, I was like, ‘I know this guy,’ ” Mr. Miranda said. “Just the hustle and ambition it took to get him off the island — this is a guy who wrote his way out of his circumstances from the get-go. That is part and parcel with the hip-hop narrative: writing your way out of your circumstances, writing the future you want to see for yourself. This is a guy who wrote at 14, ‘I wish there was a war.’ It doesn’t get more hip-hop than that.’”
The immigrant founding father pinged against the idea of hip hop, and this had meaning to Miranda and that was all it took.
Trust Comes From Naming the Ideas
Someone with too many ideas or the inability to choose among them, is probably not listening to those pings and reverberations, or trusting them. They may, in fact, be actively squashing them, in which case, they are probably saying to themselves, “A teacher van does not constitute a big idea, or a good idea” or “I’ll never have an idea worth writing about” or “Other people have already written that.”
If this is the story you are telling yourself, get Why Bother? by Jen Louden (my client, friend, and colleague.) She helps people, especially women, find their path back to themselves and their creative desire.
But if you find that you have ideas, and you feel their reverberation, and you are trying to figure out how to welcome those ideas, and trust them enough to turn them into a book, I think naming them is how you begin.
Here’s how:
1. Recognize the pinging. When you have an idea for a book, notice it. Think of this as the opposite of meditation, where (as I understand it) the goal is to watch ideas float by like clouds in the sky or water in the river, without becoming attached to them. Here, we want to become attached. We want to grab the idea and welcome it. We want to say, “That’s an idea that matters to me.”
2. Name the elements that pinged in your brain to create the spark:
- Alexander Hamilton, hip hop, immigrants, fighting with words
- Teacher van, sacred space, power in the mundane
- How an Idea Becomes a Book = How a Law Becomes a Bill, the process of creativity
- Migraine, the stories we tell ourselves about pain, fractured chronologies
3. Spend some time thinking about why that idea matters to you.
Next week, we’ll dig into the why.
