WHAT IS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING A BOOK? 1

Thinking about the reader. That’s the hard part.

Writing a book without knowing why anyone would care is not the worst way to write it, but if you do it that way then you have to carefully consider how you offer it.

“You should write the books you want to read.” The quote is not mine (I don’t remember who it is from either) but it is completely true. If you have that awareness you can answer what matters and who cares about what you write. It is not contradictory to write the books you want and at the same time consider the reader.

In 2022 I wrote a contemporary history of Qatar taking advantage of the wave of the FIFA 22 World Cup. But I didn’t know what book I was going to write.

The awareness I had was that since I knew nothing about that country I had to find the pattern, the characteristic, the idea that would explain it to me.

What was “Qatar”? A family story? A revolution? A religious struggle? A civil war? A mine or a port that ends up being so big that it becomes a gigantic management problem? A myth, which myth?

This is the real first step.

The second step is to gather information. And it is a very dangerous step.

Gathering information is not easy even if it is very accessible. Even with the Internet and Artificial Intelligence, research is still a rough part of writing. It takes a lot of time, takes up a lot of resources, and becomes a cognitive problem that can make you fail. Because you have accumulated a lot of information, you mistakenly believe that you “already have” the book or even that you already know “what it is about.”

This is not the case.

The third step (the work of writing it) can be drowned out by the second because gathering information is not the book. You have to repeat that to yourself. You have to ask them to tell you. There must be some app for that.

What you must not lose is your bearings: what do you want to know with all that information? What do you care about, what could anyone care about?

The hardest part about writing a book is that you have to know what it’s about before you write it.

If you write a book that you care about then you know it.

But if you don’t know that when you start then you have to work to answer it without getting lost in the multitude of difficulties that appear when gathering information. The problems of gathering information are never the real problem in writing a book even though that is the part that uses the most time and resources.

The work after that can be counterintuitively easy. It can even be incredibly fast.

In 2022 I also wrote another 4 books. I will talk about those processes in the next posts. Thanks for reading.