Why Your Publishing Dream is Killing Your Book
I’ve been around the block for some time, formerly working for a well known New Age book publisher. What I was told constantly, once people learned I worked for a publishing house, is that they had a book in them, and they are destined to be an author. The truth is, there are a ton of stories and new authors waiting to be seen, but there are significantly fewer who do what it takes to complete the book writing process.
I know, the act of writing sounds easy enough, but it’s quite challenging. Life is distracting and frankly there’s nothing sexy about writing a book. It’s a lot of sitting in front of a laptop or doing endless loops of research. And those are just the starting points. Don’t get me started on the rounds of edits, but like you are getting ahead of yourself dreaming of publishing your unwritten book, I’m now guilty of getting ahead of myself by bringing up edits.
So, let me get straight to the point: draft one is the most important part of the author process. You can fight me on this fact if you want, but without it, you’re only an author in your imagination.
ENVISIONING YOUR BOOK WON’T GET IT WRITTEN
Those of us in the transformational genre spend a lot of time vision boarding, visualizing, and otherwise manifesting what our dream life is going to look like. However, going to be a published author will remain in the future tense unless you sit your buns down and write your story.
One thing all of us writers who have been published know for sure is: becoming an author is a word count game. It’s a labor of love to stick with the process. Because let’s face it, the blank page is intimidating and humbling, but it’s also the great equalizer between you, Joan Didion, or Stephen King.
In short, you must take the vision down from the beautiful pictured board you’ve created and put words on the page. You also need to commit to doing this on a regular basis. It can’t just be when you “feel like it” or guess what? The dream will stay in your head and we’ll never get the honor of reading it.
Antidote: Commit 10 minutes first thing in the morning to writing and then (by all that is holy) WRITE.
There’s a Facebook community dedicated to just this action. Why? Because books can be written through the steady commitment of just a few minutes a day for the simple reason of you are WRITING SOMETHING.
FOCUSING ON PUBLISHING IS A WRITING BLOCK
When you’re in your head contemplating your New York Times bestselling book title, where is that leaving you in your craft? I’ll tell you. Not practicing. Even worse, it can stifle your creative flow because you become fixated on what other people want to read. As a writer, it’s never been your job to decide what other people want to read. It’s your job to write the words to the best of your ability as they show up for you, edit them responsibly, and publish them as appropriate. That’s it.
If you were to ask most bestselling authors, I have a sneaking suspicion they didn’t know their book was going to sail to the top of book lists. Not the authors in their integrity that is. There’s a whole system that can be played to soar your book to the top of bestselling lists (an article for another time) but for those who just wrote to the idea that was given them and completed that task — they are just as surprised as you’ll be once you achieve your vision.
Antidote: Focus on writing Chapter 1 which is roughly 3,000 words. When you’re done with that, move on to Chapter 2 (aka) the next 3,000 words.
This is the secret to achieving your dream, crossing multiple finishing lines so you stay a winner. If you want to crank up the good vibes, reward yourself with something yummy like a massage as you reach each milestone of your first draft. We all need bribes. We’re all still kids inside.
YOU’RE MISSING OUT ON THE JOY OF CREATING
When you fixate on an end goal you miss the journey. Instead you become anxious that the book isn’t happening fast enough, or you change your mind a thousand times on the plot. Basically, the despair sets in and it’s based on unfair expectations that you laid upon your path having no real experience or intimate knowledge to base it on. All because you had a vision of a published book.
Look, it’s totally ok that you get upset on your writing path, there are a lot of surprises waiting for you along the way. But if you are so focused on holding the book in your hand, I must tell you that you’ve issued yourself a preemptive Debbie Downer moment. Because from personal experience, you’ll hold the book, feel deep pride, but instead of the memory of the book, you’ll go back in time and revel in the amazingness of your quest. That you stuck it out and as a result this book now exists.
Also, when you go out and speak on book tours, you know what people ask the most? How you wrote your book and what your process was.
Antidote: When you feel yourself getting sad about your book, make a list of the reasons you started writing it in the first place. Follow it up with a list of what you hope your readers get from your book. Then pin those lists up in your writing space or put it at as a screensaver.
We all need to reflect on why we started something challenging. It can help us gain the courage to complete and overcome the uncomfortableness of the set of unknowns we must encounter in a new process.
Remember, you can only claim the title of author by becoming one, so start by finishing your first draft. Then after you go through all the multitude of edits, hold your beautiful book in your hands, and watch it soar to the top of bestseller lists, you can tell everyone how it started with an article you read on Medium.
