Perhaps You Can Write a Book: But Will You?
Revisiting what it takes to make it happen
“How do I know if I can write this book?”
This question, fully loaded, is not rhetorical. I was asked this very thing recently by someone who has penned a few articles but has never written a book.
“You don’t know,” I responded. “Neither do I.”
It’s a fair question. Logical and rational. It’s also, to my mind, one of the biggest existential questions one might ever pose—privately or publicly.
How do you know if you can write a whole book?
How do you know if you have it in you to hike the entire Appalachian Trail? Or pull off a flawless TED talk?
We live in a constant state of not-knowing. We suspect. We hope. Some of us pray.
But really, 99 percent of living is attempting.
When it comes to writing a full-length book—a work someone could read and understand from beginning to end, and perhaps beyond that, connect on an emotional level—it’s impossible to know what you’re capable of until you fully commit to the effort.
I’ve met many people who say they are writing a book, when in fact, they are thinking about an idea for a book, or making some notes, or doing some preliminary research.
Is the act itself enveloped in the intention?
Does writing a book, for real, begin with manifesting your desire to do so? And then what?
The desire must be present, of course; you’re not going to write a book if you don’t want to.
But desire is not action, and writing a book is a deeply active endeavor.
Jennie Nash, a gifted book coach and founder of Author Accelerator, recently wrote about the difference between authors who succeed and those who don’t. She notes that raw talent is not enough; persistence is not enough. A successful author, she concludes, must be highly self-aware, able to “step back from your writing and look at it objectively — to be a writer who is aware of your own skill, the habits of your own mind.”
I’ll pick up on that last point—the habits of your own mind—because therein lies the key to whether you will complete a book, not whether you can. We’re all capable of achieving lots of amazing feats, but just because we can does not mean that we will.
Our “habit of mind” makes the difference. Back to the woman who posed the question to me, quite seriously, about whether she could write the book she’s been struggling to write for years: I don’t know her habits of mind. She may not know, either.
Embarking on the task that culminates in a credible book manuscript calls upon our entire being to get involved: intellect, psyche, ego, id, our physical selves called upon to spend hours in a chair writing or type words (or dictating them).
Over a period of months, if not years, you must learn how to strike a balance among all those elements, discern when one needs to rise up while the others fall back. For instance, you call upon your ego to withstand criticism of your work; your pyche to mine your past for crucial memories; your id to fall into a deeply creative state of writing.
These are, arguably, habits of mind. But beyond these, you need an ability to, as Nash notes, change your work. You need to be able to step outside yourself—float up to the ceiling, so to speak—and look down upon what you’re doing now and what you need to be doing next or instead.
This is difficult—intuitive for some, but a hard-won skill for many others.
Writing a book calls upon everything we have to offer as human beings. Nothing less than that.
So, can you write a book? Will you?
There’s only one way to find out.
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“I wanted to extend my heartfelt congratulations on this inspiring little book of encouragement! Your creative approach—blending short, poetic bursts of text, uplifting quotations, and joyful illustrations—reframes self-doubt not as an enemy to defeat, but as a companion to be managed. This fresh perspective is exactly what creative people need, whether they're writing a book, launching a startup, or chasing any other dream.” –Michelle Kilgore, book reviewer on Reedsy