Every Writer Has a Story of the First Book: What's Yours Going to Be?

Yesterday I was thinking back to how I wrote the very first book I wrote, a ghostwriting job for a woman in Maryland who ran a catering business for dog owners. That first book was special.

Two years earlier, I’d left my job as a senior editor in-house at Delacorte Press, emotionally and psychically burned out from conflicting with my boss. I’d hung on by my fingernails to hit the two-year mark that would vest me in my 401(K) plan. I would roll it over and then withdraw it in order to gain a grace period to think.

Exhausted by coping with recent experiences, I’d done as little freelance editorial work as possible—instead choosing to spend my time (and the money I’d walked out of my job with) going to near-daily acting, voice, and movement classes, rehearsing with scene partners, going to auditions, and performing at night for the type of crowds who turn up at small black-box theaters in Manhattan.

I'd shot a small film that was circulating the festivals.

Then one day, the phone rang and it was Peter Guzzardi, the publisher of Three Rivers Press, an imprint at Crown, asking if I would be interested in a smallish writing project. The pay was decent, but not lavish. He knew I had the skills for it—my reputation preceded me—so it only rested on my desire. I said yes.

That was how I came to ghostwrite a book called Barker’sGrub, on how to cook your own dog food, which came out in August 2001.
 

I finished drafting the last page of the manuscript at 9:30 PM on December 31, 1999, the eve of Y2K, the international computer clock crisis that never happened (remember that?). One millennium I was an actor, and the next I was a professional writer.

Every writer has a story about how his or her career began. This is mine. It's got parts that are typical and parts that are atypical.

Usually there is a recognizable impulse, perhaps waiting dormant ever since childhood, which raises its hand in the mind periodically like a shy kid waiting on the sidelines at the school gym to be picked for a dodge ball team. “Pick me, please pick me!” it says. “Don’t reject me or shame me or disown me. Don’t leave me for last.”

Sometimes the urge to write a book comes on like a rocket blast. It’s accidental, but on purpose, too.  The time just comes when the message wants to come out. The writers are there and this energy is going to erupt from them. If they are willing, the lava flows. Nature will create through them or someone else. Ideas belong to the world not to the individual people in it. Ideas are unstoppable.

Later, writers become more deliberate. But before they do, they’re often tentative. I can’t tell you how many people I meet tell me that they’ve been asked by their friends and colleagues for years, “When are you going to write a book?”

Sometimes ego gets in the way of actually doing it. Sometimes they are undisciplined in their thinking or have true learning disabilities. Or they are just lazy-assed suckers. Many wannabes have put a book on the calendar in January year after year, and get a chapter done, only to stick the project in a drawer by March or April, because they’ve gone back to tending to other priorities in their lives.

The impulses to write make my heart expand.

Hesitation makes it contract.

If you are just now contemplating writing your first book, there’s really no way to exactly prepare you for the experience other than to encourage you to stay with it. There are rewards to sticking with a manuscript through to the end that go far beyond earning money from copies sold. You ought to understand your motivations going in—and your expectations. Then it’s good to toss those out the window and live with your book, letting it take you over.

Surrendering to the needs of the project (whatever they are), is the success strategy I advocate. Educate yourself if you need to learn. Interview the people you need to interview. Conduct the research you need to conduct. Think. Read. Then write and write some more. The absolute, spectacular beauty of writing is you can measure your accomplishment in words on the page. More is not better, but more ultimately gets you closer to better, or at least closer to done.

Each time I sit down to write I don’t know what to expect. Well, in general I do, but not in specific, because I am different every day in health, mood, energy, and state of mind. Writing is investigation. I like finding out what’s percolating in me, ready to emerge.

Mainly what I do is point myself in a direction, ask good questions, and then watch the white page get sprinkled with black letters, like I’m standing over an omelet skillet with a pepper shaker.

Stephanie Gunning is the creator of the Smart Indie Pub Club®, a monthly class for self-published writers at every level interested in best practices for print-on-demand and ebook publishing.