If you haven’t already, then now is the time to write your book. It’s not about becoming an author (though it is that too), it’s about writing your book so your ideas can reach people.
Ideas, the explorations of the human mind and the thoughts that stretch us, inform us, entertain us and console us, are the things that make life worthwhile.
However, that’s not what most of the people who come to me for writing advice are here for; it’s a bonus by-product. The people who come to me for book writing and creativity advice all have a calling. Their book has come to them to be brought into being in the world, like your book has come to you.
They’re conscious of a ‘nudge’ that won’t go away, which is their book asking to be brought to the world through them. And that might be you too.
They know that they have something to say, and someone waiting who needs to hear it; told just the way that they will tell it. More: that if they don’t say what they’re here to say, the person who needs to hear it will go without.
It’s that impulse to write the book that will be someone’s answer that I’m here to work with. Because the time for these books that are coming through us at this point is now. Your words are necessary and needed. These are troubled times and we need ideas and words that give us hope.
And before you scoff and ask what good you writing your book will do, just stop a moment and think.
There’s a reason that totalitarian regimes seek to control informational flows and ban and burn books when they come to power.
I’m talking about the book burning pogroms of the Third Reich, the control of education and information that’s happening both in authoritarian countries like Afghanistan, but also in so-called developed nations like America and Australia, where indigenous history is either erased from school curricula entirely or is taught from a colonialist perspective. Not to mention the current US regime being in the control of anti-intellectual oligarchs.
I’m talking about places like Belarus, where the Belorussian language is now taught as a foreign one in their schools, replaced by Russian as a nod to Putin. And where the President-dictator Lukashenko has said, “You can say what you like around your kitchen table, but in public you will not criticise the government.” The reprisals for doing so are severe.
I’m talking about voices that have traditionally been silenced, and that need to be heard. Women’s voices. Non-binary voices. LGBTIQA+ voices. Black and brown voices. Voices of people living in dictatorships, under authoritarian regimes. Voices that haven’t had agency, platform or volume. That could be because of the microcosm of the family and its strictures, traditions and dysfunctional silences or because of the macrocosm of country of birth, the silencing of whole communities and cultures of people played out on a world stage.
We’ve shied away from the hard truths about our humanity – and its fallibility – and we’re bearing the consequences of that now. How often have you clicked away from a challenging news item? Scrolled on from a social media post that makes you uncomfortable? We’ve become used to being able to choose comfort, to look away to spare our feelings.
Of course, it’s fine to be comfortable: that’s what humanity has aimed at for millennia. But comfort at the expense of others’ lives is obscene and we need to do better. The way to do this is to raise our voices.
The voices we raise and the attention we give to those voices is the currency of our collective freedom. And we need the stories that will inspire, inform, help and yes, entertain us, to keep coming. To keep looking and reporting and helping us to digest what we’re living through so we can understand and do better and fight.
That’s what books do at a fundamental level, no matter what the book is. They help us understand ourselves and the world around us. They bring us face to face with ourselves and tell us truths in ways we’re able to hear them without turning away. We need to hear hard truths in order to understand what humanity is. That’s why the original fairy tales were gruesome and scary.
Some were cautionary tales that border on propaganda about how that culture expected their community to behave. Some gave valuable pointers and insights into human behaviour and how to deal with it. A lot were also entertaining; a very valuable thing when the darkness drew in and the nights were long and cold. They were signposts that taught us about things we didn’t necessarily understand, not least of which was ourselves.
I’m not saying that terrifying people with scary stories is the way forward, but I am saying that in a lot of places in the world we’ve got to a place where we sanitise stories to a point where our souls have grown flaccid.
It’s time to tell the stories, our stories. Time to expose the truths, share the experiences.
If you know it’s time to write your book + would like some guidance, check out the resources I’ve created for you to get you started on my freebies page.
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