If you’ve ever thought about writing a book, the very first thing anyone will tell you is to figure out which “shelf” it will sit on in a bookstore. It’s not enough to simply have a topic, or even an angle into a topic. You need to know who’s going to buy this book. Because book publishing, like anything else, is a business and the key to a successful business is knowing your market.
I knew all of this, of course. Over the years, I’ve been in enough writing groups and consumed enough resources devoted to the art and science of getting published that I knew that were I someday to approach an agent with an idea for a book, I’d need to be able to provide a cogent answer to this question.
And then someday arrived and I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to answer it.
Let me back up. I’ve been working for several months on a book about…drumroll please…swimming and adulthood. After more than 25 years as a “casual runner” – someone who ran three times a week to stay fit – my body was telling me that that I could no longer run. The reasons why I needed to stop running aren’t all that interesting. (Well, OK, something called Piriformis Syndrome, if you must know…) But the upshot was that, on the advice of my doctor, I began – somewhat reluctantly – to swim.
This obviously not an entirely new topic for me. This blog’s strapline – “Finding Yourself In Adulthood” – is all about conceptualizing adulthood as a journey, not a destination. But whereas the blog tackles topics ranging from work and parenting to therapy and the arts in a much more general way, the daily act of swimming enabled me to analyse these subjects through a single prism. In essence, swimming serves as a metaphor through which to explore what it means to be a grown up in the contemporary age.
But even after I started writing this book, I still struggled with where it fit on the proverbial bookshelf. Was it an extended meditation on swimming itself, Like Leanne Shapton’s Swimming Studies? Was it a sports memoir a la Gerald Marzaroti’s Late to the Ball about picking up a new skill (tennis) in midlife? Was it a humorous, loosely themed take on daily life, modelled on David Sedaris or Sandra Tsing Loh? Or a was it a collection of more serious essays like Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable?
On alternate days it felt a bit like all of these.
It didn’t help that when I showed my précis (2 page overview) of the book to a few friends I got very different advice. One friend thought that it needed to be funnier, more like my daily status updates which I post on Facebook recounting the cast of characters I run into at my local swimming pool. Another friend thought that it should be a novel. Someone else advised me to convert it into an inspirational journey, the sort of Eat, Pray, Love of swimming.
Instead of writing the book, I began to obsess about genre.
And then, one day, at the tail end of a dinner party while chatting about this problem with a friend, I had my Eureka moment. My friend is a novelist who has written several novels in the Lad Lit genre and is on the cusp of becoming a sensation with his latest work-in-progress, which has already been snatched up by a major New York imprint. (He’s also sold the film rights. As he put it so beautifully, “Who knew that becoming an overnight success took so long?”)
After I regaled him with all of my anxieties about what the book could and should be, he looked at me and simply said: “Write the book that only you could write.”
It wasn’t rocket science. Nor was some dark, heretofore unknown secret of the publishing world. But for me, it was sort of like that age-old adage: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” And just like that, I immediately felt better.
Because I realised in that moment that I actually *had* been writing the book that only I could write all along. While it had elements of several different styles, at the end of the day the book I was writing was essentially a self-help book, albeit one very much rooted in my own experience. (I’ve since learned that there is a name for this sub-genre – self-help memoir or prescriptive memoir. Thank you, Jane Friedman.)
For me, my friend’s throwaway line (heartfelt, to be sure, even if infused with a few glasses of red wine), was clarifying: I need to stop obsessing over what other people think my book is meant to be. That comes later. For now, the book is already what I need it to be: a place to bring my voice and my insights to a topic I’ve long been passionate about with a fresh angle.
In a year where my new year’s resolution was to embrace authenticity, that feels pretty good.
Image: Bookshelves by Hernán Poo-Camaño via Flickr
It took me a while to get around to reading Brené Brown’s best-seller, Daring Greatly. It wasn’t because I doubted the book’s key claim (captured in its subtitle): “How the courage to be vulnerable can transform the way we live, love, parent, and lead.” I’ve drawn on Brown’s work in storytelling workshops I run with Executive MBAs. Vulnerability is vital to engaging and inspiring others.
I just didn’t think I had all that much more to learn on this score.
I was wrong.
So when a friend gave me Daring Greatly as a Christmas present, I thought why not? Everyone else seems to have devoured this woman’s oeuvre. Why not me?
I’m so glad that I did. Here are five new ideas I picked up from this book:
a. Shame. One of Brown’s core concepts is shame: we all carry it around, we avoid it like hell, and the only way to address shame in our lives is to speak about it. True dat’. I carry a lot of shame around, and often for things I have no control over. I’ve done enough therapy over the years to be able to identify that shame and know where it comes from. But I don’t talk about it all that much. Reading Brown’s book inspired me to anchor my next writing project around the place of shame in my own life, and to explore how it has shaped who I am.
b. Feedback. For Brown, vulnerability lies at the heart of how you give feedback, whether as a boss, teacher, mentor or friend. In my previous job, I quickly discovered that when offering constructive criticism to someone you manage, it really helps if you can identify with their professional challenges. It’s far more effective to say “I understand how frustrating it is when other people don’t share your deadlines” than to say, “You need to stop pressuring people to complete projects before the deadline.” Brown also advises that you sit on the same side of the table when delivering that feedback. Literally. The implicit message when you sit next to someone is that you’re not there to critique them, so much as to jointly improve the situation. In my line of work, I think of this is the difference between editing someone’s work and coaching them. Even in the current age of social distancing, it’s a useful metaphor to bear in mind.
c. Teaching. Brown – a Professor of Social Work – writes “I realised that if education is going to be transformative, it’s going to be uncomfortable and unpredictable.” I loved this. I think one of my greatest anxieties during my early career as an academic was the erroneous belief that I needed to know all the answers. But Brown’s approach to teaching is liberating. In my work as a communications consultant, I’ve learned that it’s so much more fun for me – and worthwhile for the participants – when I approach my workshops as a process of knowledge transformation, rather than knowledge transmission. Crucial to that shift is embracing the idea that the best part of life are the suprises. You learn so much more from them, than from all your careful planning.