How I Wrote My Book in 4 Months
Writing articles instead of a book was exactly what I needed
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Nearly three years ago, after an incredible healing journey to Kauai and a powerful ayahuasca trip to Peru, I tried to write a book on spirituality.
The problem was that I couldn’t quite find the voice for it. I didn’t want it to sound didactic or instructional. I had already published a guide to spiritual transformation and three channeled works, so publishing book-length works was familiar territory. But I wanted this one to be different.
As I wasn’t sure how to write that book, I set it aside. A friend of mine suggested that I write shorter pieces. That turned out to be something of a revolutionary transition. Over the next two years, I put together numerous articles, and then in January 2021, the book that had started as an idea in 2018 sprouted and came to life on its own.
For those of you who aspire to write a book someday but feel intimidated by the process, let me share some insights from my path that may be of help to you.
Finding My Voice
As a former professor and lawyer, I can easily slide into a didactic or argumentative style. It’s easy for me burp forth lengthy passages of overly wrought material or give you a three-pronged argument as to why most mindfulness advice misses the point.
What those styles of writing tend to do, however, is lose the reader. They’re meant to persuade. The voice I sought for this book had a different motive: to inspire. I still write to illuminate spirituality’s blindspots or provide information that may benefit others. But more than anything, I wanted to find a voice that would recreate in the reader the kind of feeling that the world at its most magical evokes in me.
It took me a while to find that voice, and I don’t always use it or find that I hit the right note. But I wrote my way into it — like this piece on feeling like you’ll never be healed or this piece on mourning the child I will never have.
Writing Shorter Pieces
My academic and legal training also tilts me toward verbosity. One of my earliest pieces, on the nature of awakening, is still among my favorites, but at 18 minutes, it’s a lot to ask of a reader. I’ve learned to cut to the chase. Pith is powerful.
That’s not to say that all of my most popular pieces are short. My longest article (on the shadow side of the spiritual world) hits 23 minutes yet happens to be one of my most popular reads (measured by claps and comments). That’s an aberration in a list of seven-minute pieces. Indeed, my most-read pieces—like this one on 7 signs of spiritual awakening or what happens after awakening — have all been somewhere between seven and ten minutes.
A book isn’t just about making the same point in a longer version — it’s about putting together a lot of short points that add up to an even more powerful one. Readers don’t need a lot of words to get the point, especially if you’re seeking to inspire them. This was an important lesson because nonfiction books now tend to have shorter chapters.
Giving the Reader a Takeaway
It’s easy to forget that the point of writing is to connect with a reader. Some writers try to offer memorial or personal pieces to invoke an empathetic response. I’ve written my share of them, and at first, it can seem like your foray into vulnerability is the key to making an emotional connection.
But your reader needs to feel that your story is relevant to their life. It’s important to leave your reader with some nugget that they can hold onto, beyond the conclusion that you overcame some kind of internal struggle. Otherwise, you’re writing a journal entry.
The same applies to a book’s individual parts. The entire message of the book isn’t saved for the conclusion. Each chapter has a takeaway, and each subsection of a chapter has one too. Those smaller takeaways should work together to lead the reader to the larger takeaway. I think of them as rungs on a ladder, and each chapter as a ladder between floors. Each section needs to inspire the reader to make it to the next rung.
I wholeheartedly credit Neil Gordon, who calls the takeaway the “silver bullet,” for teaching me to use them in my articles. For Gordon, the silver bullet is the one line that distills your inspirational message — it’s not information, but a sense of empowerment that your reader or listener needs, he says.
I haven’t always hit that note of simplicity and inspiration, but I’ve tried, and on occasion, I found myself writing lines like, “When I ask myself, ‘When will I be whole again?’, that is the moment I’ve splintered myself back into pieces” or “In mastering time, we find peace of mind.”
Writing One Piece at a Time
As I mentioned at the start, even though I had published several books, something about this next work was daunting, and try as I might, I couldn’t organize it. I kept trying to see the project in its entirety, putting together outline after outline. Every time I put together a new outline, I felt like I was trying to write the world’s greatest treatise on spiritual wisdom.
Writing shorter pieces relieved that pressure by shifting my focus away from the project’s scope. Instead, I started to nibble my way through an enormous banquet of topics that I wanted to digest. Each article was just one bite—often a subsection of a chapter — and I didn’t write with any direction.
I simply allowed myself to write when I felt inspired to write. I tackled kundalini, time, ayahuasca, death, emotions, intuition, and paradox. Even if they all touched on different aspects of spirituality, I wasn’t trying to write a series of articles that would add up to something more. I let each topic that felt like being written come forward. That was the secret for me.
Since 2019, when I began to publish regularly, I have now published some 65 pieces. For many writers, that output might seem paltry, but volume was not my goal. An arbitrary standard of productivity never guided me. Part of this process was relinquishing the sense that I had a destination.
Letting the Book Organize Itself
Without realizing it, my book wrote itself. In January of this year, I woke up one morning, and the outline that had eluded me for so long was there. I had never given up my goal of writing this book, and one night my subconscious mind put the pieces together. I suddenly knew which articles would go together, and which parts of the book I still needed to write.
With this new outline, I took a break from article writing to put the book together. And that was another lesson that I had to relearn — the book that I wanted to write was not a collection of essays. It was a separate creation, and each chapter was not a hodgepodge of shorter articles stitched together. Instead, those pieces were the foundational elements, but they had to be molded together like clay and shaped into something new.
For the next four months, I feverishly rewrote most of the original pieces that served as basic building blocks. Having these pieces and the outline is what prepared me for a marathon writing experience.
Even with the benefit of my prior pieces, writing the book required a lot of effort — I won’t pretend it was easy. Here’s what I did to get from outline to manuscript:
- I declined to work on other writing projects, except for a few pieces that were already near completion.
- I worked on a single chapter at a time, not jumping around from section to section.
- I used tips like turning off notifications and blocking off hours in my schedule to avoid distraction.
- I revised a chapter several times until I felt that it was its own unique creation, and then revised the entire manuscript several times once it was complete.
Out of a seemingly disparate array of articles, a coherent book emerged.
The Takeaway
To recap, when I was spinning my wheels trying to write a book, I paused and wrote shorter articles to:
- find my voice,
- learn to write shorter but powerful pieces,
- distill my message by giving readers takeaways,
- write my way into a full-length project, and
- allow the organization of the book to emerge on its own.
Was I successful? Only time and my editors will tell. But I loved the process of bringing that book into being, as a singular creation, built out of many contributions that were never intended to be anything more than articles.
Regardless of the outcome, the process was a wonderful exercise in trust and surrender, as I let go of my need to fully form the final vision of the book. Instead, I allowed it to write its own way into the world.
That, for me, is the single, best advice I can give to an aspiring writer daunted by the prospect of writing a nonfiction book or struggling with the process: Let go and let your book write itself through you, one piece at a time.
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