What Writing a Book Taught Me About Writing

As a marketer I write for a living. Ebooks, white papers, website copy, sales decks — I've written more of those than I can count. So when I started working on a book, I figured the main challenge would be logistics. Finding the time and managing the output alongside everything else.

The writing itself, I assumed, would feel familiar.

Boy was I was wrong about that. More wrong than I ever expected.

What I thought it would be

My mental model going in was something like: a book is just a lot of ebooks stitched together. It may be longer and more structured, but fundamentally the same kind of work. I know how to build a narrative. I know how to start with a problem and work toward a point. I'd just do that, but at greater length. Right?

That model held for approximately the first week.

What it actually was

Some days the writing came easily. I'd sit down and lose hours without noticing. The ideas connected, the sentences moved, and I'd surface from it feeling like something real had happened.

Other days, nothing. I had things I wanted to say. I just couldn't find the way in. The chapter that felt completely clear as an outline and interview notes became intangible the moment I tried to actually put it down.

What I also hadn't expected was the emotional dimension. Business writing is functional. It has a job to do and it does it. A book asks for something different of you. You're sustaining a voice across a much longer arc, making hundreds of small decisions about what to include and what to leave out, knowing those choices shape what someone actually takes away. That weight is real, and I hadn't accounted for it. I felt completely exposed, and it was scarier than I could have anticipated.

The structural problem nobody warned me about

Ebooks and white papers are self-contained. Each one begins, argues, ends. There's usually a CTA throw in there somewhere. But those are the basics. A book has to build. The arguments have to compound.

Holding that architecture in your head while also writing at the sentence level is genuinely hard. I'd get deep into a section and realize I'd drifted from the frame I'd established earlier. Or I'd finish something that felt good on its own but didn't serve the larger arc. So I'd go back, and write it again. It's no wonder this process took me more than 8 drafts (before anyone even saw it) and nearly two years.

Anne Lamott writes about the shitty first draft in Bird by Bird — the idea that you have to give yourself permission to write badly before you can write well. I'd always thought of that as encouragement. Working on the book, I understood it as a practical strategy. Getting words down, even wrong ones, was the only way to find out what the right ones should be.

What came naturally, and what didn't

The parts closest to what I already did — explaining a concept clearly, making an argument, translating something complex into plain language — those came without much struggle.

The new 'muscle' I had to build was patience with the process, days when nothing worked, and the version of myself that had expected this to feel easier. Business writing is purposeful and bounded. A book is a different kind of commitment, and it takes longer to see what you're actually making.

I finished it. I'm glad I did. And I'd do it again knowing what I know now — which is that it was going to be harder than I thought, and that was probably the point. I can't wait to share it with the world!