Confessions of a Self-Help Author (Part Four)

On life lessons, (non-existent) guarantees and writing simply to wake up

This is part of a series. Find more confessions here: Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Today my new book Kokoro: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived is published in the US and Canada, hurrah! It seems like a good time to reflect on the creative life and share a few more myth-busting confessions, in case they help you move another step forward in the direction of your own creative dreams.

Here we go…

#1 Most of the lessons I have learnt in writing books are perfectly valid for life too.

Last summer, when I was in Japan researching Kokoro, I spent some time in Kyoto, as I usually do. I woke up early one morning and headed to Nanzenji, a beautiful temple at the foot of the Higashiyama mountains. I had written about Nanzenji in my book The Way of the Fearless Writer, which had just come out in the US, and I wanted to take a photograph of it in front of the huge entrance gate known as the Sanmon, before any visitors arrived. The Sanmon has a flight of wide stone steps leading up to three rectangular doorways which frame the forested temple grounds beyond. Sanmon (三門) means ‘three gates’ and refers to the Three Gates of Liberation in Buddhism: desirelessness, formlessness and emptiness. In writing the book, I had discovered how these three ‘gates’ were essential for becoming a fearless writer.

I flicked through the book to the part about Nanzenji, and found that I had written this:

The fearless writing path is actually a pathless path, unfolding with each step and leading us not from here to there, but from here to here. It is a path of waking up. Our work as fearless writers is to pass through these three gates over and over, every time we enter our sacred writing space. Shedding our fixed identity. Letting go of our desire and our need for control. Honouring the formlessness of our creative potential. Sensing the interconnectedness of everything. And practising. Always practising, to express the human condition and this strange and beautiful experience of existence, in words.

The gates have no doors. They are symbolic. There is nothing stopping us from passing through. We just have to keep showing up with courage, humility and grace as we cross the threshold between the mundane and the sacred every single time we choose to write, never quite knowing what will happen next.

I got full body shivers reading it. I had worked on that manuscript for months, writing and rewriting, editing and reading again. I had even recorded the audiobook version myself. And yet it wasn’t until that moment at Nanzenji that I fully realised that what I had written was not just true for writing. It was also true for life.

I am a fearless writer. I haven’t always been able to say that, but writing my way through midlife, one book after another, heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy, taught me how to become one. I learnt to listen not to my kokoro – my intelligent heart - as if it was separate from me, but rather to listen from it. It took me five years and five books to understand what it took to be a fearless writer, and yet all that time I failed to notice that being a fearless human being required exactly the same thing. But I can see it now.

My midlife malaise had shown up because I was focused on my own desire. I had a fixed vision of how I wanted my life to be, but got frustrated when it didn’t look exactly that way. I had the kind of audacious, specific and time-bound goals we are so often told we need to have if we are going to achieve anything useful. Sometimes, I would reach one but feel uncomfortable shouting about it. Sometimes, I failed to reach one, which was not a good feeling. Other times, delivering on the timelines was not compatible with things I really valued, like time with my young family.

It was exacerbated by the fact that I was obsessed with form. I had a particular idea of how I thought my life should be by now, based on my conditioning and what I saw when scrolling through social media. This is a slippery slope, where nothing is ever enough. I was very familiar with this, having written an entire book about how perfectly imperfect we are, so you’d think I’d know better, but our conditioning runs deep.

Finally, my midlife malaise had revealed the awkward truth that I was hostage to the idea of separateness. I saw most people as judge, critic and competition. As a result, I rarely asked for help, or shared where I was struggling.

Being by my mother’s side as she faced death, and navigating the path of grief all the way to the summit of the remote Japanese mountain of Gassan during the final year of writing Kokoro, changed everything for me. It revealed my own patterns, and showed me how important it was for me to let them die too, in order to fully live. I would rather have found out another way, without the intensity and devastation caused by the rupture, but this is where I am.

It makes complete sense that what works for writing works for life, because writing is simply a way of accessing our deepest wisdom, capturing what we have sensed about the innermost nature of things and offering our natural creative response to the world. Writing, just like any other creative act, is an instrument of the kokoro. It is through our creative acts that the kokoro is made visible.

