How an Idea Becomes a Book, Part 3: Why do you care?

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This is the third part of a series. You can catch up by reading the other parts here: Part One, Part Two.

Once you know that an idea matters to you — once you notice the pinging in your mind and you welcome the idea — the next part of the process of turning that idea into a book is to figure out why you care. If you never do this work — if you start writing without knowing why — you will write in circles. You will fall into frustration and doubt. You will come to believe that writing depends on some elusive muse or a series of special habits (i.e. write 1500 words a day, write for an hour every day, write when the full moon is waning) rather than deep self-reflection, discipline, and persistence.

These beliefs set in because you were doing the work out of order. You were writing to try to find your reason for writing, rather than finding your reason and then writing.

It may seem like a small difference, but in my experience, it’s enormous. It’s often the difference between writing a book that people want to read and either a.) never finishing, or b.) finishing, but writing something that is so watered down and wishy-washy it fails to make an impact.

You can write your way to an answer — absolutely. I have done it, and writers I know have done it, and we have all heard of Famous People who have done it on Famous Books, but the truth is that for most of us most of the time, it’s wildly inefficient, ineffective, painful, and unnecessary.

So why do you care?

When I ask nonfiction writers why they care — it’s the first question I ask of every writer I coach — they will often give an easy answer: “I want to share what I have learned” or “I don’t want other people to suffer like I did.”

These kinds of answers are part of the truth, but they often strike me as polite sentiments that work as a kind of altruistic shield to the deeper reason people want to write a book. The other parts of the truth — the ones that are harder to accept in ourselves — usually have to do with ambition and rage.

The Reality of Ambition

When I ask people why they want to write their book, I provide this checklist to help them with their thinking:

• To make money
• To make a name for myself as an expert/authority
• To influence/educate/illuminate/comfort/entertain people
• To raise my voice/speak up/claim my story
• To prove that I can do it, either to myself or others
• Because I feel called to do it/I am burning to do it/I can’t rest until I do it
• To leave a legacy for my family
• To model for my kids what it means to pursue a dream (hard work, frustration, failure, perseverance, etc.)
• ___________________________________________________

Most people check off several of these answers, and every once in a while someone checks off all of them. It’s all good. An honest assessment can help you begin to understand your why.

For me, for the book about How an Idea Becomes a Book (which I am circling around as I write these posts), I am driven by a desire to make a name for myself as someone who teaches not just the craft of writing, but the larger creative process writers engage in when they write books.

Why am I so driven?

Because a lot of writers teach craft and teach it well, but there aren’t as many people who are examining the larger patterns of the creative process or thinking about how those processes fit into the business of being a writer. I’m in an ideal position to consider these ideas. At Author Accelerator, we are teaching book coaches how to coach writers, which forces us into a kind of metacognition (Wikipedia says, “Metacognition is ‘cognition about cognition’, ‘thinking about thinking’, ‘knowing about knowing’, becoming ‘aware of one’s awareness’ and higher-order thinking skills. The term comes from the root word meta, meaning ‘beyond’, or ‘on top of’.) I would like to write a book that gets at this higher-order processing and codifies what I have learned by teaching hundreds of book coaches.

And why do I want to codify what I have learned?

All the books I cited in the first part of this series — books like The Creative Habit and Creativity, Inc — examine these larger ideas about creativity, and they have inspired me over many years; they are the touchstones I return to when I am trying to solve problems on my work or find motivation. I would like to be part of this conversation and think I have something to add to it specific to writing books.

And why is adding to the conversation important to me?

Part of it is that I want to prove to the people who follow me (that’s you if you are reading this) that I am worthy of being followed, that I have something to say worth saying, that I am a “real” CEO and leader. About six years ago, our tax guy looked at my book coaching income and said, “You’re really becoming a viable economic unit.” He was commenting upon the fact that most people who call themselves coaches or consultants don’t make that much money, and I was showing consistent and increasingly impressive results year after year. At the time, I remember feeling proud of his comment — smug.

But then I began to be furious about it — his presumption that I couldn’t somehow pull it off, his patronizing tone. I began hearing that tone around a lot of things he said and we soon left that tax guy and found someone else. There still lingers in me from that experience, and from a lifetime of other influences, the fear that I don’t really know what I’m doing, that it won’t last, that the success is not real. In other words, I have something to prove to myself and to others.

