A Young Man Co-Writes a Book

If a new writer suggests writing a book for fame and fortune, they’re either joking or delusional. No one, even well-known authors, save Stephen King, can guarantee they will write a best seller. Most books go unnoticed. Sometimes a book isn’t good enough to get attention. Other times, the book is good enough, but the infrastructure to generate excitement about the book doesn’t exist.

As I graduated from college, my father suggested that I help him write a book about his experiences over a five-decade career working in community development. If you don’t know the US version of community development, well, you’re not alone. The definition has evolved and doesn’t means different things in different places. This writing aims not to debate the intricacies or history of community development in the United States but to discuss the book project.

I agreed to write the book because I had experienced the life of an office hack and didn’t want any part of it. I’d started writing on my own, fiction mostly. Still, my dad had read several of my college papers and thought he and I aligned intellectually on any issues related to community development work.

So, after my last summer working at camp, I returned to my hometown, Washington, DC, and began writing a book. When writing a non-fiction book, you first want to understand what you will be writing. To do this, you must grasp the issues and arguments and how you might want to present your ideas. If this sounds like it might be intellectually challenging, that’s because it is. But of course, most of you are writers, so you know what I’m talking about.

Even just outlining a book is an extraordinary amount of work. The logistics of researching for the outline are significant. My dad managed to do several things, including getting us a shelf at the Library of Congress. Getting a shelf at the Library of Congress is a huge deal if you’re a researcher. It means that you don’t have to be at the library to get your books physically and can have them sent to your shelf for retrieval whenever you appear there.

In addition to the Library of Congress, I spent much time at the Department of Housing and Urban Development library. It’s not well-advertised, but this library is, or at least was, open to the public, and I could freely roam the stacks.

For about the first six to eight months of working on the book, I did nothing but go to the library every day and read. Depending on my mood, I’d spend about 4 to 6 hours a day there. Then I’d take my notes, go home, and write them on the computer. You couldn’t bring a laptop into the main reading room at the Library of Congress. I haven’t researched there in twenty years, so I don’t know if it’s the same.

At the same time, my dad was trying to organize his thoughts and memories into a coherent narrative. We weren’t exactly working off the same playbook here because we didn’t know how to deliver the book. Only later, when I seized more control over how we would present the book, the outline became clearer.

During the first year, I was overwhelmed as I dug into housing and community development-related research. I had seen my father’s direction and could find support for it in the research. But as a budding writer, I was more concerned with the writing than the research. That’s probably the opposite of any good researcher. However, I fancied myself a writer, so the writing was important. How would it sound?

One year turned into two years of this. We began to write the book separately, then exchanging parts and editing what the other had done. It wasn’t strategic, at least not the way we did it. There are probably co-authors who can undertake such work efficiently, but there was a difference in knowledge and perspective here. My dad had almost all of it, and the supporting documentation was all well and good, but it wasn’t coming together.

If you’ve never done something on this scale, you imagine that things fall into place and the stars align, and the book writes itself. Unfortunately, books don’t write themselves. People write books, and my dad and I had very different perspectives on how to write this book.

By the beginning of 2001, I needed a break from the book. I went to write another book (something I’ll write about in another post) and only returned to Washington and writing the book after 9/11.

As I returned, got another mindless job, I resolved not to let this book falter any longer. I would do everything I could to finish this book and get it published. And that’s what I did. It took until 2003 when we finally received an acceptance letter, but we did it. Or rather, my dad’s entire career with some elbow grease on my end got us a slight book deal with a minor press that was kind of a vanity press, but not quite.

Regardless, getting the project done for me was a great accomplishment. And once the book was published in 2004, I thought I had made it. I felt that publishing a book would be the ticket to future writing.

That turned out not to be the case. But that wasn’t because the book was mediocre, which it was. The writing didn’t come because I didn’t pursue it. I got scared. I thought about all the things I should be doing that weren’t writing. I thought about all the expectations to make a positive change that I had put on myself and slightly turned myself away from writing.

I thought of myself as a writer still. But I didn’t pursue writing like someone pursues something they love. Instead, I began to believe that writing was not powerful enough for what I wanted to do. I wanted to create positive social change. And while the book we’d written would perhaps influence a few people, it wouldn’t have the impact I wanted.

Writing is hard. Research is hard. Exposing your thoughts to the world is hard. It made us, my father and me, open to criticism. Some of our reviews were okay, some were good, and others were bad. And you know I felt okay about that. As a first effort in undertaking such a project, I remain proud of what we did together. Overall, the book had little impact.

Nearly 20 years on, the book still matters, though. It still provides an essential historical context for how residential segregation continued from the pre-Urban Renewal era. Of course, I digress. The point of this piece is to articulate how scary writing was for me, despite it being what I wanted to do. I completed a project and yet could not bring myself to focus on writing.

I longed to have already traversed the path to success without actually traversing it. There was something romantic in writing that I longed for, freedom from the drudgery of office work. Yet I knew how hard it was to pay the bills relying on writing. Writers always have to do other work, or almost always, to support themselves until they reach a certain level of success, which most never will.

The one thing I regret from this experience was not pushing further with it, not doggedly pursuing it until the end. Of course, here I am now, writing. But in the intervening 20 years, I could have done so much more. But here I am now, at least, trying to rectify my mistakes, learn from the past, and create a new future. So, I suppose writing the book was a positive experience, even if I didn’t immediately recognize it.