There is enough stuff happening in your head right now to write a book. Too don’t need to do more research. You don’t need to look things up. You certainly don’t need to start looking into how to publish a book. The point is that the book exists between your ears, somewhere in there. Every single day of your life has a story. Is the story interesting? Who can say. But something happened to you. You did something.
The problem is actually writing it. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes a lot of mental strength to force the ideas out. But the page is not blank. Even when there are no words there, there is no such thing as a blank page. Because you have absorbed so much, you know so much, that the page already has so much context. There is already structure, your thoughts already have an order.
The key to writing is the key to thinking. The act of thinking and remembering is reconstructive. You are rebuilding a scene pixel by pixel in your mind. Attempting to capture a time that was. And it will never be perfect, but the way that you construct memories will change something inside of you. A memory can break your spirit if you let it. If you build it up to be bigger and bigger, worse and worse. A memory can also give you all the hope or confidence that you would ever need in life. And it may not even be true. Some sort of Dumbo magic feather. Dumbo could always fly.
Writing should come as easily as thinking, because writing is thinking. After you learn a language, your thoughts are given something to coalesce around. A framework. Letters are the tools, and the means through which you can share those thoughts. Animals live their entire lives unable to share their thoughts. Think of Remarkably Bright Creatures, an octopus in a tank. More intuitive than the human characters, but lacking the engineered telepathy that evolved from being pathologically eusocial creatures. The octopus cannot speak, except to the audience. To himself. The octopus can only share his thoughts in an abstract or infantile way.
Humans may not be the smartest animal on Earth. But humans have language. The most powerful computer in the world is an expensive paperweight if it is not running any software. The ability to take those thoughts out of your head and to put them onto the page is a great gift. It has fundamentally changed the natural order of things.
There are no giants so grand that they could have developed their own prerequisites. No scientist so brilliant they could have invented all of their field of study while living exclusively in their own head. It is not possible. They had to read, they had to learn what others found out. They had to take thoughts from the outside world, and program them into their brains, without even sharing the experience that led to the conclusion. And suddenly, something you read becomes something you know. Something you know just as truly as if you had seen it occur with your own eyes. It is astounding.
And when you do not write, or when you write poorly, you are removing yourself and your thoughts from consideration. The book in your head goes unpublished. Why?
Research is useful, but it is a crutch. With the access of so much knowledge literally at your fingertips, it may often seem easier to find the answers externally. What is your first thought when you need an idea? Go to Google, or some such. Finding some listical that explains your thoughts before you have them. The listical becomes truth. You have been advertised to.
So just don’t do that. Try something different. Actually look at that page and start the process. Return to thinking. Just start writing and don’t stop. There is no such thing as a blank page if you let yourself fill it. And the full page can be edited into something more usable, more reasonable. You may even end up crossing out 99% of what you write, but that is not a problem. Having something to cross out is a success.
So think about the book that you would write. There is not just one book in your head either. There are many. On many subjects and many things. If you’ve ever read a book, and thought it was interesting, just know that that came out of someone else’s head. They didn’t find that book on a listical of best books to read. They just wrote one. They sat down, and they wrote their thoughts.
