Writing isn’t just the act of putting words on paper. Idea work, research and background reading all count as work when you’re writing. In fact, you could argue that this phase of the writing process is the most important and the most difficult aspect of writing a book.
Figuring out what you’re going to write is far harder than writing it. My dad–who in addition to being the Latin American, European and West Coast editor of LOOK magazine has penned multiple books, scripts and plays–once told me, “I can teach anyone to write. I just can’t teach them to think.” The fact is that writing is nothing more than putting word to thought. Of course once on paper, we want to make sure that those words are as powerful, effective or moving as possible. But if you haven’t done your preliminary idea work, massaging language will be of little consequence.
This is a tough lesson for most of my clients to accept. They feel that if they don’t have pages for me to read at each session, they haven’t written. Many of them even discount the sloppy writing I ask them to do. “I’m not doing the real writing,” they’ll say. “I’m not writing the real book.”
During one such conversation, a writing coach client and I came up with a new term. We decided that she’s working on the pre-book. That helped her accept that fact that she’s in the nuts and berries gathering phase. More than that, she’s even figuring out which regions she needs to forage in. This process has taken her on an intellectual journey that radically altered the direction of her book. So even if she had started doing the “real” writing, that would all be in the trash by now.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s a difference between procrastination and pre-book exploration. At a certain point, you do have to dive in, even if you don’t have all the facts yet, or you’ll spend the rest of your life gathering nuts and berries and never baking anything. But if you’re actively exploring and playing with ideas (which means taking notes), give yourself a pat on the back and realize that you’re actively working the writing process even if you aren’t actually writing a set number of pages each week.
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