Why is it so hard to write a book?
Trying to explain the most difficult fun of my life. Plus, Creative Hour this Sunday – and a special offer.
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Last week, I took a day off work and spent it with my sister, who I love to bits. Over lunch, she asked me how writing my book is going, and I lolled my head around and scrunched up my face and made some pained noises, and said, ‘Oh my god, it’s so hard.’
Some people would find this an irritating response. You could definitely argue that writing a book is unnecessary – we’ve got loads of them already – and also, having a few ideas and typing them out doesn’t sound that hard, especially compared to, say, eighty percent of other jobs. It’s all pretty self-indulgent and privileged, looked at one way. In fact, I might not even talk about this publicly if it weren’t for the fact that I know a lot of you are going through versions of the same thing. I find it comforting and encouraging to know that writers are all in the same leaky boat, and I hope you will too.
My sister has never had the urge to write a book, but from a young age we both heard plenty about it being difficult, because my dad has published several. So she looked at me with no judgement, just an honest, perplexed desire to understand, and said, ‘Why? Why is writing a book so hard?’
I tried to explain. I told her about the ups and downs of morale – how you ricochet constantly between, ‘Actually, I think maybe this is really good,’ and then ‘Oh god, no it isn’t, it’s absolute dogshit – what am I doing?’ and then straight back up again to, ‘Wait, hang on, maybe it’s actually great?’ and then here we are again at ‘Oh god, oh god I have no ability at all, I’m going to be humiliated’ and then, ‘You know what? This bit’s OK’ and on and on like that, nauseatingly, minute by minute, month after month.
Then I tried to explain why I find it technically so hard. It’s something to do with the scale of it, the 80,000 words or so of it. It’s trying to keep the whole big thing in your mind, while zooming in and resolving small problems over here in Chapter Seven, and at the same time vaguely remembering a related thing in Chapter Four, which you definitely need to look at again now that you’ve made that change in Chapter Seven. Then you remember that at some point you need to look again at the titles of the chapters, which you wrote almost a year ago before there was any book, and you need to make a note to ask this person about that thing, and actually if you’re honest with yourself, Chapter Eight is just a bad idea.
So trying to get my brain around writing a book feels like trying to stretch a sandwich bag around a Volvo. Stretch is a word that keeps coming to me, actually. I often have the feeling of trying to expand the reaches of my intellect: I know there’s a solution to something, but I am banging up against the limits of my disappointing ability every time I look for it.
Some books might be simpler to write than this one, but many are more web-like and complex. I recently read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (excellent and important, but still keeping me awake at night several months on), and was struck by how clever she must be, to weave so many complicated ideas together and keep her grip on them, across a work that I’d guess is around 120,000 words. Her brain is not a sandwich bag, clearly.
What adds a funny meta layer to all this, and some irony, is that the book I’m writing is about writing. Even while I’m struggling with it, a lot of the material I’m struggling with is about more successful authors struggling. That hasn’t made the writing easier, but it gives me more confidence and determination to continue. I hope that when (or if) people read my book, they’ll gain confidence and determination to continue with their own projects – because there’s another important thing I have to say here: that I love every painful, emotional minute of writing a book, and it’s so worrying, and it’s so unbelievably exciting and wonderful too.
In the meantime, it’s not easy to earn a living as a journalist around the edges of a big project, so I want to say how very grateful I am to those of you who pay for a full subscription to In Writing, and are helping to keep me afloat.
The Creative Hour writing sessions we do together are also very morale-boosting, and the solidarity helps me enormously – I hope you find the same comfort and motivation in it.
If you haven’t joined us before, maybe try this week. I’ve set up an offer to give new paying subscribers twenty percent off the first twelve months. It must be redeemed by Saturday 7th October, so don’t wait.
That will get you signed up in time to join the next In Writing Creative Hour, this Sunday 8th October at 5pm UK time. Here’s the timezone converter so you can check what time that is where you are (just put your location in the second set of boxes). Look out for another email on Sunday with the link to join.
Hope to see you then. Good luck with your writing this week!
Your brain is a Birkin bag darling (only massive)! lovely read
I found all of this deeply relatable Hattie - "the most difficult fun", that's it exactly. Just wanted to share a quote with you from Annie Dillard, which has helped me reframe things on the "this is absolute dog shit, what am I doing?" days:
“Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let it rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.”
So, in other words, it's supposed to be hard!! Sometimes just telling myself that on the trickier days can help. And deep down, like you, I do love every moment of it. Thank you for this post ❤️