By midlife the kokoro refuses to be silenced any more. This is surely why so many of us get a desperate urge to do something creative at this point. That ‘something creative’ has many faces – from endeavours such as art, writing, and music, to house renovation, starting a new business, conscious parenting or innovating the way we live. It’s the kokoro’s way of seeking out new instruments to communicate our longings and deepest wisdom, and for responding to the beauty in the world.

In his bestselling novel How Do You Live?, Genzaburō Yoshino wrote: ‘The first, most basic step is to start with the moments of real feeling in your life, when your heart is truly moved, and to think about the meaning of those. The things that you feel most deeply, from the very bottom of your heart, will never deceive you in the slightest . . . That is what is most important, now and always.’¹

#2 I write my books for my readers, but before that I write them for myself

This is perhaps one of the great ironies of writing books, especially non-fiction. When we write a proposal for a book we have to explain why we are the perfect person to write that book, what makes us the expert and so on. And in some cases people really are the expert in a particular topic. But in my case, although my experiences and qualifications make me well placed to ask the question, it is only in writing the actual book that I discover any kind of answer.

The reason I am curious about it in the first place is because it solves a problem in my life.

Feeling trapped? Write a book about freedom.

Feeling like your perfectionism is getting in the way. Write a book about the beauty of imperfection.

Feeling stressed by the holiday season? Write a book about having a calm Christmas.

Finding self-doubt is hampering your writing? Write a book about being a fearless writer. And so it goes on. This is the story of my book-writing life.

With Kokoro, the one that is out in the US and Canada today (hurrah!), the question I wanted to solve for myself as I stumbled across the statistical midlife threshold was ‘What does it mean to have lived well, and am I doing it right?’

So if you have a book dream, instead of worrying about not being expert enough in anything, focus on what burning question you would like to find the answer to, and see what that might look like as a book. It’s as good a place as any to begin, and whether or not you write the book, your life will be better for having asked the question.

(Also come and join my upcoming Book Dream Incubator, so I can help you tend to your dream!)

Honestly, writing Kokoro, was a life-changer for me. It completely shifted the way I see the world, what I prioritise, what I no longer care about. Yes of course I would love many, many people to read it, and I am delighted that there are already book deals in place which will see it translated into more than a dozen languages, but writing it was enough. And if you can get to a place in your creative endeavours that creating the thing is enough, everything else is a bonus, and doing the work is a joy.

#3 A book publication day is just like any other day, except it’s not

If, like me, you are the kind of person who would rather write about the things they have created than talk about them, it is possible that you are being held back from writing a book by the fear of talking about it a lot in public much further down the line. You may have this image of a compulsory book launch party and whirlwind of live interviews that you are terrified of having to undergo. It took me a while to figure out that there is no single way to launch a creation and you can choose how you do it.

Here’s how I launched each of my books, and you can see as we go along that I have calmed things down with each book:

· Book 1 (Freedom Seeker): I spent a good chunk of my advance on a big launch party, invited a ton of people, and had a brilliant time but came away exhausted, having sold no books because I sent everyone a free copy in advance. Why I did that I’ll never know – if ever there is a good time to sell a book it is at a book launch party! I then went on a self-funded tour to the US (bidding goodbye to the rest of my advance) and exhausted myself doing a bunch of small events and one large one, which probably only sold enough copies to cover the cost of ten days’ worth of hotel breakfasts. I came back shattered, missing my babies and vowed never to launch a book like that again.

· Book 2 (Wabi Sabi): I spent the day with my agent going around London bookshops offering Japanese sweets to friendly booksellers. Most of them had my book in stock, and it was fun to sign them. Some of them didn’t, and that was embarrassing. I gave them sweets anyway. I went back to my publisher’s office and did a Facebook Live with my editor all about how to get a book deal. I think that actually sold more copies of the book than anything else!

· Book 3 (Calm Christmas): It was published in October when everyone was too busy thinking about Halloween to care about Christmas, so I spent launch day at the Bodleian Japanese Library in Oxford working on another book idea. When December rolled around, I toured London bookshops again, and when no-one was looking, covered the giant not-yet-decorated Waterstones Christmas tree with copies of my book before running away.

