Welcome back to B is for Book Coach.
Today, we’re making space for slowness.
Once upon a time, and somehow just yesterday, I hosted a season or two of another podcast. The theme was parenting, but through the lens of the “young witch” archetype in literature.
My co-host and I used the insights from those fictional stories—Matilda, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, so much from Terry Pratchett, and more—to unpack real-life wisdom about parenting and being parented as a child who is a little bit too much for standard society.
And we did it all in a weekend, holed up in an AirBnB in Memphis, TN, with stacks of books all around us and the rain quietly falling outside.
Witches or no, that work was magical.
One of the stories we centered on came from Women Who Run with the Wolves, which I hadn’t read in full before that weekend. And then I still didn’t read it in full during…or after…for literal years.
I blamed the size of the edition I had and how dense the words felt on the page.
Once I started reading it again, however, I knew it was a different kind of density that had held me back.
Some books need to be digested slowly, and for me, this was one.
If you aren’t familiar, Women Who Run with the Wolves is written by a psychologist who comes from a storytelling heritage. The book draws on both perspectives to give us the explicit takeaways from the implicit wisdom-sharing of “fairytales” from various cultures.
It’s deep, personal growth level stuff that I recommend to anyone who is interested in either story or developing their feminine and masculine inner worlds.
But the end is what really got me, and I don’t know that it would’ve landed so hard for me if I’d read it through the first time around.
Here’s what she says:
The healing medicine of story does not exist in a vacuum. It cannot exist divorced from its spiritual source. It cannot be taken on as a mix-and-match project. There is an integrity to story that comes from a real life lived in it. A story is clearly illumined from being raised up in it.
For Clarissa, the author, being “raised up in” story was quite literal. She references active cultural and spiritual practices that would shift and change throughout the year or based on the heritage of the family members she was with.
For us, the readers, she calls us to find our own practices that return stories to the elevated status that allow us to be healed by them and to heal with them.
Within one tradition, she says that “every detail is weighed carefully.”
…when to tell a story, which story and to whom, how long and in what form, what words, and under which conditions.
We carefully consider the time, the place, the health or lack of health of the person, the mandates in the person’s inner and outer lives, and several other critical factors as well, in order to arrive at the medicine needed.
The separation between stories as entertainment and stories as medicine, she tells us, is knowing what not to do or to include.
That level of intention is not about winning performance points, but about care for the reader or listener who will engage with it.
In the years between first holding this book and finally finishing it, so many critical factors arose that made me the “whom” that she’d written to.
Before then, it wasn’t the time or the place, and I had not reached a level of health that could sustain what she’d written.
And that was more than fine.
The words were still there when I was ready for them, and they’ll continue to be there when I’m ready for them at a different degree of healing.
This is what I mean when I say that books are slow medicine.
Slow to live. Slow to write. Slow to refine. Slow to share. Slow to consume. Slow to integrate.
Nothing about books moves fast.
As I told an author of mine just this weekend, any urgency that you’re feeling to make this book move faster is only an urgency to get the message out.
And there are iterations of your message that can land long before a book can.
You’ve probably already talked about your topic in conversation with mentees or team members. You might have trained someone on it or worked them through it. You could have given presentations on some aspect of it, and you might have even spoken to crowds about it—large or small.
You might be feeling the pull to teach more, speak more, share more, lead more right now, while also feeling the pull to dig as deep and write as thoroughly as a book requires.
But the book does not have to come first.
And trying to rush the book to come first risks turning it into entertainment when it wants to be healing.
Later in the closing, Dr. Estes acknowledges the challenge that this slowness presents:
The process is a long exertion in time and energy, both intellectual and spiritual; it is in no way an idle practice.
It costs much and takes long.
This is another thing I find myself telling authors on a regular basis: Treat this like a construction project—it will take twice and long and cost twice as much as you’d planned.
If you wanted it to be faster and cheaper, you’d rent an apartment instead of building a custom home.
But here you and I are, exerting our time and energy to build an intellectual and spiritual home that meets the mandates of specific inner and outer lives, hoping that one day we’ll arrive at the medicine that is needed.
This all hit particularly hard for me this week, as I came to the end of a key stage in a project I’ve been working on.
What I first thought would be a quick “lead magnet” document has turned into a deep excavation of two decades spent with authors of all sorts and a new way to think about the shapes our books tend to take.
It was exhausting. It was rewarding. And when I came to the end of nine different descriptions that mined the subtle nuances between books—based on intention and impact—I wanted it to be done.
But it’s not done.
There’s more work to go, and as living documents, the work will always be there.
The slow emergence of a book’s true form—as healing medicine and as a lasting contribution—can be painful.
It costs much and takes long.
Even when you hit milestones like finishing a draft or even publishing the book, it still takes time to reach the fullest iteration of the world you envision your book creating.
And my whole “editing commune” can attest to how much whining, weeping, and gnashing of teeth came with that realization.
Instead of the relief I imagined having when that last core articulation was complete, I felt hungover, exhausted by the mining that I’d done.
I felt overwhelmed, suddenly seeing everything that I’d put on hold to get those words out.
I felt behind, wishing I’d been able to do any of this sooner so that I could be at the results stage now instead of just barely reaching the realizations.
And I felt like that “too much for society” kid all over again, with imaginary voices scolding me for doing too much or not enough, or for being too much or not enough.
If I’m going to fit the archetype of the witch, why can’t I get some “wave a wand and it’s done” type powers as a bonus?! Ugh.
I’m not going to minimize the whining or even apologize for it, because it’s important for you to know that these stages happen.
They are normal.
As much as I hate to say it, these moments of struggle are the magic.
I am still too far into it all to have my own medicine for you right now, so instead I’ll offer you the very last words of Women Who Run With the Wolves.
If it’s not the healing balm that you need now, save it to come back to later. It’ll still be here, waiting patiently for you to be ready, just like all slow medicine does.
The authentic mining of stories from one’s own life and the lives of one’s own people, and the modern world as it relates to one’s own life as well, means that there will be discomfort and trials.
You know you are on the right path if you have experienced these: the scraped knuckles, the sleeping on cold ground—not once, but over and over again—the groping in the dark, the walking in circles in the night, the bone-chilling revelations, and the hair-raising adventures on the way—these are worth everything.
There must be a little, and in many cases, a good deal of blood spilled on every story, on every aspect of your own life, if it is to cary the numen, if a person is to carry a true medicine.
I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories from your life—your life, not someone else’s life—water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.
That is the work.
The only work.
Hey, 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.
Be sure to subscribe here on Substack or wherever you listen to podcasts. 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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