Write a book

“Six months ago, few days after my 37th birthday, out of the blue, in the middle of the day, I had a moment, a voice that just started yelling, boiling from inside. I started running towards my MacBook, and I wrote ~ 30 pages in a breath. I felt exhausted afterwards. But then I struggled to write anything else for the next two months. Finally I started getting really obsessive with it. And by now it consumed my life completely. When I started, I had a milestone, a thought: “if I get to ~300 pages, that’s a decent book. If I get anywhere close to 100k words, that’s a big achievement.” Well, 6 months later, and I’m at 160000 words. Got well over 500 good pages. And there’s a lot more left to my story. At least another 50k by my current evaluation. Although that changes all the time. Anyway, it’s really surreal now when I look at all those printed pages. It’s funny how my perception changes all the time. And I find really fascinating the realization, that only when I finally had put myself out there, my completely naked soul, and when I started writing without a second thought of how anyone would perceive it, is when I tapped into something big I feel. That now, it comes natural. Like breathing.”

“First, I started with an outline of material. I wrote the book in a Google Doc and used their standard “Heading 1,” “Heading 2,” “Heading 3,” paragraph styles and filled in a lot of the outline as I went. The more I wrote, the more ideas I had for the book, which I could easily insert into the outline. Having the outline made it clear for me to navigate where to insert and move content. The bigger the outline grew, the less concerned I was about filling the book with tons of words. It’s a lot easier to write a 280-page book if there are 90 chapters. The outline showed me that I could write two or three pages per chapter and have a decently-sized book. Second, I ignored my emotions about the book. Truth be told, I’d tried writing the book before, but got too wrapped up in how I felt about it instead of just writing the book. [...] By imagining that no one would read the book and by literally not caring if it sold a single copy, I wasn’t really bound to any attachment or expectation. Third, I firmly believe in the “first pancake problem.” Anyone who has ever made pancakes has burnt the first pancake in the batch. The rest of them turn out fine and the best pancakes are the last ones cooked. That’s how I feel about this book.”