Don't Write a Book: The Lesson at the Heart of Ex Nihilo
Have you ever been curious about what lies behind the pages? It's far more arcane than it seems.
Just as there’s no correct way to raise a child, there’s no singular correct way to write a book.
I’ve written four books now, but the process feels alien each time I begin the esoteric ritual. My oeuvre is distinctly my own; a unique blend of my rough edges, mostly published under pen names. My forthcoming work, Ex Nihilo, is now complete. Advance reader copies are being printed as I write this and will arrive in a select few readers’ hands very soon. Although each book will have its own unique needs during its creation and maturation, I’ve been able to abstract a few general principles that can help early writers.
Solitary
Writing is a solo endeavor. It is a grave decision to write a book. You will drift socially and mentally over the course of your journey.
When you have a rough patch in life, others are there to help you or, at the very least, lend an ear while you whine about how unfair and hard things are. Even that small kindness can reinvigorate you.
When things start to go awry during the writing process — and they will, if they don’t, you're not writing something true to you — you can talk to people about it, but nobody will really “get it”.
There’s a very small club of people who have written a book to completion, i.e., publication. 0.1% of people undertake this journey and see it through to completion; that’s one in a thousand. In the extremely unlikely event that you meet one of these people, you probably won’t have a ton in common with the emotional journey of your book writing. You will experience many of the same ups and downs and be able to chat about that, but it’s nearly impossible that you’ll experience these events at the same time.
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You are fully on your own when you write a book. It is an emotional journey to barf the whole thing up onto paper, corral it hundreds of times into better shape, and to convince yourself that the final product “looks pretty good” or at least not hate it.
Hating your book doesn’t have anything to do with its quality. You should be sick of your book by the time you’re finished with it. As with any truly beyond-yourself goal in life, you don’t feel happy when you finished it, just relieved that it’s fucking done for a fleeting moment before you wake up a few days afterwards feeling like you have no direction in life because you don’t have to work on your book anymore but you’re also too tired and beat up to start another one.
It’s a horrific ending every time without exception. Most people just have to touch a stove burner once to learn that it’s painful, but I guess I’ve arrived at some kind of familiarity with the pain of writing and finishing a book. It hurts, but I wouldn’t know what to do without it, you know?
Process
I can say a few things that I’ve learned work well for the writing process. Hemingway’s edict to “Write drunk, edit sober.” must be held as sacrosanct. Not in terms of substance use — any sane man would prefer to be drunk during the whole process — but in terms of the division of labor.
Write and Edit are two modes that you can live in. If you start to mix the two, you’ll fuck up the whole book. You can’t mix them. You absolutely can never mix them — okay? This is very important. Don’t try it, you will fuck up your book. I don’t have words to explain why, it’s spiritually harmful in some way to interlace those two worlds. Those two are like potassium and water. Bad bad bad. If you take one thing away from this article, don’t flip between Write and Edit.
Write
Write is where you put words on paper, Microsoft Word, Notepad, or whatever your input capture method of choice is.
Write is not reading, fixing typos, or going backwards in any sense of the word.
Your Write setup is less important when you begin and more important as you go on. If you take up cooking, virtually any $100-ish knife will represent a massive upgrade over whatever is lying around your kitchen. As you become a chef, though, you’ll want to choose a knife that compensates for your weaknesses and maximizes your strengths. This is a highly personal thing, so I can’t tell you what tool you should end up with. I can give you some insight into my process, though, since I’ve tried most tools at this point.
I am finicky about my setup, but if faced with the choice of doing Write with subpar tools versus using my perfected setup, I will choose to write every single time, even if that’s with a MacBook keyboard into TextEdit.
I began Write with Microsoft Word. Word is fine. It integrates well with my favorite citation manager, Mendeley, so it’s especially nice for research-heavy work. Word will work well for most people.
I migrated over to Google Docs for a while. Docs is also fine, but ultimately, I don’t trust web applications for Write. I prefer to be able to save a locally stored file every few sentences. It’s a neurotic me-thing, though, so Docs probably works equally well for starting off.
Along the way, I’ve tried Notion (too ephemeral), Obsidian (great for knowledge bases but not for larger works), Scrivener (felt like too many unnecessary tools), various typewriters (love the idea, hate the reality), and many others.
These days, I write in a highly customizable text editing application called NeoVim. Most NeoVim users employ it to write code, but at its core, it is simply a text editor. I have NeoVim set up to take up my entire screen (it runs in a terminal window), use a harsh font and color scheme (discourages me from reading), and limit the amount of text I can see horizontally ( around 70 characters is the width for text) and vertically. These intentional and customizable decisions make NeoVim very unpleasant for anything other than Write. There are a myriad of ways to set the tool up to be better for reading and interacting with text, but remember, when we are doing Write, we are not doing Edit. If Edit is a bit painful, it discourages you from doing Edit in your weaker moments (there will be many.)
Where I Write
My Write corner is gross. My wife regularly reminds me of this. It is brutally efficient and has everything I need within reach.