I don’t mind admitting this desire. Ambition is a necessary part of book coaching and of writing. You have to assume that people want to hear what you have to say before you take action to put words on the page. You have to assume that someone will want the service you are offering before you start asking people to pay you for it.

The Reality of Rage

Rage — or anger, jealousy, dissatisfaction, discontentment — also plays a role in recognizing and claiming ideas. Often people who have something to say are saying it in opposition to something else — some other idea, or movement, or belief, or experience.

For me, this idea about How an Idea Becomes a Book, stems from my anger about the way writing is often taught. There is such an intensive focus on habits, inspiration, craft, and marketing and so little focus on the thing itself — the process of turning ideas into words that impact readers.

Habits and inspiration and craft and marketing are good and necessary things, but so often it seems we rip them out of context and serve them up because they are the parts of the process that are do-able. They are teachable in small bites. They can form a nice and neat business model — write every day, write a book in 30 days, learn the format of a book proposal, become an Amazon bestseller, get 5,000 people on your email newsletter list. The process of actually writing — of wrangling your idea on the page — seems, by contrast, impossible to pin down or teach or control.

What on earth can a book coach promise if we don’t promise some actionable, measurable outcome?

I teach a process of self-discovery and book development that is slow and iterative and difficult and may lead to no material reward for the writer. It’s not a very sexy thing. But this is the process writers need in order to turn their idea into a book. Someone can learn the elements of a book proposal — it’s not rocket science — but unless they do the hard work of knowing what they are writing and why it matters to them and how best to shape their idea to impact their reader, they won’t have anything worthwhile to propose.

The way writing is taught makes me mad because I see it misleading so many writers, and causing so much pain, and I know that this pain is preventable. So anger drives me.

The Migraine Book

Anger also drives me on the migraine book I have in mind, too. I am driven by a desire to do something with the 28 years of pain I have suffered — to make something from it, to turn it into something good. It’s my way of making all that pain meaningful, of making it worthwhile. I can’t help but want to write a book about it.

I also have rage about the way migraine has for so long been mistreated and dismissed. This kind of rage can galvanize an idea. If you know what you stand against, you know better what you stand for.

Many years ago, I took a course with Sarah Avers and I was struggling to define who I wanted to coach. “Writers” wasn’t cutting it as a business plan. Sarah pushed me to define who I wouldn’t serve, and that set loose in me a giant gush about people who were stingy of spirit, who demanded a certain ROI, who wanted me to do the writing for them, who wanted the process of writing a book to be fast and painless. It was easy to write the anti-manifesto, and in doing that, I backed into the kind of writer I am best suited to serve. Anger showed me the way.

In her book 3 Word Rebellion, Michelle Mazur walks people through a similar process of knowing what they stand for and against. I recommend it.

Start with Why

What I have been leading up to saying is that when you have an idea — when you notice it and welcome it — you must then start with why.

Start with Why is, of course, the title of Simon Sinek’s blockbuster business book that organizations ranging from small private schools to Fortune 500 multinational corporations embraced with vigor. Sinek’s contention is that people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it, and what is true for businesses is true for writers, too.

Writers are a business. We are developing and launching a product. It just happens to be an idea that we formed in our minds and brought to life through words on the page.

Knowing your why helps keep you focused. It gives you a box to work in — and we will be talking a lot about boxes when we talk about structure and shape. But even before we get to shape and structure, while we are still just talking about recognizing the idea as an idea and as an idea that matters to you, focus is critical.

When you know your why, you are engaged in the process of refining and pruning your idea.

You are circling around the idea, moving in from a wide target to a more narrow one.

It’s THIS idea, not that one.

And in choosing it, you claim it.

Know Your Why

So how do you know why you care about this book idea that has stuck in your mind? Ask yourself the following:

• What do I like about this idea? What is buzzy about it for me? What makes it call to me? Why this idea, not some other one?
• What else does it remind me of that resonates with me? Other books, other ideas, other people, other movies, other art, other songs, other people?
• Is there something behind or around this idea I am repelled by? Jealous of? Obsessed with?
• Is there anger underneath the idea? Rage? At what??
• Why do I care?
• Why?
• Why?
• Why?