No, you can’t write a book in 30 days
During these last weeks, I’ve received some posts with tips and tricks on how to write a book in 30 days. They reminded me of a friend of mine that, despite praising and preaching the benefits of being constant, he literally brain-dumped his first book in one month. Ah, the irony.
Let me be clear, if you want to write a decent book, don’t do that. Or more like, be my guest, you’re on an excellent path to writing a horrible and disgusting book.
Great books take years of work. Years of thought and years of editing. It’s not something you do while being high on Benzedrine like Kerouac’s On The Road.
You can put years of research and note taking into words in a month. That you can. What you can’t do is dump whatever bright idea comes into your brain and expect to write something close to decent in a 30-day time span.
Let’s be honest, most of the books out there are worthless. And I’m not talking about the prose; I won’t even go there. Most books are rewrites of blog posts, extended Quora comments or water cooler conversation with friends.
Most suggestions, advice, and experiences encoded in such books are a thousand years old. Wisdom that is known to many but transcribed into our current Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurial lingo.
There isn’t anything bad about it, but we must face the truth, most suck. From a literature standpoint, even the most enlightening ones seem to have a high disregard for the English dictionary.
It’s not until you stump onto a well-written book that you suddenly gasp in perplexity. What is this? Is this word even allowed? Oh look, it sounds like a line from Game of Thrones.
Quality, like in any other field, requires talent, expertise, knowledge and time.
Yes, there is such thing as literature, good writing, and extensive editing. There is such thing as taking the time to review and rewrite a page over and over and over again. Quality, like in any other field, requires talent, expertise, knowledge and time.
Yes, time. And that’s one of the major factors affecting book quality. No one has time to edit and rewrite anything. We dump the first thing that comes to our mind, and off we go, it will go viral if we make it to Product Hunt.
So if you’re thinking about writing your book, becoming famous and making an appearance on the Charlie Rose show, please, do us a favor, and take a little longer than one month to write those pages.
PS: Yes, I did dump this rant on these pages, ah, the irony.
