Confessions of a Self-Help Author (Part One)

The first in a series about what it's really like to write books (Warning: Sometimes it's not pretty...)

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

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Friends, by way of introduction, and to start as I mean to go on, I thought I’d share a few truths about my life as a self-help author, which I have not shared before. I do not know if these are only true for me, or if they are universal, and other people don’t talk about them for fear of selling less books, or being judged or whatever. But I’m a midlifer now. I officially do not care, right? So here goes. I’m going to make a series of these confessions, and share a few at a time, as I get braver here on Substack. Nice to meet you friends. Maybe you will share a truth or two with me along the way!

CONFESSION #1: I don’t have as many answers as you might think I do (just like everyone else, I suspect)

I have just finished the manuscript for my sixth book, Kokoro: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived. Somewhere near the beginning of it I wrote this: ‘Well, that is the gentle version. It sometimes showed up as: ‘How can you be more than forty years into this life, call yourself an adult, never mind a self-help author, and still have no clue what you are doing?’

Here’s the thing. None of us has as many answers as we probably think we should by now. We are making most of it up as we go along.

There is a tendency among self-help gurus to say things along these lines: ‘My life was a mess. One day I woke up to it. Now my life is amazing and perfect. You there, with your messed up life, you can be like me and have an amazing, perfect life too if you just read my book/take my course/join my workshop.’ Ever heard that one before?

But I don’t buy it. I don’t write books because I have all the answers. I write books because I have so many questions.

We are all works in progress. Some of us happen to have had the opportunity to reflect – which is one of the things writing books does for you - and we perhaps have built a platform from which we get to share what we are discovering as we go but, in truth, we are all learning from each other. No one is in charge here. No one has all the answers. And anyone who pretends they do is either selling a false version of their story, or is heading for a wake-up call.

Here's the thing: It’s deep in the not knowing that the interesting things happen. All the questions that lead to adventures, good conversations, book ideas, live in the not knowing. So I am happy that I don’t know what I am doing, or else I’d have nothing to explore, nothing to have a real conversation about, no ideas for books. It is our curiosity, and our willingness to walk through the dark of the unknown carrying nothing but our questions, that leads us to write our best books.

Tell me, what questions do you carry, that wouldn’t exist if you knew exactly what you were doing? (Hint: That’s where your next interesting thing lives)

I write books to help myself as much as other people. The experience of writing each of my six books has been a revelation to me. With each one I have grown and changed as a human being – this was most true with my first book, Freedom Seeker, where I wrote myself free, and with this most recent book, Kokoro, where I wrote myself happy.

CONFESSION #2: Don’t tell my family but part of the reason I write books is to get away from everyone

I could not love my family any more than I do, but sometimes I just need to be alone. It might be my personality, it might be my life stage, I’m not sure. Sometimes I just need quiet, and space to contemplate big questions about life, and writing a book is the PERFECT excuse for that.

I didn’t start writing books until my second child was born, so I have never known writing books without babies or children in the mix, and in amongst the huge amounts of goodness, my greatest challenge has always been a desperate need for quiet, which is hard with two little ones. Writing books became a great excuse to get away to far flung places like Costa Rica and Japan, and to picturesque towns and rural villages in my own country, usually for a few days, sometimes for a few weeks, to ponder big ideas without being asked for a snack or having to deal with a melt down. (Yes my husband is an actual angel and I could not be more grateful). I use my advances to book plane tickets and train tickets and rent airbnbs, and be alone, with my thoughts and my notebook. Utter bliss. Until the guilt kicks in of course.

The truth is every time I pack my suitcase I take out my sewing box and stitch the motherly guilt into my skin. I can’t help it. In the beginning it seemed so indulgent to go away alone for a few days and leave my husband to take care of everything, just so that I could write. Then one day I realised that it was my job. That makes it a little easier, but it doesn’t make the guilt go away. Funny how we are wired like that. I must say though, it has become easier with each book, now I know for a fact that I am a better person/mother/partner for having written, and the books that have resulted from my retreats have had a huge impact on the life of our family as a unit. They pay the mortgage and allow us to work flexibly around our young children’s lives (when I’m not away!)

I also want to recognize the value in my children seeing their mother following her dreams, not putting them off until one day when they have gone to uni. They are learning all sorts of things watching us work the way we work, and I know that they already have a much broader view of what is possible in a life than I had at their age.

CONFESSION #3: I usually have no idea what I am going to write at the point I sign a book deal

I write non-fiction books, so when I pitch my next book to a publisher, it is based on a hunch. I have an idea for something juicy, relevant to my particular area of expertise, experience and interest, and I do some research around why it would make a great book, and why it would help lots of people, and who those people might be who would read it.

But at the point of signing the contract, I have no idea what I am actually going to write.

