Confessions of a Self-Help Author (Part Two)

More things no-one ever tells you about life with books

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

“The act of reading is a sacrament. A holy practice. But like all sacred things, it is easy to lose sight of the wonder. I remember the first moment that I knew I was a reader - the first time that I lost myself in a book. it was during school; I was in third or fourth grade at the time and we had been given quiet time to read at our desks. One moment there was time and the next it had vanished. Nothing existed between me and the pages of the story - no worries, no fears, no needs or longings. I was never the same again.” - Fatima Bhutto in What Writers Read edited by Pandora Sykes (Bloomsbury) p.177

In the crazy storms of life, books can be life rafts – to keep us afloat, to distract us or fully focus us, even to carry us to other shores. What I have learnt in the past few years is that this is as true for the writing of books, as for the reading of them.

Today, as I’m sure you know, is World Book Day, a celebration of all the good that books bring to our lives. As an author, books are a physical manifestation of a once-vague and floating idea. Fragments of our hearts, or our imaginations, settle themselves onto paper and are sent out into the world like Chinese lanterns released into a warm summer night. We never know quite how they will travel, or where they will land, but we trust that somehow they will wing their way to whoever needs them most.

When I joined Substack a few months ago, I began with a confessional, sharing a few truths about my life as a self-help author. Thousands of you have since read it, many sharing that it was a relief to know that you weren’t alone in your self-doubt, social anxiety and general not-knowing. I called it Confessions of a Self-Help Author (Part One), knowing that I would have more to spill. I didn’t expect it to take me more than four months to get to Part Two, but here we go. As with my first round of confessions, I do not know if these are only true for me, or if they are universal - I am curious to find out, if you care to share about your own experience in the comments.

These are random confessions in no particular order, and I am sharing them because everything I learn about how to be a writer teaches me something about how to be a human. They have arisen from my experience of writing books (or from the teaching that is often an extension of that), but the relevance of the ideas themselves is not confined to the world of words.

Confession #1 Back before I wrote self-help books, I used to think that in order to write one you had to know how to fix everyone (yourself included).

Of course I was wrong. We don’t need to be fixed. We need to be seen, and heard.

I am embarrassed to say that for a long time, whenever someone shared a problem with me, my default reaction was to give them advice, usually in the form of recommending a book that might help. I was basically an unpaid bibliotherapist, before that was even a thing. These days I am working on mostly listening instead, but it’s not always easy (after all, books really can help!)

This personality trait used to make the idea of writing books incredibly intimidating. Every reader is different. How could one author possibly fix all their problems? Of course now I realise, they can’t, but more than that they aren’t supposed to. I have come to understand that fixing things is often not something any of us can actually do for one another, and even though self-help books are marketed as if they can solve any problem you might have, the job of the self-help author is really to witness suffering and gather up threads of joy, to let people know they are seen, and not alone, and share what they are learning along this winding path of life, in case any of it is of use to anyone else. It is called self-help after all.

Confession #2 I learnt how to teach writing by being shamed in a workshop at a leading writing centre

I have no formal writing qualifications (that’s a confession to explore more another day). The one time I actually went to a workshop to learn about writing from ‘professional writers’ I was shamed in front of the whole class. It was a few years ago now, on a residential writing course at a well-known writing centre, which shall remain nameless. At the time I was already working on my third book, but I needed some time and space to work on my manuscript, and was curious about what I might learn from a professional writing teacher.

Our first exercise gave me the chance to try something completely different from my usual style. I went all out creating an otherworldly scene. It was a bit out there, and it was far from finished, but it had something interesting about it. We took it in turns to read aloud. When I had finished, I looked at the teacher, whose face was screwed up in disgust. ‘Ugh!’ she said. ‘That is just nauseating. Next!’ That was the extent of her feedback. I didn’t share another word for the next two days.

As I processed what had happened, still staggered by it, I decided that my lesson from the residential was going to be how not to teach writing. I decided to create a series of writing courses that were the antithesis of that experience: supportive sanctuaries where no critique is permitted, and the focus is on building confidence and helping writers become better evaluators of their own work. More than 35,000 students later, it seems that I wasn’t the only one who needed a safe space to share my work and grow as a writer more than criticism from on high. The moral of the story? Be careful who you learn from.

Confession #3 I write for love and I write for money.

