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
A few years ago, I got lost in an abandoned town near Fethiye, in Turkey: Kayaköy Ghost Town.
I was deliberately lost because I was imagining that I was in a computer game. And also because I wanted to interrupt my usual patterns of needing to know everything in advance.
(Because we all know how very possible THAT goal is to achieve.)
“You make it look so easy!”
That’s when you know you’re really good at something. When someone says that. And I always glow a little bit and puff myself up a little taller.
But there is something inherently frustrating in this whole exchange, and nowhere is it more stark than when you’re upside down on a trapeze in front of a couple of hundred people, and the death-defying move you just did got a ripple of applause, but the easy beginner shape got a roar of approval.
Public speaking always comes up as people’s number 1 fear and I kind of get it — after all, it’s a chance for humiliation and rejection in the most public way. And our lizard brains tell us very clearly that if that happens WE WILL DEFINITELY DIE.
Because back in the day when we lived in little groups and hunted and gathered, we probably WOULD die if we got ousted.
Writing — and comedy — is a way for us to reach out to people we might not otherwise meet. People who might be massively helped by hearing our stories, but are separated from us by time and space. But to do that, to share generously, we have to allow ourselves to possibly maybe make a huge fool of ourselves. We have to open ourselves up to rejection if we want to invite people in.
Are you thinking your way out of writing your book?
I reckon you might be, you know.
Sometimes I do. Before I started writing this, in fact, I’d shuffled along that route. I let my brain get in the way of the ideas.
Humans are big old bags of mostly water and emotional soup.
When I was a child I often went missing. Not missing missing — except for that one time my parents gathered the entire neighbourhood to look for me and were about to call the police before my brother found me underneath the dining room table behind the tablecloth reading a stack of books.
And that’s where I often was.
It’s a common scenario: I’m not going to do the thing — finish writing the book — until I’m chosen. So the manuscript stays unfinished, endlessly tweaked, for when a publisher finally says “yes.”
The secret fantasy is alluring: one of the Big Five hears about the book idea and swoops in with a huge advance, the perfect eye-catching cover, a glamorous book tour, and all that credibility we crave. We’ve finally made it! Our ideas are worthwhile! We matter!
Humans are weird. The things humans do are weird.
Here are some of them...You’ll probably vehemently disagree with some of these. That’s okay; it’s life. We’re allowed to disagree.
I’ve stopped and started a book I’m writing so many times I’m sick of myself. Do you ever get so sick of yourself you just want to scream and scream and scream until you’re hoarse? Yes, well. Just because I’m a writing coach, doesn’t mean I’m immune from the brain nonsense that flattens us all at some point.
I’m the proverbial cobbler with holes in her shoes.
I’ve started and stopped writing so many times today I’m sick of myself. Do you ever get so sick of yourself you just want to scream and scream and scream until you’re hoarse? Yes, well.
Anyway, I decided to stop overthinking it and instead tell you about a tiny experiment I’ve started, because perhaps it’ll help you too.
Inefficiency, I’ve realised, is where life happens. It’s where we notice things. It’s where we remember we’re alive.
I’m a writer; I already knew that. But it’s easy to forget it when we’re constantly bombarded with ways to make everything more efficient.
Let’s hear it for laziness. All because I couldn’t be arsed to take a run-up.
You never know what you might be able to achieve when you simply cannot be bothered.
This is the kind of positivity you can expect from me in the face of inertia. I’ll find a way. I’ll make it fun. We’ll do the thing.