This might come as a surprise to you, but actually when you pitch to a publisher you only need a book proposal, not a full manuscript (unless you are writing a memoir or a novel). They buy your idea, not the done book.

That’s what makes a book proposal a very unique thing – the art of writing one which gets you a book deal is in knowing how to articulate what is probably still a floaty vague idea well enough that there is a clear commercial case for it, without actually knowing what conclusion you are going to come to by the end.

The book I have just finished, Kokoro, took me five years to write. It morphed from a book about slow living (which is what my lovely publisher bought) and became a book about major life transitions, and about grief, and ultimately about making the most of this precious life. The world has changed so much in the past five years it is only natural that a book would evolve too (and I kept my editor in the look as it evolved), but the truth is I didn’t know how that book was going to end until two days before the deadline, when the ending showed itself to me.

Personally I think living with such uncertainty, learning to trust the process, and having faith that the universe will show me what I need to know when I need to know it, has been one of the greatest gifts of writing books, because of course it is entirely applicable to life as well.

CONFESSION #4: I have massive amounts of social anxiety when I have just come out of the writing cave

When you have spent several weeks beavering away on a creative project, people around you seem to think that you are now going to (a) relax or (b) party like a wild thing. The truth is all you actually want to do is first sleep for about 72 hours, then you have to catch up on all the work that has been building up all the time you have been in the writing cave, not to mention spending time with family. In my case I find myself purposely avoiding anywhere I might bump into people I actually know (and like very much), like the school gates, or clubs etc. It’s the weirdest thing, but I have to learn how to talk to people again.

Even though I have just spent fifteen hours a day working on a book with the intention of communicating with people at a deep level, and helping people feel less alone, and doing it because I love other human beings, when it comes to seeing people in real life just after I have finished writing a book, I want to run away. I can’t explain it, so I won’t try. I guess I am sharing here to say that if this is your experience, you aren’t the only one, and if you have a friend who is a writer, and they have been acting weirdly, this might be why.

Or maybe I’m just weird. Oh well, we’re all weird, one way or another.

CONFESSION #5: Self-doubt lingers like woodsmoke (this is from the woman who wrote a book called The Way of the Fearless Writer).

The thing about self-doubt is that it is a constant companion when you write and, dare I say it, as long as you are alive, if you are a sensitive human being who lives fully in the world, which is what you need to be if you are going to write anything useful about it.

Can I let you into a secret? When I wrote Wabi Sabi (which has sold a ton of copies, and relied on my experience as a Japanologist), I was physically shaking with self-doubt, putting it out in the world. You see, I have two degrees in Japanese, I have lived and worked in Japan for many years, I memorised an entire bilingual dictionary for my Masters, I once edited another, I even won a national award for my spoken Japanese but none of that matters because I am not a native speaker of Japanese, so in my mind, I was never good enough. I did not grow up in Japan. I did not go to school in Japan, so there will always be people who speak better Japanese than me.

But there came a point when I realized I could let the fact of me not being Japanese stop me, or I could turn it into an advantage, by embracing my outsiderliness and the perspective that brings, and simply doing the absolute best I could with all of my experience, and ability, and the networks I had built over many years. I decided there and then to never stop studying, to always do my own research (so my language would keep on improving, instead of stagnating), to be humble as I went about my interviews, and just in case, to pay native speakers out of my own money to review all my manuscripts before I submitted them.

These decisions have gone a long way to helping me deal with self-doubt around language, but the truth is it will never go away entirely, because I will never be a native speaker. It’s the same with writing. We can get better and better at writing, work at it, carefully choose who we get feedback from, read work that we consider to be fantastic and learn from that. But we will never be perfect, because there is always something else to learn, some life experience we haven’t had yet, someone else with more years of refining sentences under their belt. But in the meantime, we get better by putting our work out in the world, letting it fly, and working on something else.

If I had let self-doubt stop me, instead of six books out in the world, I would have none. Each one has taught me something new about how to write a book, and I am grateful for that.

By the way, I should add that I am a fearless writer. I have absolutely no fear around writing (in terms of spilling words onto the page) these days - read The Way of the Fearless Writer if you want to discover what happened to make that true - but that does not mean I don’t have self-doubt as a human being. The difference is that these days I try to remind myself that the self-doubt is evidence that I am trying to do big and scary stuff in the world which requires being vulnerable (which is terrifying by its nature and that’s okay), that I am making the most of my life, trying new things and risking making big mistakes in front of others.

And part of me thinks, Oh well. Life is short. And I’m going to be pushing fifty soon, so there’s no time to waste.

I think that’s enough confessions for one day. Let me know if you’d like to hear some more another time. And if any of them resonated with you, I’d love to know. Perhaps you have a secret book dream? Go for it, I say. 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. Sometimes we all need to hear that others are a little bit weird too, just like us!

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

Photo: Holly Bobbins