A friend came to me recently with a question I hear a lot: Am I writing the right book?
After sending her query to one of her wish-list agents, who’d just requested her proposal and sample chapters (an exciting, albeit stomach-churning situation in this case), she was having a sudden case of the I-don’t-knows.
In a bit of a panic, she texted: Is the book clear? Is it confusing? Have I included too much? Will readers get it? Should I go back to my original vision—a memoir—one she’d shifted away from because she worried it might be “too intense”?
That’s why she’d landed on something closer to self-help. Except now she wasn’t sure that was right either.
As she laid out all the arguments for and against, I realized my advice wasn’t going to start with structure or sample chapters or what an agent might think. I wanted to start here:
Do you love your book?
I mean really LOVE it. You can’t write the book you think the market wants. Or contort it into a category because somebody told you that one sells. You can’t slap a clever device onto it because it makes the proposal easier to pitch. Or spend your whole writing process looking over your shoulder wondering what agents, editors, readers, critics, Amazon reviewers, your mother, your neighbor, or the women in your book club will think.
At some point, you must shut everybody out and ask: What is the book I want to write?
Because here’s the part writers sometimes forget when we’re desperate to get a book deal: If you’re lucky enough to sell this thing, you’re going to be carrying it around for years. You’ll be editing it. Dreaming about it. Beta testing it. Talking about it. Promoting it. Writing posts about it. Reading from it. And answering questions about the who, what, and why. Long after the initial thrill of OMG I SOLD MY BOOK! wears off, you’re still going to be carrying this thing to dinner with you every night until you, or it, are old and gray. Lol.
Are you catching my flow? I mean, OMG, you’d better love her.
I learned this one the hard way.
In 2016, I was getting ready to fly to New York for meetings my agent had arranged with publishers for my divorce memoir. I’d been working on that memoir for years. At one point, I’d amassed more than 200,000 words. I’d spent the previous year editing it fast and furiously, one chapter at a time, not always in order, with a brilliant, highly accomplished mentor I adored and trusted. Maybe, at times, more than I trusted myself.
Right before I left for New York, I had a gut feeling: Read the whole book out loud from beginning to end. Who has nine uninterrupted hours for such things? I certainly hadn’t. But I knew to make the time. And . . .
Whoops! Late safety advisory! I was devastated.
I didn’t love her. The writing was good. Parts of it made me laugh out loud and cry—good signs, for sure. But I didn’t close those pages feeling the way I wanted a reader to feel. Something was off. Lots of things. As I later wrote in Beautiful Writers, I’d become so focused on streamlining that I’d lost some of what I’d originally loved:
“In trying to do too much, I’d shortchanged the whole. I no longer loved her.”
Oof.
My friend Martha Beck, who’d read and blurbed the book prior to my meetings with publishers, told me not to ignore what I knew. “Don’t even get on the plane,” she said. Naturally, I got on the plane. (Lesson learned: Martha’s uber-smart.)
And wouldn’t you know it? The publishers felt exactly what I’d felt. One loved the publishing and writing stories I’d woven throughout and wanted more of those. But I kept saying, It’s not a writing book. It’s a divorce memoir. Another publisher had the opposite reaction: Cut the writing stories! Give me more divorce!
My response, immortalized in Beautiful Writers: “Holy fuckballs.”
Because somewhere underneath all that confusion, I knew what was happening. There were two books in there. I’d known it. My gut had known it. But someone I deeply respected saw it differently, and I’d trusted her instincts over mine.
The publishers weren’t telling me my book was bad. They were showing me that I hadn’t yet figured out what my book was.
There’s a difference.
Confusion is information.
And for the record, taking your sweet time to figure out what your book wants to be is hardly unusual. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tracy Kidder has said he’s rewritten some of his books as many as twelve times. Other beloved books took years to find their final form—Gone Girl took Gillian Flynn about three years, while J.K. Rowling spent six years on the first Harry Potter. Beautiful Writers is filled with monster word-killing tales from the celeb authors I interviewed.
If you’re constantly asking, Is this memoir or self-help? Am I trying to cover too much? Will people understand what I’m doing? Should I make this more commercial? Maybe I should add this device? Maybe I should take out the thing I really want to write because it’s too heavy?—pay attention.
I’m not saying every moment of uncertainty means you’ve written the wrong book. Books are messy beasts (aka slippery mother f-ers) while they’re becoming themselves. But persistent confusion can be valuable intel.
Maybe you haven’t found the form yet. Maybe you’re trying to make one book do the work of two. Maybe you’ve buried the very thing that has the most electricity because it scares you. Maybe you’re trying to write the sellable book instead of your book. Or maybe you simply haven’t written far enough yet to know. Sometimes you need to finish the damn thing—or at least write much more of it—before you can see what you’ve made.
Ask your book.
This was the advice I ultimately gave this writer: Sit with your book. Get quiet. Forget the agent for a minute. Forget me. Ditch the marketplace. And ask: Is this the book I want to write?
Does this structure feel inevitable to me? When I read these pages, do I recognize myself? Am I proud of what I’m saying? Have I made choices because they make the book better—or because I’m afraid? If nobody could promise me this book would sell, would I still want to write it?
And perhaps most importantly: When I imagine holding the finished book in my hands, do I love her?
Not: Do I think she’s clever? Not: Do I think she’s marketable? Not: Do I think an agent can sell her?
Do. I. Love. Her?
Because books have a funny way of telling us what they want to be—once we stop yelling our plans at them.
That’s ultimately what happened with mine. After those New York meetings, I put the memoir down. For months. I stopped trying to fix it. I stopped trying to figure it out. I stopped writing altogether.
And slowly, I got happy.
Then one morning, the words came back, and writing was fun again. As I wrote at the end of Beautiful Writers: “My desire to write was the only why I needed.”
I returned to my desk thinking I was finally going back to my divorce memoir. Except . . . I wasn’t. Those publishing and writing stories that hadn’t belonged in my divorce memoir? They became Beautiful Writers. The book I hadn’t known I was writing stepped forward.
And this time? I loved her right away.
Four years after publication, I can still pick up Beautiful Writers and feel that way. I fucking love that book. Do I wish I’d sold a bazillion more copies? Hell yes. Would I change her into some more commercial version of herself if I could go back? Nope. Not for a minute.
She is the book I wanted to write.
And that matters more than I knew when I was younger. Because here’s the maddening and magical thing about creativity: Sometimes the pages that seem to be taking you down the wrong road are actually leading you home.
As I wrote in that book: “Trust your delays. Creativity is mysterious.”
And my sister gave me another piece of advice I’ve never forgotten: “No writing is ever wasted.”
So, if you’re confused about your book right now, I wouldn’t panic. I also wouldn’t rush to make it more marketable. I’d get curious.
Maybe you need an editor. Maybe you need a trusted reader. Or five (may I suggest an intimate retreat setting?). Maybe you need to take the meeting with that great agent you’ve “prematurely” reached out to and see if they might be the creative partner who can help you see what you can’t yet see. But before any of that, listen to yourself.
You may already know.
What book would make your heart happy? And is that the book you’re writing?
If the answer is yes, wonderful. Keep going. If the answer is I’m not sure, keep listening. And if the answer is no?
Oh, love bug. That’s far from failure. That’s information.
Your book may simply be waiting for you to fall in love.
Write on!
Linda xo
