On Writing

Over the past eleven months, I’ve written five books. That comes to approximately 1,000 pages written, revised, designed, and published. I have reached a total of 6 readers. Each book I’ve written has been for an audience of one. Each book I’ve written this year has been a bespoke publication examining the life of its recipient. The books I’ve written may never be read by more than a few.

For anyone who’s gone through the experience of writing a book, you may be asking why I would put myself through the process of writing 200+ pages addressed to a single reader. You may be listing out all the ways in which this model violates basic mass-marketing principles. You may be wondering what good those words are if only consumed by a single reader.

My answer to you is simple. My answer to you is as honest as I can make it. But my answer may not make much sense at all.

The point of writing one book per reader is based on my intention and my intention stems from my vision. My vision is an expression of the Big Picture that I See when I Look. When I Look, I am focusing my attention on deciphering what my role is in this life and how I can most fully accomplish what I’ve come here to do. The point, my point, of writing one book per reader is to clarify, as much as possible, what that person brought forth in the process of remembering why they’re here. The books I write are about You for you.

Knowing the reason for writing a book is an exceptionally useful piece of information to have when embarking on the writer’s journey. And yet, most have very little awareness of why they write. They simply write because they can’t imagine a life without words, without the crafting of melodic prose and the sequencing of profundity as expressed on the page. For most, the inner yearning to express themselves through the written word is all that propels them forward as they spiral down the depths of the deepest, darkest crevices of their internal hells. That is, if they are doing it right.

I write that tongue in cheek but only partially. If you think that writing is easy, you haven’t experienced the process of unraveling yourself from the twisted strands of truncated sentences and tangled phrases that bind the inner writer oh so tightly in a prison of its own torment where the walls are papered with blank pages and the sounds coming from the endless corridors ring of reluctance, resistance, and defeat.

On the other hand, writing doesn’t have to be a challenge at all. It’s perfectly possible to find yourself sitting at your keyboard and watching the words appear on your screen as you read them for the very first time. It’s absolutely conceivable to write a book without first structuring it or of thinking it through for months on end. It’s not hard, but it can be uncomfortable.

One reason for the discomfort is that you have to face yourself in the process of revealing yourself (and if you’re not revealing yourself, you may as well not write anything at all). Another reason for the discomfort is in the isolation of the space that surrounds the writer at work. Isolation, in itself, can be a refreshing reprieve from the chaos of the absurdity of the world outside but if held for long enough, it becomes a hermetic seal that can threaten to cut off the writer from an essential aspect of his or her nature as a social creature. Humans are, after all, social creatures. Spirit, on the other hand, can be quite comfortable in the isolation of the stillness, of the all-consuming vastness of the infinite. It’s this dichotomy of the finite and the Infinite that dissolves into the space between the letters when you can surrender to the process of discovering your Self through your words.

How do you write a book? You sit down and you do it. If you want an outline before you begin, then draft an outline but do so quickly for the outline can become a way of escaping the blank page, just as window washing, silver polishing, and closet reorganizing can.

Writing is a conversation. Conversations don’t have to be hard; they don’t have to be strained or complicated. But they do have to add value to this world. Otherwise, why bother?