Wherever you are on your book writing adventure, you’ll find what you need here…
What to do if you’re just starting out on your Author Adventure: planning, preparation, and dealing with your Inner Dickhead
I love it when a piece of tangible evidence arrives to support something I know and feel to be true.
Like — nobody is going to remember any of your LinkedIn posts or Instagram posts or Tweets in 10 years.
Sorry, they’re not. Because social media is designed to be hooky, addictive, and instantly forgettable, like cheap candy.
But a long-form piece of writing or media That, they might remember.
Cue trumpets 🎺
Please be upstanding and create a massive amount of noise for Tricia Nichols and her brand spanking new book The Currencies of Wellness, out now and available for pre-order!
I can never decide whether my favourite moment of working with someone to write their book is a) when I see the light go on behind their eyes when they realise they have a good idea, they CAN write, and...
Have you ever been faced with a task SO huge that instead of getting started, you just kind of spin in place, getting more and more dizzy?
Like, for example, tackling an overgrown garden?
Or renovating a house?
Or… writing a book?
I mean, let’s be honest, sometimes I feel like that about starting my day.
One of my LinkedIn contacts asked me a perfectly reasonable question once:
“I’m not asking for a guarantee carved in stone, but what percentage of your students make enough off of their MicroBook to make back the cost of the class?”
It’s an interesting question because although it’s reasonable on the surface, it’s not quite the right question to ask. First of all: I don’t make any guarantees about what the book will do after you’ve written it, because that’s out my hands.
Dolly Parton.
If everyone in the world was even 1% more Dolly, I do believe everything would be okay.
She reached the very top of her world, then she set up a ladder and reached down to help the rest of us up there too.
I don’t even know where to start with what a huge loss she is to the world and I’m really surprised at how hard this has hit me. I didn’t know her.
Wanna know a secret that will either delight you and change your life or have you cursing my name?
Of course you do, and here it is:
The words you use are the least important part of your book. They get in the way. A great book isn’t dependent on the words. It’s dependent on the connection you create.
There’s this guy called Peter Elbow.
Isn’t that a great name? It’s the third brilliant name I’ve encountered in the past week, the other two being Bob Whopper and Jim Bumgardner. The delight I’ve had in these names has been large and ongoing.
Anyway, his name isn’t the point.
His book is.
When you need to do something — like write your email or your social media post or those insights for that client — the best thing to do is stop doing trying to do that thing and do something else entirely.
So, yeah, I’m writing about cleaning my windows right now…
But what I’m actually saying is — when you find yourself struggling to do a task, stop it. Go do something else.
Do you ever look around you and think
My god what have I done?
Did that this morning as I stood in the early sunshine with my cup of tea.
I’d just walked down the stairs, under the tarpaulin, and out through the gaping hole in the back of the house where the shower room and kitchen used to be.
Last week at the gym I took a tiny beetle step to becoming the type of irritating person who makes the most of every moment.
You know the type — they have to fill every spare second with something productive or what’s the point of them.
There’s a hole behind our house. A big, big hole.
A really big huge massive hole.
I stood with my sheep on the edge and gazed into it, wondering when we’d find buried treasure. Because that always happens in books and on TV: you dig a huge hole in the back of your house, and there’s treasure. Or a skeleton. One of the two.
I spend a lot of time thinking about why people don’t write the books they say they want to write.
And I’ve come to the conclusion that, although there are many reasons and circumstances, it often starts with a bunch of lies we’re told about how writing books works.
Here are three of my favourites.
