WHAT IS THE HARDEST THING ABOUT WRITING A BOOK? 2
Knowing what your book is about is the hardest part of writing it.
How do you realize that? When you realize you don’t know what to title it.
You think you’ve finished your book, and you give it a title. In the case of the book about Qatar, the obvious title was “Qatar: present.” Or “Qatar: contemporary history,” or iterations of both.
But you quickly realize the problem. It’s a terrible title. It doesn’t stand out from hundreds of books on the subject. It doesn’t say anything to the reader. If the books “Contemporary History of Qatar” and “Qatar Today” are next to each other in the bookstore, which one do you buy? Which one do you think is better? Which one appeals to you?
With titles like that, none.
Well, you say to yourself, the reader should check the index… But the reader doesn’t have to do anything that you think he “should” do. One type of reader will do it, but those readers aren’t abundant.
And the problem remains: the bland title can remain in the index if you didn’t put any care into it when you gave your book a title, name!, much less when you listed the chapters.
You can’t give your book a title if the only thing you know about your book is the subject.
The only way to give your book a name is, as we already said, to know what you want to communicate with it, to know what you want to say, to be clear about the message you want to give the reader. To really know what your book is about, which is not the subject it deals with but the spirit that drove you in the first place to spend months researching.
What bug bit you to write it?
There is a second way to give it a title.
You have worked without a map or compass, letting yourself be carried away by curiosity, paying attention to the questions you find or that you ask in front of the bibliography, in front of the interviewee. You must organize all this information in an index, separate it into categories, and think about which topic you should talk about first, why, and then how you will organize the rest of the topics.
That is the opportunity.
You are forced to organize, to propose a head and a torso and some arms and legs to give it shape, to give meaning to your work. The difficult part of this process is that you will surely find subtopics that interest you and that you did not investigate as much as others. That will make the work difficult because you will be tempted to go back to investigate. The best thing is not to do it. That can mean frustration for the entire project. Due to lack of time or resources or because you are already very tired or bored, you give up and do not write anymore.
That is why this second method is dangerous.
The best way is to limit yourself to the material you already have and use that and only that to work. This is what a person who has already reached this point should do.
Something that helped me a lot in the process was the atmosphere of the 2022 World Cup. Everyone was talking about certain specific topics, all the content revolved around the same thing. It was easy to see that there was no point in talking anymore, and instead it was equally clear all the gaps that the abundance of information created. The stadiums were talked about for hours, but not about the places where they were built. The subject of workers’ rights and the scandal of their situation came up, but the life of the Qataris and what they thought and said about the World Cup was not focused on. Which directly affected their political and social situation. The scenes of the workers in the stadiums were repeated but not of the other workers who had nothing to do with the World Cup.
And so the title appeared to me: “Qatar. Out of the Stadium.” I think this generates more interest than titles like the ones I mentioned above.
The book I finished has a subtitle: “Three Qatari Wars.”
The full title is “Qatar: Out of the Park. Three Qatari Wars.”
The subtitle is meant to point out Qatar’s geopolitical situation, the state of its relations with its neighbors, which is not easy at all. Since that is also “out of the park,” I think it makes sense to put it there.