This post is the second of two on finding your voice.  

It seems like every other person I meet either announces that they’re a storyteller or tells me that they want to write a book.  So naturally we start talking about the book they want to write, and it almost always falls into one of three categories.  First, and most common, they’ve led a remarkable life and have lots of anecdotes to share.  For these memoirists, the challenges have to do with time and selection.  That desire to write a book is constantly giving way to other more pressing tasks, or they can’t figure out where to begin – there’s simply too much material.

I met a wonderful psychologist a few weeks back who had me convulsed with laughter over the stories (anonymized, of course) of her patients, and she referred to boxes and boxes and boxes of case notes going back 30 years – and when would she ever have the time to sort through all of them?

Second, and a little less common, they’ve got an insight into an industry or an idea or a slice of life. They know something no one else knows, and their friends are always telling them they should write a book.  For these people, the issue is really that they’re good at something else, not writing a book, and they can’t stop long enough to learn how to become an expert in book writing.  Sometimes the solution to that is essentially dictation.

We had to corner Les Gold in a hotel room, order room service, and lock the door to get him to stop filming his TV show long enough to tell us the stories and negotiating hacks that formed the basis of his highly entertaining book, For What It’s Worth: Business Wisdom from a Pawnbroker. 

And third, and the smallest of the three categories, but a significant one nonetheless, they’re in recovery, and they want to share (or someone they respect thinks they should share) the story of how they beat the addiction to drugs or alcohol or sugar or gambling or whatever the problem is.

Do you fit into one of these three categories of people who think they have a book in them?  If so, I have some blunt, and perhaps unwelcome advice.  You should, like Mark Twain may have said of exercise, “lie down until the feeling passes.”

Here’s the bad news.  If you’re the memoirist, the first category, there simply isn’t a market for what you have to say, unless you were one of three members of a famous rock band, and the other two are dead, or you climbed Mount Everest riding an ostrich, or you were Fidel Castro’s gay lover.

Second, if you’re the one with the insight, your industry, or idea, or slice of life is currently changing fast enough that by the time you write your book your information will be outdated.  As Geoffrey West details in his splendid and essential book, Scale, human life and knowledge are measurably moving faster than ever – and the pace of change itself is accelerating.  This acceleration is not water cooler gossip, it’s fact.  And thus the dissemination of knowledge is necessarily affected, especially at the pace of book publication.

And finally, your recovery story is of interest to the group of fellow sufferers, and it may indeed be life-saving, but no one else.

Unless.  Unless how you tell the story is in your unique voice.  Unless you show us the real truth behind the cover story, unless you let out the authentic person and tell us your deep, raw story in a way that can only come from your perspective.  Don’t even think about writing a book unless you’re going to do that.  And if you are going to do that, don’t even think about not writing a book.  A book is a piece of permanence in a world that is throwing everything away faster and faster, including the precious voices of unique human beings.  If you’re willing and able to share your voice with us, then please start writing.