Behind the Scenes: How My Self-Development Book Turned Into Memoir
In November of 2017, I furiously wrote down potential topics to write about for my book.
All I knew was that I wanted to write to publish a book after creating a mini one in 2015. I had heard about National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.
50,000 words over 30 days, so I’d write 1667 words on a topic each day.
The writing was crazy fast and super crappy.
That fast flow of surrendered writing was the whole point of NaNoWriMo
My first book, titled, Unfussy Mom: Simplifying Your Life, Staying Sane, and Working Like a Boss, was the book I needed at that time in my life. It was for the 9-5 working mom who was trying to balance work, family, and life.
So much has changed since then. So much of the advice would be different today.
Keeping with the “unfussy” theme, this next book was going to be a self-development book about simplifying your life and taking an easy and relaxed approach to life.
A few days before beginning the writing process, I turned on some Metallica and wrote fast and furious, aiming to come up with 30 topics to write about (one for each day in November). Some of the topics included:
Being intentional with social media
Setting expectations and boundaries — saying yes when you mean no
Saying no
Gratitude practice
Doing the important work
the original cards with the topics for my book, Unfussy Life
I did it! I wrote 50,000 super shitty words in 30 days. Then I needed some space from it. I put the book down for a whole year and picked it back up again in November 2018 and revised what I originally wrote a year earlier.
After that, I had found a great editor to help me make it better and get it into shape to be worthy of a bookshelf (and not my desk drawer). She made lots of suggestions about where to expand, where to add personal stories and some ideas for arranging the whole thing.
I didn't pick it up again until early and 2019, and it changed and morphed quite a bit since then.
Until that meeting with an intuitive who asked me to tell her about my book…
“Well, it’s a book about living an unfussy life. It’s advice on how to simplify, live with less, and take an easy approach to life.”
She paused, “You might not like what I have to say, but your book is a memoir.”
That idea hung in the air. It didn’t resonate, and I was absolutely not excited to rewrite the entire thing.
I left it alone for a few more months.
All the while, ideas of the book would pop into my mind in the middle of the night or at 5 a.m. How inconvenient!
It wasn’t an exact moment that nudged me to pull it out again and start working with it, but a series of moments.
I opened up the draft with my editor’s comments. They all had a similar theme:
Add more personal antidotes
Tell the story behind the advice
Tell the reader why you think this now
Wait, my book is a memoir!
The intuitive was right! And I knew it all along but ignored those inner nudges.
Call me crazy, but I revised the entire thing. I added more than 25,000 words and removed just as many. I reached back into my brain for all the forgotten stories and wrote them as they came to me. The funny thing about digging up the old stuff in your mind is that you get even more ideas. During this significant revision, I had so many new ideas, memories, and stories to add.
I still need to write the intro and do a final revision, plus copyedits, and today it sits at 76,000 words. It’s part memoir, part self-development.
Those original note cards were only the starting seeds of the bigger story. And it took two years to figure out what the thread holding them all together was. During these revisions, the theme came together, too — change.
I picked up those note cards after almost three years, and one card stood out to me. It says, "Change is change."
the theme of my memoir
Imagine my surprise when I had an A-HA moment more than a year earlier telling me that change was the book's theme.
It’s a book about all the lessons I’ve had on change. Embracing change when it sucks, lessons on change growing up, and creating change when necessary.
By allowing this work the creative space to go deeper, and sitting down to the draft manuscript, especially when it was uncomfortable — and most days, it is uncomfortable, let me uncover the deeper story.
For me, deeper is better. I’m an INFJ — which means I can only do deep conversation. Small talk physically hurts. I want to uncover, understand, dismantle, and put ideas back together. To me, everything has a much deeper meaning. Almost always deeper than what our eyes and brains can comprehend.
Here’s your invitation to pause so you can go deeper.
Whatever it is you’re working on, what’s in there for you to revisit, spend a week pondering, or sleep on?
How might your project become even better if you give it some space to breathe?
And then, lean in even closer?
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