How writing a book changes you

Authors know things that other thinkers, no matter how accomplished, don’t. You can tell by the knowing looks when we get together.

To a certain extent this is like sex: it’s hard to explain to virgins what’s different. Even so, I’ll try.

What authors know

People with ideas think they know all about those ideas. But we know that until you’ve had to justify an idea in a whole book, you don’t really have a robust and intimate knowledge of that idea.

We know what it is like to work on a sustained project for a year or more with multiple triumphs, setbacks, and recoveries, and to see it completed and launched into the world.

We know what it is like to pour our heart and soul into a pile of text, then have an editor tell us it’s not working. Or, sometimes, have an editor tell us it’s glorious.

We know how to desperately search for evidence to prove we’re right. We know the triumph of finding that proof, or of talking to the expert who confirms what we suspected. We also sometimes know what it’s like to find the evidence that proves us wrong, and to change our idea of the world and write about the new truth. We call that growth, and it’s painful but rewarding.

We know how it feels to argue for hours about a word or three, because we care about those words.

We know doubt. Oh, boy, do we know doubt. Doubt stalks us all day long and approaches us from all sorts of unexpected directions. But we also know how it feels to keep going, doubt and all.

We know how it feels to choose working on the book over time with our families. We’re sorry. We’ll make it up to you. And yes, it was worth it.

If we have coauthors, we know how it feels to raise an idea together; to care about each other and our idea so much that it hurts to argue, but would hurt more to just give in.

We know about titles and cover graphics: decisions that seem to matter so much, but that our experience has never taught us how to make. Ask us about how hard those decisions were. We’ll talk your ear off.

We know publishers are frustrating and incomprehensible. That’s true on the first book. It’s also true on the second, third, and nth book. Somehow, they keep finding ways to surprise and confound us no matter how much we learn.

We know the ineffable joy of holding the book in our hands after the long journey of creating it. And of knowing that once we’re holding it, there’s a year of promotional effort remaining ahead of us.

We know what writers cramp from signing 300 copies feels like.

We know what it feels like to meet someone new from some faraway place who says “I read your book. Wow, it changed things for me. It’s so rewarding to meet you.”

We know that writing a book was one of the hardest things we ever did. And that we want to do it again.

One more thing

We’re eager to use AI to help us with the research and creation process, because anything that can make that easier and better is worth doing.

We’re also upset that AI has been ripping off our content without asking or paying, dumping our unique and effortful work into a huge bin and treating it as a commodity.

And we know in our bones that no AI could ever create what we created. We made art. It makes slop. There is a big difference.