Why Write Books | Blue Horizon Communications

The Large-Canvas Reward

Writing a book offers a large canvas: two hundred and fifty-odd pages in which to articulate, refine, and cultivate those thoughts and ideas, feelings and experiences that preoccupy you, and have, often for years. But a book manuscript offers a large canvas not only in the medium of space, but in the medium of time, as well: most books require a year or two to write, and frequently longer.

Those years spent “carrying” a book (similar to carrying a pregnancy), result in a hidden organic benefit. Authors find themselves growing into a more fully-realized sense of their personal reality, while at the same time inhabiting an expanded sense of the world outside themselves.

This is a mysterious and wondrous process, though its beginning is something every author is familiar with. Once one or two ideas are successfully articulated on the page, they begin to multiply, giving birth to new thoughts not otherwise available. Over time, in the space of a book-length manuscript, whole new worlds of thought and understanding open up.

The Greater-Awareness Reward

The mystery of book writing occurs in the ability we all share to tap into a greater awareness. Though it is accessible only when we undergo the preliminary “discipline” (actually, a joyful experience) of paying close attention to the wisdom of our deeper minds. It is the book writing-induced access to vaster understanding which creates an enlargement of our personal reality. And this occurs naturally and organically — without our conscious recognition — during the lengthy and painstaking process of writing a book.

The Creating-a-Living-Being Reward

There is also the reward that results from nurturing the living being of your book. (Caring for anything is an enlivening experience, as those with children, animals, plants, and whatever else requires constant care, know.) Your book will emanate a life of its own, a life independent of you, its author, in direct proportion to the amount of love and involvement in your book’s creation that you are able to give it (that you, in a very real sense, achieve with your book).

The parallel between parenting and authoring has been observed by, among others, author and creativity teacher, Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way), who once referred to her books as “book children.” This seems particularly apt. Books, like human children, travel out into the world, affecting others in all sorts of ways, seen and unseen. It is a phenomenon that has occurred for thousands of years.

In Robert B. Downs’ Books That Changed the World, authors from Plato to Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine to Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoreau to Harriet Beecher Stowe, and from Charles Darwin, to Freud, to Rachel Carson, have produced works that profoundly changed the worldview of millions of people — both in their time, and over the course of time.

Newer authors, meanwhile, come from the ranks of those who have been so personally touched by books that they feel moved to participate, to do what books do: they want to create worlds of sense, sensibility, and deeper meaning.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, Barbara Tuchman, observed, “Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, ‘lighthouses’ (as a poet said) ‘erected in the sea of time.’ They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”

The Vital-Reasons Reward

Long before they reach print, during the long and painstaking process of their creation, book manuscripts offer their authors all the gifts Tuchman lists. Writing a book changes and transforms our sense of who we are (it cultivates our own “civilization”), by opening windows on our inner and outer worlds. And it place-marks passages in our lives, experiences that, without being evoked and preserved in words, would be less available to us, if not completely lost.

The book we are writing becomes our closest companion during all the years we spend working on it, and teaches us what we do not even know we need to know. Our book manuscript metamorphoses magically, from week to week, while holding our best thoughts within the vaulted bank of itself, where it collects and compounds interest. These are vital reasons, all.

Even more vitally, our book gives us our own humanity. Once in print, it offers our individual expression of humanity to countless seen and unseen others.

“A writer looking for subjects,” observes Annie Dillard in The Writing Life, “inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.”

In other words, authors are compelled to tell other people about some small corner of the world’s marvels that they alone find fascinating. That small corner is almost always an intimate one. It encompasses and enfolds an author’s personal experience, even when it’s written as fiction.

Books Grow Like Trees

Let me illustrate. Each week, in my editorial services business for authors, I receive emails from writers describing their book projects. Every one of these projects grew — as would a tree’s roots and branches — from a personal experience that moved or disturbed its author. An experience that led him or her to spend many months writing hundreds of pages.

Surprisingly few of these authors are primarily, or professionally, writers. And it makes no difference. All are writing to give voice to what they know. What life has taught them that they find mesmerizing.

And their stories are invariably a marvel: so varied, so heartfelt, so often courageous.

Many are about survival: whether surviving an orphanage . . . a severely dysfunctional family . . . a life-altering car accident . . . or life in a country beseiged by violent unrest.

A few are about lives on a world stage: the biography of a world-famous musician . . . or the memoir of an internationally known physician who lived in British internment camps set up in Africa during World War II.

Among the novels, almost all emerge from something their authors love or, in some way, identify with: whether sixties rock stars . . . the spunkiness of thirty-somethings determined to express themselves . . . teenagers confronting the abyss that opens on the cusp of adulthood . . . or a world in which everyone is enlightened.

The many nonfiction authors who contact me produce manuscripts equally diverse: They offer business executives a new perspective on leadership . . . or a method for renewing creativity in management. They present a system of self-hypnosis that will transform the stress and anxiety of daily life. They describe a spiritual experience that led to a novel way of seeking inner guidance.They help those with chronic illness find fulfillment, despite the many challenges that confront them each day.

A Thriving Genre

Self-help, among the authors who seek my assistance, is a thriving genre. It thrives because of the authorial impulse to share life’s experience, and what that experience has taught — leading authors to love the unique universality of their lives all the more.

For writers of books want to share their hard-earned wisdom with readers who will be mesmerized by the world they’ve created. And will put the essence of their wise words to good use.