The Art of Not Writing A Book

For quite some time now I’ve had a desire to write a book.

I’m not entirely sure where that desire comes from. Is it that I want to be recognized the world over as an author? Is it that I just want to feel like I’m potentially helping people with whatever I’d write about?

To be honest I’m not entirely sure where the desire comes from, it’s a pretty deep question, and not one that I want to get into this morning.

The biggest issue with the actual writing of the book has been this, every time I start on one I tend to get scatter brained, or I lose focus and get bored. Other times I simply get tired and go to bed. Or the character I chose to write the story about got tired and went to bed.

Perhaps not being able to write in large chunks about a single topic means I’m just not really cut out for it. Or perhaps it means that I just don’t have the right technique for researching and writing about a single subject.

At any rate, this morning I was thinking about writing books and remembered something that I did a few years ago. After digging around in some old files I finally found the file I was looking for.

The document is titled very clearly – Blog Posts.

When I dissolved my old blog (nodleulations) I exported the entire thing and put all of the posts into a single Word document.

I’m still amazed at the sheer number of words in that document. From August 2009 until November 2011 there are something over 100,000 words and 250 pages.

That’s a lot of words and pages. But I remind myself that it could have been more. I could have written every day… I’d be interested what it would look like if I’d do the same thing with my posts since then and see where we stand, I fairly confident that I’d be easily double that number now.

So what am I trying to say in this post?

I’m not sure yet.

Perhaps I’m just trying to convince myself that I could write a book. You know, if I actually wanted to.

Perhaps I’m just not sure what to write about this morning so my scattered mind came up with something for me.

Perhaps I’m worried about the characters of my previous book projects not being able to get anywhere in life if I don’t help them (Mark and Jared, hang in there).

If you were going to write a book what would you write about and how would you approach the writing process?