“My Book Is Already Written”

In addition to writing my own books, I work with first-time authors to help them get a first book produced and independently published on Amazon, using the print-on-demand model.

For many of them, we are starting with a blank page, and it’s about a six to ten month process of coaching and cajoling to get a paperback and an e-book available for readers.

I’ve helped someone write about the agonizing treatment decisions he had to make following a cancer diagnosis, and I’ve supported a Vietnam veteran as he wrote about his wounding from a land mine fifty years earlier.

I occasionally run across people who are confident writers, experts in their field, incredibly knowledgable, who claim to have a book complete, and say they don’t need my help.

“Why don’t you send it over and have me take a look?” I tell them.

Half the time, I never see the manuscript. It’s the end of the discussion. Maybe their project is too precious, and my positive, constructive approach might pop the bubble of accomplishment.

For the other half, I find the “completed” book is not done at all.

It is ragged, and choppy, and has no narrative flow. It never considers a core reader “persona” and is written too close to the writer, with limited appeal. I’m not talking about grammar here; that part is usually just fine. These finished books are structurally unsound and lack a compelling storyline.

In memoir, I find a one-dimensional recounting of events, a catalogue of nostalgia laid out on a linear timeline (middle school to high school to gap year to college to marriage to their middle school sweetheart).

What is missing is how those events and personal artifacts transformed the writer in profound ways. What is also missing is a lyrical layer, with the prose quite pedestrian: “And then in sixth grade, my dad changed jobs and we moved from Peoria to Naperville….”

What is also missing is a “guided elevation” that an editor can bring to any writing project that has been gurgling off to the side, for years or decades, that’s seeing the light of day outside the writer’s own head for the first time.

I’m going to approach this kind of project tenderly, and considerate, but I’m also going to shoot straight. I may need to tell the author of a “finished” work that there’s not really a book there at all.

And that might be the very best guidance I can ever give.

This essay originally appeared in Laying Low (2021)

Photo by author “Alameda Assemblage”