Welcome back to B is for Book Coach. I’m B, midwife of big ideas and book development partner for writers and non-writers alike. And for the next few minutes, you are my author.
Don’t worry. That doesn’t commit you to anything more than what you’re doing right in this moment. Because the best authors are simply people who show up as themselves, for themselves and for their readers.
Today, we’re making space for perspective.
A few weeks ago, one of my teenagers wanted to spend the day “body-doubling” at the library to make progress on the last of her eighth grade school work.
If you’re not familiar, body doubling is simply working in parallel with someone—not necessarily to help them directly, but to show up to the task with them. Simply being present creates energy, motivation, and co-regulation that can make an otherwise boring or frustrating task seem possible.
Her stack of boring assignments was no match for a gorgeous spring day, iced coffee, parallel work, and a library with a terrace overlooking the Ozark mountains.
I took the opportunity to get my own stack of tasks done, but not before I stepped inside to grab a book that one of my authors referenced as a complimentary title.
While scanning the numbers, author names, and titles to find that book, I paused on one with a rainbow gradient on the spine, not unlike the design I’d just created for my Clarity Spectrum work-in-progress.
The book is called Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern, and without slowing my search for the book I was actually there for, I slid it off the shelf, tucked it under the arm carrying my iced coffee, and kept going.
Maybe it was good, maybe not—but the topic of color was way too timely to ignore.
In a similarly ADHD-fueled side quest not long before that trip, I had scrolled to a video with Neil Degrasse Tyson explaining the composite images that we get from high-powered telescopes, and how their infrared-lens photos are translated to something that our RGB-lens eyes can process.
This turned my collection of book types from its early iteration as “Enneagram for books” into the “Clarity Spectrum,” because it’s a perfect metaphor for the way I edit: My infrared lens is only as useful as the composite outcome that the author’s vision can appreciate.
And it was only after that video that I flipped back to my little blue notebook and remembered the gradient of colors I’d overlayed on my notes about genre.
Of course I was going to come back to light and color. This is always how I’ve thought about book types.
And that’s exactly what made it so hard to see.
When we’re creating from our own perspectives, it’s a little bit like a fish trying to describe water.
We’re so used to seeing the world this way that it becomes hard to imagine it any other way. And even harder to imagine anyone being surprised or enlightened by it.
This is why I coach authors to walk back through their own moment of change or their progression of realization. It’s both to tap into empathy for the reader who hasn’t yet seen that light and to remember that this isn’t just the way everyone sees things.
At one point, you hadn’t seen it either.
So it’s not exactly like a fish describing water, since a fish has literally only ever known water. And who would a fish need to describe it to anyway?
Forgive my millennial ADHD-kid brain for a moment, but I think I have to turn to the cartoon SpongeBob Squarepants for this one.
The character Sandy is a squirrel who lives in a biodome within Spongebob’s undersea setting. She wears an airlocked suit whenever she’s not at home, and the other characters wear water-locked suits in order to visit her.
It’s all a bit silly, but stick with me: imagine that Sandy lives in this underwater world for decades, then eventually goes back home—to Texas, if you’re wondering—to visit her aboveground squirrel family.
How many times would her stories about SpongeBob’s shenanigans be interrupted with basic questions about undersea life?
Details that wouldn’t even feel like details to her anymore would be completely absurd to her family members, who haven’t even been underwater for a minute, much less years.
We’ve all heard variations of the cliche “like a fish describing water” or “like describing water to a fish,” but now you and I can share this updated version: “like a squirrel who lives in the ocean describing water to other squirrels.”
Good luck trying to use that one in your next keynote.
The point is this: We don’t have to describe our ubiquitous perspectives… until there’s someone worth describing them to.
This actually came up in the squirrel-brained side quest book that I picked up during that working day at the library. Full Spectrum was exactly the deep dive into color that I needed to ground my color spectrum metaphor in something a bit more substantial than a two-minute explanation from Neil Degrasse Tyson.
One chapter digs into the language of color, with a fascinating breakdown of the way societies talk about color and the colors that seem to be difficult for all of us to differentiate to a nuanced degree.
On one side of color science, we have the literal measurements of light waves and the biological mechanics of seeing those waves. This tells us that the red side is easier to see and the mushy range of “purples” are harder to see.
Then there’s another side of color science, which deals with the way we perceive, communicate, and even create those colors in a social context.
Spoiler: It’s complex.
But while there’s so much more for us to learn, as is the tendency within science, there’s an interesting phenomenon in which the mushy “purples” that are harder to see aren’t necessarily the hardest to communicate. It’s the “grue” spectrum—the range from greens to blues—that lacks differentiated language.
My favorite theory is that those colors get fuzzy in many languages not because they’re physically harder to see, but because those are the colors of our natural world.
One scientist quoted in Full Spectrum explained that "There are two separate processes: What is that, and do you give a shit? Color is doing the second."
