Welcome back to B is for Book Coach. Today, we’re making space for digging.
Confession time: I do not think of myself as a writer.
An editor, yes.
A story nerd, definitely.
A creator, sometimes. An operations director, once.
A mom, a doula, a midwife-in-another-life, a bit of an herbalist, a bog witch? Sure.
I know I'm an excellent ghostwriter.
I do not think of myself as a writer.
This is not a values statement.
I love you, writers, but it's not like I have you on a pedestal that I don't allow myself to climb onto.
I just see something different in the nature of writer that I don't relate to. The abundance of ideas, the addiction to the craft, the imagined dream future where they're tucked into a seaside cabin with nothing to do but write…
Okay, the seaside part I can get behind, but other than that? No, I would much rather go from cabin to cabin checking in on those writers, thanks.
This is how I came to the language of “non-writer”—not because we are not writers, but because there is something different about the experience of writing when it is not your primary identity.
Namely, it's a different kind of hard.
Writers by trade or identity seem to relish in the challenge of writing in the way gym bros grunt about leg day. Getting your words out, getting your reps in, it all sounds the same to my sedentary ears.
Hopefully this comparison makes it clear that I don't see “hard” or “easy” as a values statements either.
Some days at the gym are refreshing, so they tell me, and some are painful.
Some chapters flow without hesitation, and some do not.
This is true for us all.
But while I can tolerate sore muscles for the sake of a newly cleared garden bed or a day spent exploring a new city by foot—I find very little joy in the soreness itself. Not even as an indicator that I lifted something especially heavy that day.
Similarly, I’ve found very little satisfaction in the content churn of SEO-based marketing, I never resonated with the speed of journalism, and I am instantly bored at the thought of building a catalog of eBooks for the sake of so-called residual income.
Even the weekly rhythm of this publication stressed me out at first, because there isn't enough energy in the objective of writing for writing's sake to sustain the work of actually doing the writing itself.
It is not enough to think of this space as a blog or a business tool or even a practice that develops my own resilience—even though it sort of is all of those things.
Because I can leave every last one of them behind in a second if it got in the way of what I actually care about: that is, supporting writers—and non-writers—through their own heavy lifts.
I see this in my people, too.
They would readily give up the book that they're currently working on if it got in the way of the work that they're actually here to do.
It's not enough to elevate the practice of writing, the intangible benefits, or the satisfaction of typing “the end,” just like it's not enough to explain to me how exercise supposedly generates oxytocin.
We understand.
We'd just much rather tend gardens and cultivate client relationships than lift metal or write shitty first drafts.
The consequence of this, of course, is that our writing muscles work differently than the writers-for-reps. We're overdeveloped on internal meaning-making and underdeveloped on external expression, at least in this medium.
And without the everyday work of pushing and pulling at the page even if no progress is made—after all, we have other work to prioritize and need time for some of our ideas to develop before they can be articulated—that initial soreness sets in way more frequently than it does for our friends who religiously follow a daily rotation.
It hurts.
It's hard.
And it's not just the frequency of practice, though it's worth accounting for that extra time you'll spend reorienting to the thing you wrote last.
It's also the lift itself.
Writers by trade tend to move quickly through content, at least from an outsider's perspective. But it's not necessarily a skill issue that allows them to do that and us…not.
It can also be a depth difference.
If I wanted to gather something quickly, I would go for what's most readily available.
Cleaning my house, for example, looks much more productive in a shorter amount of time if I'm gathering up errant trash or laundry in one fell swoop than when I'm sorting through drawers that have been stuffed full of junk and tucked out of sight.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about foraging for wild plants and the relational nature of seeing those plants as beings who are sharing themselves with you.
She cautions that shallow roots that let go of the soil easily can almost be too easy to gather, to over-harvest in eager handfuls.
“The difficulty of digging is an important constraint,” she writes. “Not everything should be convenient.”
My confession is that I do not think of myself as a writer, and my absolution is that I am writing anyway.
Not for the pride of doing something difficult.
Not for the potential of some outsized harvest.
Not even for the practice of it all.
I'm writing because that's where the medicine is.
The difficulty of digging to core topics, the inconvenience of pausing to process learnings on the page—these are important constraints.
They are not values statements or indicators of skill.
It is simply the nature of sharing yourself with another being.
Thanks for creating this space with me today. Whether or not you’re ready to dive into writing quite yet, remember that the best authors show up fully, just as they are. That’s all it takes—and you're already doing it. 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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