Answering Hard Questions About Your Book

In yesterday’s post, I listed three major questions that a person answers when working out their nonfiction book, and what is hard about them. Today, I will take a stab at answering some of them, or at least forging a head forward.

Shout out to Tee Barnett and Supercycle.org for their help on “how to do hard things” with this!

What journey are you taking your reader on?

In what way is this book like your autobiography, and in what way is this book not like your autobiography? You have an incredible journey of finding out the information that you are now sharing. What ratio of the book is the exact story of what happened, or how you learned your sacred content, what ratio is the content, and what ratio is…something else?

You can simplify this question by asking yourself what emotions you felt when you started on your journey, and what emotions you feel now. You can be pretty pure and crass about it. The “refined thing” is the entire book. The book is the thing that makes the journey elegant.

For my book, I started off feeling confused, angry. Really wanting to find something sacred. Really wanting to not give up on my ideals of relationships, while at the same time really wanting to be realistic about what I can actually expect of another person, myself, and the world.

Wow. That was very easy. But I don’t think I would have ever written this sentence without giving myself this permission structure.

How do I feel now, after going on my journey, such that I want to record that arc? I feel a lot more confident about knowing which things in dating are “signals” and which are “noise.” I feel a lot more confident in my ability to chart paths that are meaningful to me. That doesn’t mean that I won’t have heartbreak or make mistakes, but it means the heartbreak is authentic, and the mistakes are mine. When I date, I feel closer to knowing and feeling what is real, rather than either living in fantasy or living in cynicism.

Wow. That was easy too, and pretty clear. That just came out. Cool.

I think I am also much more settled on a title. I will keep that a secret for now :)

Now, what is the function of my own story in the book? Even if it’s mostly not included, what is its function in having happened or being part of me, in relation to the book?

Does it give me credibility? “Hey I bled for this.” Does it work as a source of examples?

In my case as a researcher and coach, my personal experience is a basin of examples or concrete (abstracted, anonymized) detail. It is like a well which I can hit with a pick, and something nurturing and with clarity comes out.

Who is your target audience?

This question becomes easier when you consider, who wants to come on this journey?

In my case, it is people who have already had questions about relationships. My tent is pretty large. The biggest thing for me here is the target audience is people who have questions about relationships, and want to read some kind of book about it.

I am not going to be convincing people who already do not feel confused and feel they know everything about their relationships, or perhaps have their own major theories they follow, to like my book. I am also not going to convince people who believe the way forward through confusion is just to have more and more experiences out in the world, to read my book.

So that’s a pretty clear intersection. People who seek clarity about relationships, and people who are game to read a book about it.

More specifically, I’m writing for adults who are already suspicious that the standard relationship scripts don’t fit them. These are people who have tried to be “good” at relationships and still feel confused, ashamed, or like something essential about them keeps breaking the scripts, or like they do not know something important about getting the relationship to a deeper level. They are reflective, often overthinkers, hungry for frameworks and language, and they’re willing to sit with the complexity on the page in exchange for feeling less crazy in their own lives.

That is enough for me to keep going.

How will the book help your personal brand?

Oof. This one still feels hard. Let’s try it though.

There is a simplicity here. I want to make my work findable. Currently, it is scattered among many blogposts, and ideas in my brain.

It is a personal brand around authenticity, romance, honesty, groundedness in reality, and applying analysis to all sorts of problems.

There might be pivots I might make here.

But this question is a main site of play. The locus of accountability here is to myself. I can make this whatever I want. Me and the project are like stem cells, together.

In some ways, my visions and imagery, such as the original logo for this website, a compass rose, with roses, form brand components.

Perhaps I want to go in a more engineering direction. Perhaps I want to go in a more aggressive social commentary direction.

I think I am learning in the direction of experiments, and experiences, for this book I am working on. I am thinking less blueprints, more experiments, but I think I want to go harder in that direction.