Everything is powered by a MacBook Air running through an Apple Studio Display. The second monitor is a new addition, but I am considering removing it because it feels unnecessary.
I generally have more than one coffee cup on my desk. I have to compulsively drink coffee while in Write, so I make most of them decaf. If it’s an afternoon session, as this one is, I grab a Monster. That’s about it! There’s usually some random detritus scattered about. I don’t particularly know why two sets of corded earbuds landed here, but there they are. My daughter made the canister to the right that serves as a pen holder; it’s one of the few sentimental items I allow in my workspace.
The space isn’t particularly inspiring. Inspiration is for amateurs and has-beens. When you want to do Write, you rip it from the void by animalistic force. You don’t wait for Write to happen; you sit down and demand more words every single day until, over time, the demand becomes an expectation, you do Write. There’s not a lot of color, and my view is of a wall. The view outside a window is the side of the neighbor’s house. It looks identical to every other house in the neighborhood. I mostly tune everything out and forget where I am once I am in Write, so as long as the location is comfortable and quiet, I’m good to clack away on the keyboard endlessly.
Have some strong opinions about my setup? Good! Listen to those; your setup probably shouldn’t look exactly like mine. Take the useful bits and leave the rest.
Edit
You’re ready for Edit when you arrive at about 30%-50% words over your word goal. Ex Nihilo currently sits at about 55k words excluding prefatory material. When I finished Write, it was at 80k words. I cut the weakest 45% of the material because I didn’t want to waste your time with it.
Edit always feels kinda like that movie 127 Hours, where the adventure guy gets stuck in a rocky crevice while hiking and has to hack his own arm off with a blunt tool to escape. It’s an uncannily great metaphor for Edit.
When you hack away at your own content, you need to disassociate yourself from it as much as possible to limit the pain. This gets a lot easier after the first book — now it feels more like spring cleaning, I really don’t want to do it, and I’d prefer to keep anything, but ultimately I fill up a few Goodwill bags — but the first time you do it, you are removing your own arm with a shitty tool.
I have a ritual now that alleviates some of this pain — hopefully, you’ll use it on your first book, and it’ll save you some heartbreak.
Hit your Write word count, then stop everything for a bit. Don’t look at your book, don’t read it, try your best not to think about it. Ideally, go on a trip somewhere. Remind yourself that there’s a whole world out there beyond the one you’ve built in your mind while in Write.
Come back with a clearer head and enter Edit. I usually work large to small. I presume this is similar to how a sculptor works.
Skim the whole book and move chapters around to suit the flow.
Move the sections around within each chapter.
Ask yourself what each chapter does in one sentence. Write this down.
Remove everything that doesn’t serve that chapter’s singular purpose. If it has two purposes, then it’s two chapters. It’s probably just one, and you just have rose-tinted glasses on for your ideas.
Okay, remove everything that doesn’t serve those points. Be honest because you weren’t the first time.
C’mon, one more pass, be a real asshole about it.
Revise the tone throughout the whole book. Shape everything at the paragraph level.
Line-edit. Grammar, spelling, and tone within each sentence.
Read.
Cut more things. Free for all. Rules of engagement: open season.
Read.
Send individual chapters to beta readers.
Is their feedback legit? If not, why the fuck did you pick that person in the first place?
Do more Edit.
Send advance copies to some friends. Let them hype you up about it. It’s done at this point; no criticism is going to change anything. That baby is coming, might as well get positive about it.
Publish that shit!
What’s the Point?
I genuinely do not know why I write books.
I know that I am better at it each time.
I know that it helps me think on a different level and time scale than I’m ordinarily capable of.
Finally, I know that it is everything to me and I love it. I don’t know why I love it. I don’t question that love anymore than I question my love for my spouse, family, or friends. Love is just a really nice thing that comes around very sparingly in an increasingly hostile, bleak, and cheap world that’s always focused on measuring things and accumulating wealth. It invigorates my soul to engage with things that, by all accounts, don’t make sense, i.e., don’t produce measurable benefits or reliably generate money or don’t seem worthwhile to the pointy-haired MBA crowd. It makes me feel human in a way that an AI never will be.
In a few years, it seems likely that AI will be able to write books that reliably top the NYT Best Seller list. These AI-books will be technically perfect, and they will cover topics or tell stories that are primed to sell to the largest market segment while offending the fewest people possible.
What the AI won’t do is suffer through the process of writing a book. The end product can sell more copies and make the MBAs more money; the publishing house’s balance sheets will look better.
All of it misses the central point: it was never really about writing the book; it was about the book writing you back. This is the central thesis of Ex Nihilo: do difficult things that wear you down and beat you up. Choose the things you do carefully and with complete disregard for the status quo. Do these things when they feel good and also when they hurt you. Do these things when people praise you and when they try to tear your efforts down for being “odd”. Do these things because their future is uncertain. In a world that is in a blind rush to make everything completely safe and predictable, go on unpredictable adventures and fall hopelessly in love; these are the only things, the human things, that we’ll have left in a few years.