In other words, we first try to differentiate and categorize what we see, and then we try to give it significance and meaning.
Color, in his perspective, is a meaning-making function. So, why would we need to develop words to differentiate the baseline colors of existence? They just ARE.
Existential angst aside, there is nothing especially significant about the container we find ourselves in—at least, not until we try to describe it.
Similarly, the "Grue" books on the Clarity Spectrum are driven by perspective more than tangible tools. So they are about the container we find ourselves in, which means we don’t always have the words to differentiate that perspective.
Setting a different but no less existential angst aside, Green, Teal, Blue, and sometimes Indigo authors have realized that someone else could benefit from their perspective—so they’ve accepted the challenge of differentiating it even though it has become the baseline of their own existence.
By following the pull to write, they are no longer a fish talking to fish or a squirrel talking to squirrels or even an underwater squirrel talking to their new fish friends.
They have someone else to talk to now.
Someone who can’t actually see the Reds and Purples until they understand a world that is not all Green or all Blue.
This is hard.
On the Clarity Spectrum, Reds are tangible tools and processes—doing, having, solving, getting.
Purples are nuanced invitations—being, seeing, challenging, existing.
When I first set out to learn the concepts of writing structure and editing, I thought I had to issue nuanced invitations for authors to join me in that space. I challenged them with nuanced ways of seeing content, thinking that the being would lead to the having.
When that didn’t work to the degree I wanted it to, I shifted toward doing. I stopped worrying about giving the author the infrared lens and started creating the composite images they could see. I solved the edit and authors got the book they wanted.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with either approach.
There are excellent books, podcasts, keynotes, courses, and any other medium you can think of in every spot on the spectrum of tangible to intangible insight.
Similarly, it seems fairly clear to science that color is experienced on that full spectrum whether or not it is articulated.
If all we can talk about is Reds, it doesn’t mean we can only see the sunset but miss the beauty of the ocean it’s sinking into.
The years you’ve spent teaching, telling, supporting, mentoring, coaching have had their impact, long before you feel the pull to encase those insights in a book.
This is also why I ask almost every author I meet, “Why are you writing a book??”
Writing is hard enough.
Writing when you’re not a writer by trade is a weird gig—on par with a squirrel being given an airlock suit—and it isn’t strictly necessary to your ability to create impact.
And while every single book has its challenges that make the whole endeavor questionable, those Green-Teal-Blue books are a beast of their own. Adam Rogers even said it in Full Spectrum: “Grue is a monster.”
So, why do we do it?
Why do we turn these ideas over and over in our heads—even when we’re helping our kids or looking for other books or trying to escape in the scroll?
Why can’t we set these projects aside—even though the rest of our lives are full to the brim with true priorities we can’t actually move to make room?
Why a book—even when we can get, and have gotten, the message out in literally any other way?
We do it the same reason humans have always experimented with color. We do it for each other.
From Full Spectrum: "Nobody makes colors alone. Nobody sees them without a context, without a contrast or constant, without geology and biology and history and chemistry and physics. We all make colors together."
Beyond simply articulating color to each other, humans have made colors for each other since the literal dawn of our time.
And we haven’t stopped.
I’m about to share a string of quotes, listed out of order of appearance, that landed Full Spectrum a permanent place on my shelf—and no, not just because my ADHD self hasn’t taken it back to the library yet. I’m buying a copy.
It’s because the book is about so much more than color.
It’s about how we experience the world in ways that are still mysterious to even the greatest scientific minds.
It’s about embracing that experience, mystery included, so fully that it becomes meaningful.
And it’s about caring for other humans so deeply that we want to share that meaning with them.
So I’ll close with this journey from the internal experience of color to the possibilities that are unlocked when we apply intention to mystery.
Take them in like a bit of parallel play rather than direct instruction.
Let Adam Rogers body double with us for a minute—from this Purple book on the Clarity Spectrum, if you’re interested—offering us a nuanced invitation to a complex perspective of the world.
And maybe it will create a bit more energy, motivation, and co-regulation that can make the otherwise boring or frustrating or overwhelming task of writing seem possible.
"Color is always constructed in the mind, illuminating dark, indistinct corners of human perceptual and psychological colorspace."
"When we see color, our brains are doing their level, meaty best to process a quantum interaction. When we see colors, our brains are processing nothing less than the invisible subatomic world in action. Color is the way the deep mysteries of matter and energy say hello."
"Light bounces off a surface and into electrified meat and jelly mounted in the bony skull of our great-to-the-nth-grandparents, and they see what we would've seen: glorious color that lets the human mind observe and become a part of the universe at play."
"The future...is one where people construct color in the mind not accidentally, but with intention—not as illusions, mistakes, or curiosities but as a material that artists and scientists can actually use."
Hey, 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.
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