I like everything about writing. You could, too.

A social media poster recently asked what part of writing a book their followers hated — ideation, drafting, editing, rewriting, and so on.

I think I was the only one who responded “I love all of it.” And I do.

Here’s what I love about all the phases of writing a nonfiction book. This could be you if you get yourself into the right frame of mind.

Ideation

What’s your book about?

The wonderful thing about having written nothing yet is that anything is possible. You can change your mind from moment to moment about your book without having to abandon any work. You can talk to people about your book and change your mind based on those conversations.

Ideation before writing is totally enjoyable for anyone who is likes ideas. Every experience you have and everything you read could kick off a fascinating idea.

Research

Once you have an idea, you need to gather evidence. Now, with the help of AI, you can open up the aperture broadly and get a really wide collection of previously published material to review.

If you are curious person, trolling through lots of other people’s ideas is pure joy. Learning about stuff is your actual job! You also get the chance to make connections that nobody else has ever noticed.

Research also means reaching out to people who have unique, relevant experiences and interviewing them. People are endlessly fascinating, so those interviews are often quite enjoyable.

And there’s no pressure to make it make sense yet. So have a blast.

Planning

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m a planner, not a pantser. That is, I plan out what will be in the book, rather than writing by the seat of my pants.

Planning bears the same relationship to writing as architecture does to building. It’s your chance to construct a framework that brings all your ideas together.

A quick tip here: use the reader question method to plan your chapter organization, identifying which of readers’ questions each chapter will answer.

Planning has the advantage that it’s easy to rearrange without much risk, at least until you start writing. For planners like me, building the plan is highly rewarding, because we know it will pay off hugely during the writing phase.

Pitching publishers

If you hope to get a traditional publishing contract, you’ll need to build a book proposal. I’ll admit it, that’s a whole lot of work. (Here’s an example you can download and use as a template.)

Writing a proposal is sort of a dress rehearsal for writing the book. You’ll need to nail down the main idea, build a table of contents (easy if you planned it properly in the previous stage), write a sample chapter, and design a promotional plan.

Building all those elements is good practice. So that can be enjoyable.

Getting rejected by publishers isn’t fun, but the work of creating the proposal still can be.

Writing

I have to admit, I really can’t get my head around the challenge of authors who say the writing is the hardest part.

For me, the writing is the part that’s the most fun. I love writing case study stories. I like solving the puzzle of how to put a chapter together. I just love typing words in ways that fit together and are engaging to readers.

It’s totally a flow experience. If you know anything about psychology, you know that being in flow is what turns work into exhilaration. It’s why we’re writers!

Feedback and revision

There is something wrong with what you wrote.

That’s no knock on you. Everyone has something wrong with what they wrote.

A talented editor will tell you what’s wrong and suggest how to fix it.

It’s far better to do that when the book is still ongoing.

If you have an emotional reaction to being edited it, get over it. Getting the opportunity to make something good into something better ought to be rewarding. It’s your chance to create something great.

Copy editing and book production

Raise your hand if like being copy edited.

Wow. No hands went up.

But let’s admit it. Some of us are detail-oriented people. We’re the kind of people who like crocheting and folding laundry. (I admit, I have a side that’s like this.) We’re the ones who’ve read Dreyer’s English cover-to-cover and liked every word.

Folks like that love finding and fixing all the grammatical errors and bits of punctuation. And we also get to be smug about how the copy editor found hardly anything because we were really good writers and understand everything about how written English works.

And it is definitely enjoyable to see your book laid out in pages — the first moment when it seems like a real book.

I used to run a book production department for a publisher. I liked doing this for authors. And I still like it.

Publication and promotion

A lot of authors hate promotion. I get it. You put in all that work getting the book published, and now you have to hit the bricks to tell everyone how great it is? If you’re an introvert or don’t have a big ego, this is probably tedious.

But think about it.

If you do this work, you get the chance to talk to lots of interesting people about your book, like reviewers and podcasters. You get to promote bits and pieces of the book on social media and interact with people who read it. And you get to give speeches about it.

Writing a book is a solitary activity. Lonely, even. But now you get to take it out into the world and interact with people about something you created.

There are also the moments when you’re sitting in a room with hundreds of copies of your book and signing them. All of us secretly get an ego boost from that.

Real writers love readers as much as they love writing. So if you get into the right frame of mind, book promotion can be an excellent experience. You created the book, why not enjoy people reacting to it?

Learn to love all of it

I love books. I love everything about them. I love researching, writing, and promotion. I love being an author, which has been my ambition since I first started reading. I can’t believe I actually get to make my living this way. What a privilege.

It’s partly about enjoying the best parts of being an author.

And partly about learning to enjoy even the parts you thought would be tedious or difficult.

Real writers learn to embrace all of it. And once you do that, being an author is the most fulfilling creative experience you could ever have.

That’s an lifelong ambition worth pursuing. I hope you get to experience it the way I have.