Try Writing "The Book of You" to Get to the Good Stuff

An Easy Cure For Writer's Block

If you suffer from writers block, it may be that the thing you’re trying to write is not what you really want to write right now. Or something else is blocking its passage from your brain (or wherever good stories really come from) onto the page.

I wrote my first novel when I was 19. It was the story of a guy who pretends to be God on the Internet and people start to believe him. I read the New Testament and tried to make the story parallel it in the same way that the movie Clueless parallels Jane Austen’s Emma. But all the magic was changed to coincidence, exaggeration, and misunderstanding.

I think I got the idea from those email forwards that used to fly around when the Internet first started. Like chain letters - if you don’t forward this to 20 people, you’ll be dead by the end of the year or something.

Anyway, I wasn’t sure how many pages of my notebook it would take to write the story that was taking shape in my mind, but I decided to give it a go. I sat down and started to write. By the time I was a few chapters in, it started getting hard. I still kind of knew the direction it was moving, but I could not force myself to write it.

I left it alone for a day. Then two. Then a week. Time went on and the book didn’t get writ. I thought about it all the time. Couldn’t get it out of my head. But also couldn’t write the damn thing. I thought maybe it was because there was a disconnect between my head, where the story had a shape and was moving all the time, and my hands, that were not picking up the pen and translating that into words.

And something else kept sneaking into my mind which I could scarcely control. Me.

What a bloody pain.

One day, I was moaning to my mother about my narcissism getting in the way of a good, fictional tale, and she suggested that I embrace the narse. That I simply write everything I want to about myself.

The Book of Me.

Hm, that sounded extremely self-indulgent, but it made sense on some levels. Get it out of my system. Write something easy that would flow and maybe learn some things in the process.

What did I have to lose?

So I did. I wrote a bunch of chapter headings in a fresh notebook and filled them in as a series of little essays - what I hate about myself, what I love about myself, how I see myself, how I think others see me, how I see others, etc. The last chapter was about my spiritual beliefs.

Amazingly, it worked. When it was done, I picked up the first notebook again and finished the draft.

My second work of fiction was the sci-fi novel, Journey to Kyron, in its first iteration. It was a struggle, but I got through a draft in a year or two. I was proud of it. It had multiple storylines happening over gigantic time periods. I calculated how fast a ship would take to get to another planet only a handful of lightyears away and figured at the fastest speed I could imagine, it would be something like 200,000 years.

Early readers struggled with lots of it, but that was probably the biggest killer. Readers just couldn’t grasp it, so I called it unfinished and moved on with my life. Kind of.

Again, I couldn’t get it out of my head and knew I’d have to go back to it. But I no longer felt equipped to write a work of fiction. I was convinced it was all terrible.

So I used the same trick.

I decided to write about myself again. This time in memoir form. I took an interesting year from my life and turned it into a book. It was much easier to write than pure fiction because the characters were based on real people and the events really happened and I just had to embellish a bit and put it into a structure that gave it an arc.

I wrote it during Covid lockdown and edited it with quite a bit of help and feedback.

And I’m pretty sure it’s not terrible. It was long-listed for a manuscript prize and all the readers who have read it have been fairly positive. Not “best book I’ve ever read” positive, but “yeah, it’s good. It’s real.”

Which gave me the confidence to get back to Kyron and write it again. Which I did.

Still not satisfied, I’m now into the third rewrite and struggling to get any momentum, but today I had a realization. What I’m doing on Substack - writing about my dreams, my travels, my childhood trauma, and my sex life - is probably a version of that same technique. Use the easy stuff that flows to get to the fiction that doesn’t always.

Yes, it feels self-indulgent and might not be that interesting but at least I’m writing. Practicing the craft. Maybe learning a thing or two. And seeing as I’m doing it in public this time, I can hope that I’m bringing something positive and creative to the world too.

So, if you’re struggling to write what you believe you should be writing, maybe you just need to write the Book of You. Well, you’d call it of Me, but you know what I mean.

But yeah. That’s the purpose this Substack is serving. Sharing myself with anyone who may be interested or inspired by it, as I try to find the muse again to get me back on the Journey to Kyron.

Thanks for joining me, and if you like writing but sometimes get stuck, maybe give it a go.

You might learn something about yourself!