Friday Advice: Don't You Dare Write The Book You Set Out To Write.
In which an incredibly offensive picture makes a very telling and valuable point.
If you wrote the book you set out to write then you wrote the wrong book.
That’s right. Following your plan, your book map or outline, will invariably lead you to a cringeworthy business book.
I know what you’re thinking: “Hey, Mike, don’t you urge writers to follow a rigid pattern? And isn’t that pattern, word for word…
Proposition. A powerful counter-intuitive truth that advantages the reader.
Backstory. The writer’s journey toward that truth.
Recommendations: Stuff for the reader to do immediately that guides them to immediate success.
Well, yes, yes I am that guy and that is the template. Here’s a link to a video on that very subject.
Let me explain.
I take in a Hamilton Tiger-Cats game once or twice a year, more for the fans than for anything else. I never fail to take something home from those encounters and I did this year as well.
The guy beside me was contorting himself with rage as the Ticats began their inevitable descent toward a home-field loss.
Over one ten minute span they fumbled, went offside, tried to operate out of an illegal formation, went offside again, threw two incompletions and punted. Kicking, giving the other team the ball, was the best and most successful idea of the entire Meshugaah.
The Cats got the ball back again: interception.
The fan beside me could hold back no longer.
He jumped from his seat, pointed to the opposite end zone, and shouted: “THAT WAY!”
In searching for a photo to illustrate someone pointing in a direction, I came across this beauty.
This photo is staggering in its bad taste, caricature and nuttiness. God knows what kind of beast the gentleman on the left has at the end of the leash, maybe a gargoyle or space creature. Wigwams? A flip phone? Honestly, discovering this photo changed the course of my day and it certainly changed the course of this piece.
And that’s the magic. If you only write according to plan, you deny yourself the delightful side trips that bring discovery, new conclusions and the occasional lawsuit.
Writing is supposed to be an adventure, not a recitation. You owe it to your reader to deliver your best, most telling conclusions and that process demands curiosity, daring thought and even risky behaviour.
The contemplation, the re-examining of a life, is the wonderful by-product of a book. I often tell clients I will charge them a buck a word for the clarity and throw in the book for free.
What you have on paper going in, the plan, is the one thought guaranteed to be stale. The template is the frame. Your ideas, the newest freshest ones, make up the canvas.
Don’t write the book you set out to write. Do better.