This seems to offend some people, but that’s for them to reflect on, not for me to worry about. Fundamentally I believe creative people should get paid just as surely as a plumber gets paid and a lawyer gets paid. It shocks me that we even have to have that conversation. In fact the only person I have ever blocked on Substack Notes was basically having a go at me for earning money from writing. We don’t need that kind of energy around here, do we?

Writing for money is how I get to fill my days with writing for love. The two things are not mutually exclusive – one can enable the other.

Readers have a role in this too – if we, as reader. don’t buy books, pay for subscriptions, or buy magazines and newspapers that pay their journalists, we are sending a message that although we love a writer’s words, we don’t love it more than a cup of coffee or yet another pair of shoes. So if you follow someone, and really love their work, and find that it makes your life better in some way, and you want them to have the time and space to produce more of it, so they can continue to have an impact on your life, why not show them with a few of your pennies? It’s World Book Day after all. Why not buy their book, subscribe to their Substack, etc, or if that is not available to you right now, why not use your channels to amplify their voices or tell your friends about the great work that they do? It all helps support the work.

Speaking of buying books, you are welcome to support my own creative work by pre-ordering my new book, if you like 😊 I hope you will absolutely love KOKORO: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived, and that it will have a deep impact on your life, just as it has on mine.

Confession #4 The amount of time I spend writing things that matter is inversely proportional to how much time I spend on social media.

Throughout December and into early January I was very busy on social media. It was that time of year for me – I had a podcast in its third series, I had a Winter Writing Sanctuary running live, and I had a community writing challenge going. In that time I shared more than one thousand pieces of content (posts, stories, reshares of other people’s Instagram stories, restacking of Instagram Notes and so on). Contrary to popular belief I don’t have a marketing assistant. Every single post, share, comment and DM response is me. It always has been. It’s not efficient, but it keeps me connected to all of you, which is, after all, the main point of being on social media at all. Building community and helping amplify other voices is part of my work in the world, and I do it happily and out of choice. But I have come to see it is not sustainable to do it at the same degree of intensity all year round. Why? Because there is an inversely proportional relationship with my own creativity.

The more time I spend on social media, the more my brain’s capacity for ideas seems to shrink. It takes me longer to write an essay. It takes more time and attention to shape big projects. I am distracted more often.

But when I step away from social media for a while and focus on writing things that matter, I feel more content, uplifted, calm even. So my personal solution is not to walk away, but to be OK with sometimes being active, and sometimes not. How about you, I wonder?

Confession #5 I spend more money on books than I do on clothes and shoes, and my life is better for it.

Not long ago we had a clearout. We laid out all the shoes we own, and got rid of half of them. I looked at the pile of high heels, remnants from a former life when I had time to photograph them and stick a printout of the photo on each shoe box, a life where I could actually walk in them, and was expected to. Heels were part of the unspoken uniform of that former life.

Seeing all my shoes laid out like that made me realise that I have been running my own business for longer than I have worked for other people (thirteen of the twenty-four years since I graduated from university), and within that timeline of working for myself, I have been writing books for longer than I haven’t. Many things have shifted in that time – my sense of what matters, my roles in the world, my confidence in my own ability to create things in my head and heart and turn them into physical things in the world, and my priorities for spending money.

There was a time when I quite happily spent a decent chunk of money on yet another a pair of shiny new shoes, not just because I liked them, but also because I thought that in some strange roundabout way they would help me do my job better, (or, if I’m being honest, be better thought of in my job). Now I live in the countryside, in a place with lots of steep hills and muddy fields, but that’s not the only reason I stopped buying heels. I realized that for the cost of a new pair of shoes I could buy a whole stack of books, be moved and inspired, be carried to other worlds, be shown what language can do. I don’t dislike pretty shoes, I just like books more.

These days I keep the receipts and charge most of my books to work as research. That alone is reason enough to have a business, I’d say.

Confession #6 As much as I love writing, sometimes I forget to have fun. Luckily I have two children in my house to remind me.

Recently I shared a thought which has become one of my most popular ‘Notes’ here on Substack, liked more than one thousand times. It said this:

In celebration of World Book Day, and the joy of books, I invite you to join me in committing to having more fun with words, read and written, from now on.

Tell me, which of these confessions resonated most with you? Any confessions of your own? I’d love to hear in the comments.

Beth Xx

PS In case you missed my International Women’s Day celebration of woman poets, you can read it here!

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

Photos: Holly Bobbins Photography