· Book 4 (We Are in This Together): This book about the pandemic was written and published during the pandemic. There was no hardback version, just ebook and audiobook (which I recorded under a blanket in my attic, using a mic the publisher had shipped to my house). It was the pandemic so I was probably homeschooling, then making lunch from the salad leaves I had grown in my new raised beds or something like that. I don’t even remember.

· Book 5 (The Way of the Fearless Writer): I did a bunch of podcast interviews, and worked on Kokoro.

· Book 6 (Kokoro): When the UK version came out in April it was my wedding anniversary, as well as the seventh anniversary of the publication of my first book. So there was some celebrating (flowers, dancing in the kitchen, a special dinner with Mr K), but nothing loud. I remember writing Confessions of a Self-Help Author Part Three, where I talked about the disappointment of missing the Sunday Times Bestseller List by just 25 copies that week. You might think “Well if you’d done a bit more around publication day you’d have made that list” and maybe you’d be right, but maybe I did the most that I had the capacity to do at that moment in my life, as I launched a book about grieving my mother, and administered a large dose of forgiveness to myself.

With today being the US + Canada launch of Kokoro, if I was in New York or Vancouver, I would go into Barnes & Noble or Indigo and search for Kokoro, hope to goodness there were a few copies waiting, and offer to sign them. However, today I am in Devon, so instead I am launching a lovely giveaway on my Instagram and sitting here with a cup of tea, writing this, watching the rain pour down the window and thinking about my mum and my friend Lisa, to whom Kokoro is dedicated.

Which is all to say there are no rules when it comes to book publishing, or launching anything, and the older I get and the more books I write the more I realise that it’s better to line up a whole load of activities that are aligned with your personality and energy (hello essays!) than things you ‘think’ you should do. And that doesn’t just go for books – it goes for anything you launch into the world.

So yes, book publication days are special, because they represent the moment that the thing that was once just a vague idea in your head and heart becomes something that people can hold in their hands and take in, but also they are just another day in this wild and beautiful life.

Note: From the above you might think I don’t do anything to launch my books. Actually I do a ton of work, but it’s strategic, and mostly happens from well before launch day comes around, and over time for a long time afterwards, which I find is a much less stressful way of doing things. You can watch me chatting about it here).

#4 There are no guarantees

You never know how your creative work is going to be received, and before that you never know how it is going to be supported on its passage out into the world. You might get big guns support, or you might not. Perhaps no-one will blurb your book. Perhaps none of the pitches turn into an interview opportunity. Perhaps your publisher will do nothing.

I have found that the easiest way to cope with the pressure of it all – and this goes for launching anything into the world – is to assume third parties will do nothing. It’s not to say they won’t do anything, but this way you can be grateful for what does happen rather than disappointed by what doesn’t, and in the meantime you can crack on with your own plans.

Earlier this week I agreed terms on my 59^th book deal. That’s two more deals since I wrote this essay eight days ago. Sometimes things go well. Sometimes they don’t. There are no guarantees, which is why some people give up. But for me, there are no guarantees in life anyway, which is why I keep writing.

#5 Writing books is not the point

All that said, writing books is not the point. The point is waking up. That’s why I write. That’s why I practice writing. To wake up to the experience of life as it is unfolding right now. It’s as good a reason as any, to do anything, I think.

Phew! That’s enough confessions for one day. Perhaps you have a secret book dream of your own? Go for it, I say. It can be some of the most meaningful work you will ever do. And if you REALLY want to bring it to life, be sure to come and join my Book Dream Incubator (low cost, low stakes, huge amounts of inspiration!)

And if there’s anything particular you’d like to know about the writing life, ask away in the comments. I might just make a confession about it…

Beth Xx

PS Please do share this if you have any writerly friends in your community.

PPS This is part of a series. More confessions here: Part One | Part Two | Part Three

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This is part of a series of confessions. You can read the earlier ones here: Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Photos by Holly Bobbins. Art in the second image by Emilie van Camp.

1. How Do You Live? by Genzaburō Yoshino (Rider) p.48  https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-You-Live-uplifting-enchanted/dp/1846046467