Welcome back to B is for Book Coach. Today, we’re creating space for your completed book.
Many writing services and service providers have a singular writing process that they prescribe for their authors. These are often attached to specific steps or timelines, with marketing copy that focuses on the ultimate outcome and how soon you can get there.
In the same way that a hero’s journey will relate to some but a non-linear heroine’s journey will be much more familiar to others, I have found that the non-writer’s creative process is not as straightforward as “write a book in a year” processes might promise.
There are so many variables to a writing project, based on everything from the complexity of your topic to how close it is to the chest to how many times you’ve articulated it (or not) in the past.
The key is to surface those variables and chart your course with them in mind. And we can’t chart a course without first naming the direction we’re headed.
So while I don’t subscribe to one singular process, I do start every client off with a Clear Direction session, and before that I give them all the same exercise.
It’s the only prep work that I unilaterally have all my clients do, because it tells us more about their project than anything they've already written or mapped or planned out.
I’m going to guide you through it here, but you may or may not have any answers just yet. Feel free to come back later, multiple times if needed, until you have the space to let it settle in. Or listen just the once, and let your subconscious do the rest.
Ready?
Close your eyes.
Imagine your book is in hand.
Stop trying to read it. You can't. And it wouldn’t matter if you could. It's the being-in-hand that matters.
Kind of like it would be in a dream—when you know in your gut what it is that you’re holding even though you can't make out the text? That.
Now, imagine you're handing that book to someone.
Who are they?
Where are you meeting them?
How are you meeting them—casually, formally, something else?
Where have they been before this moment?
What do you say when you hand it to them?
How do you say it?
What do you feel?
What do they say in response?
With that same dream-state knowing: How do they engage with the book?
Do they go home and gobble it up all at once?
Do they read it slowly because they’re taking notes?
Do they read it slowly because they are savoring it?
What do they do once they've read it?
What do you do together?
How are they changed?
How are you changed?
Don’t analyze your answers to these questions. Don’t turn them into a to-do list, and don’t filter them by what will sell or how you’ll write or what your peers are doing.
Just sit with this feeling.
Let it become as real as your imagination will let it.
Because underneath all of the fears and obligations and shoulds, it already is real. It’s the pull you’re feeling to write a book in the first place.
Our only work is to follow it.
Thanks for creating this space with me today. Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing just yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you're already doing it.
Be sure to subscribe on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts to catch every coaching moment to come. And when more of your book is ready to emerge, the space we made today will be here waiting for you.
And so will I.
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