Could You, Would You, Should You . . . Write a Book?
By Laurel Marshfield
Reprinted from Yoga Living Magazine
 Those who want to write a book are legion. But many who nurture this dream are expert in areas quite unrelated to writing. Why, then, the yearning to become an author?
Three reasons. Professional, Personal, and the Pressure of Potential talent. All three share a single stumbling block: the chasm between "I ought to write a book" and "I am writing one."
What makes the leap from one to the other so vast? The best answers come from the questions in this article's title. By answering each, in turn, a bridge will appear -- one that spans the chasm between the dream of authoring a book, and actually writing one.
Could You Write a Book?
You're a professional, a holistic practitioner, say, who's worked in your field for many years. What you know could fill a book. But filling hundreds of pages with information, and developing a message strong enough to support a book-length treatment, are very different. What is a strong message? It's your unique perspective (a philosophy or system, perhaps, and its broader applications). If you have a substantive, enticingly packaged message, and something very similar hasn't appeared in a book published during the last five years -- you could write a book.
Suppose you're someone who's arrived at a certain point in life, where nothing is a challenge, and everything a little stale. You are restless and vaguely unhappy. You've thought about examining this malaise by writing a memoir. Whether you do or not is a matter of commitment. Without a deep desire to find answers, your book will go the way of all attempts to skirt the periphery of unhappiness. But if your focus is truly on your inner quest -- you could write a memoir.
You are, let's say, someone who's always felt a longing to write. Whenever another writer's words expressed your thoughts, you felt an inner pang. You want to write, but you've never written -- and if it were awful, you'd feel humiliated. For someone with dormant talent, the ability to focus on learning how to write, while being undeterred by the inevitable ugly-duckling process, is crucial. If you can place your attention on the pleasure of learning to use language in more and more satisfying ways, you could write a book over time.
Would You Write a Book?
What prevents you from getting to it? For the professional, it's the enormity of the job, juxtaposed with the demands of a practice. The solution? Schedule short, specific tasks (make notes about your book's contents, say, during brief downtime intervals); don't scare yourself with long, amorphous assignments. After you tally-up an hour in increments, reward yourself. Focus only on the doable task at hand, while remembering your overall message. Anything else is resistance.
For the inner quest author, frustration intolerance is often the impediment. Your focus should be on small tasks, overall purpose, and cultivating a writing habit (same time, same place, every day). The patience to unearth material leading to understanding, and the perseverance to see it flower into meaning, complete the requisites here.
For the talent-nurturing author, your ego's fear of embarrassment can cause relentless self-denigration. Tune the ego out. Realize there are many kinds of writing talent. Make it your aim to locate those things you do well. Also: read voraciously, study technique, dissect style.
Should You Write a Book?
What are the benefits of writing a book? For the professional, a book results in a larger public arena. Having made a contribution to your field, this enhanced credibility allows you to present regionally, nationally, even internationally, with greater ease. Spokespersonship is frequently the next evolutionary step in a practitioner's career.
For the personal quest author, a book is primarily an inner accomplishment. If your book expresses deeply universal themes, you may publish -- and find doors swinging open on your life's next phase.
For the talent-nurturing author, the joy of expressing your gift is its own reward. If you have lots of life experience, you may write a book fairly soon. If starting earlier in life, cultivate the garden of your abilities, and ignore our culture's fame-and-fortune mirage. Then, one day, you should write a book.
Like every practice requiring the daily habit of engagement (work), a deliberate focus on what matters (purpose and message), and unwavering patience and perseverance (returning, again and again, to begin again), writing joins the inner world with a gradually perfected outer form (your book, written one word at a time).
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