Instructions on how to write a book

a mostly visual essay

—Heya. Pre-ordered the book yet? Just two weeks until it’s out in the wild.—

Get existentially freaked out about something in your own life and realize there is a larger thing going on. Google shit and find almost nothing. Read some books and ask some people and learn a lot.

Publish some initial essays and spark a national conversation among fascinating strangers. Pour over their emails.

Read some more. Talk some more. Live a lot.

Ask your Quaker mentor for a phone call where he asks you hard, open-ended questions about whether you should actually write this book. Decide that, despite all the reasons not to, you must.

Land with an editor you have been smitten with since you were 25 and sold your first book.

Land with a community of people, particularly one beautiful, hilarious friend who mentors you in showing up.

Talk to so many people. Live. Live. Live. Take notes. Make mistakes. Pay attention.

Read obscure, beautifully titled dissertations.

Go to so many meetings. So. Many. Meetings.

Refuse to make anyone into a hero or a villain, especially yourself. Keep asking yourself what there is to learn from the people who make you want to write villains.

Read more.

Right size yourself. Over and over again.

Make weird visual maps of your confusion.

Have hard conversations. Hang in there with them. Cultivate democratic friendships.

Perfect climbing a ladder with a cup of coffee in one hand and a laptop in the other so you can hide in the top floor of a messy old barn and write.

Learn so much about how kids learn to read, how school funding flows, how Brown v. Board failed.

Learn to see White culture. Learn to see it in your own life, your own language, your own expectations.

Read more books.

Organize all your research and reporting into a Scrivner file. Gaze at the Scrivner file adoringly.

Pay for a transcription service but spend hours and hours listening back to your interviews anyway.

Survive a pandemic.

Get in the 1975 VW bus in your driveway every morning at 6am and write like your ass is on fire for three hours before taking care of two wondering, wandering children all day.

Do it over and over and over again until you’ve written a book.

Print the book out on real paper. Edit it. Revise it.

Print the book out on real paper again. Read it aloud to yourself. (This will be terrible; do it anyway.)

Share pages of the book with people you trust to tell you the truth. (This is scary.) Listen to what they suggest. Don’t explain yourself. Just get it all on the page.

Share pages of the book with people who are portrayed in the book. (This is scary.) Be astounded by their generosity.

Mrs. Minor, a central character and expert, featured in the book, with her son.

Have a friend who organizes all your friends to give you little gifts of encouragement as you face the final month before your deadline. Cry every day while you drink the whiskey they bring and read the cards they write and look at the art of your heroes they make.

Turn in the book.

Get edits back.

Not my actual editor, though I believe my editor would fully endorse the use of this photo to represent her.

Revise the book.

Have the book fact checked by someone with a massive appetite for accuracy. Feel so grateful.

Have the book copy edited by someone with an eagle eye. Feel so grateful.

Get a galley of the book and realize you are alone at some strange moment and grab it and read a random page and then look up at a giant Redwood tree with one small young branch near the bottom and think, “That’s my book. That’s me. Just trying to grow a little in the scheme of a vast history.”

Send a million emails about the book.

Have a therapy session where you name all the paradoxes you are holding around the book and then write them in your journal.

Be disappointed by rejection. Get over it.

Be elated by conversations you get to have with people you admire.

For deets, go here.

Pray like hell that the book finds its people.

Learning in Public made it onto Bookshop’s bestsellers this week—sandwiched between two books I have such profound respect for, Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed and Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweet Grass. (Fun fact: my sister-in-law designed the cover of Braiding Sweet Grass!) Thank you so much to all of you who have pre-ordered the book and spread the word among friends and colleagues. The national conversation is just getting warmed up and I’m so grateful that you’re the spark.