Is It Time To Finally Birth Your Book?
Making The Move From Dreaming About Making Your Story Public To Actually Doing So
I remember the day my justice-seeking parts decided to tell my very vulnerable story publicly. I’d just quit my job as a doctor and I was in recovery from the PTSD of my medical training, including all the sexual harassment, moral injury, relational destruction, narcissistic abuse by my medical school professors, and even criminal assault that I was too afraid to prosecute. The statute of limitations had passed me by, so it was too late to seek justice via law enforcement and lawyers. But I knew I was a decent writer and figured maybe I could find some sort of justice with the power of my pen.
But other parts of me were downright terrified to even try. I had parts afraid of rejection, afraid of failure, afraid of what everybody would think, afraid I’d get crucified by my perpetrators, afraid I wasn’t talented enough, afraid nobody would empathize with my suffering, afraid I didn’t have any clue what I was doing. All the afraids.
But the drive of my muse parts ultimately took the lead, wrestling with all the other parts and convincing them that writing was something worth doing, even if I failed, even if I wasn’t good enough, even if there was backlash, even if [all the afraids.]
My first attempt at publication did not result in a book, largely because I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t have any sort of “platform.” I didn’t even know what a platform was. I was a doctor, not a tech person. I barely had an email address and was the last person I knew to get a smart phone! I had zero social media accounts but had the misconception that being a good writer was good enough.
That all turned out to be false. But how would I have known that?
I learned everything the hard way, but now, 17 years and 8 books later, I’ve learned a lot. I’m getting ready to share it in a Zoom weekend workshop with anyone who is interested in learning what I wish someone had shared with me way back then!
Introducing MENTOR YOUR MEMOIR
Since 2016, many thousands of you have taken my memoir writing classes, whether in person at retreat venues like Bali and Malta, during the pandemic as Alchemizing Uncertain Times Through Writing, alongside Nancy Aronie in Memoir As Medicine, and with Frank Anderson in Write To Heal. Especially here on Substack, I know many of you write to heal, to grow, to forgive, to connect, to create, to mark time, to make hard things real, to process and digest your lived experience. That’s certainly reason enough to write and keep writing!
But for those of you who are considering releasing some of that writing into the world so others can read it, whether as a published book, a paid serialized Substack subscription, or otherwise, I just wanted to let you all know I’m leading a new weekend Zoom workshop MENTOR YOUR MEMOIR.
Take advantage of our early bird special and save $100 for MENTOR YOUR MEMOIR here.
I’ve published 8 books traditionally and am publishing two unpublished manuscripts for my paid Substack subscribers, so I have a lot of experience talking about the pros and cons of both options.
If you have parts of you that want to publish your writing and parts that don’t, if you’ve been on the fence about publishing your writing, or if your parts are already sure you want to see that published book on your shelf, MENTOR YOUR MEMOIR is a like a crash course in what you need to know about structuring your musings into a book, finishing the book, making yourself attractive to agents and publishers, finding an agent, writing a book proposal, marketing your book, shopping your book to publishers, or releasing your writing some other way, like as a Substack newsletter, eBook, or blog series.
We’ll be exploring questions like:
-How do you go from visioning your book on a bookshelf to actually materializing a real book? What are the options of how you can do so?
-What are the challenges and pitfalls and how can you best overcome them?
-What is it going to take to actually complete a manuscript and then engage in next steps towards publication?
-What if you don’t want to build a platform or market yourself?
-What’s in the way of making your dream a reality?
In MENTOR YOUR MEMOIR, we’ll help you jump start next steps and give you a map of how to get from A to B. We’ll also give you the opportunity to pair up with other students for self-organized writing groups and/or creative masterminds.
As someone who just turned in the manuscript of my eighth conventionally published book, and as someone publishing two other books via Substack, I’ll do my best to answer as many of your questions as I can. We’ll even be asking our students to submit their questions before the weekend workshop, so we can guide the workshop to support the real time issues you need help overcoming.
In addition to giving you what I’ve got in the realm of bringing a book to life from idea to book-in-hand, the course includes advice from my longtime literary agent Michele Martin, as well as my editor at Sounds True Jennifer Brown and the CEO of my newest publisher BenBella Books Glenn Yeffeth.
Save $100 on MENTOR YOUR MEMOIR if you register now.
I also offer one-on-one Transformational Mentoring for those who would like to add on a bit more personalized support during your book-writing or healing journey. My one-on-one practice is currently full, but we’ll be opening up new spots soon if you’d like to get on the waiting list.
Get on the waiting list for private mentoring here.
I can’t wait to play with you all in the world of bringing your book to life! Every day, I count my lucky stars that I get to be a full time writer. We creatives play a massive role in sense-making the things that happen to us, both personally and collectively. Without my writing practice, I don’t know how I’d survive uncertain times like this.
I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t indulge our activist parts and participate in resistance in the areas where we’re distressed about what’s happening in the world. We should!
But we can also calm our nervous systems, let our creative juices flow, hunker down into our writing practices, and create something of beauty during this time of global turmoil.
I’m grateful to all the muses and hoping they visit you frequently in these coming days. I remember listening to a writing professor at the beginning of the pandemic. He said “Write down everything, every little detail, every hoarded toilet paper, every coyote howl at sunset. One day you’ll be writing about this historic time in history.”
I feel like the same is true now. Let’s write it all down, not only to make sense of what’s happening, not only to help us heal, but to make beauty out of chaos and to help others heal alongside us.
We can’t control everything in our lives, but it can help us heal to find “certainty anchors,” to control the things we can control and guide our parts towards paths of healing, justice, and creativity. Writing a book and getting yourself on a self-imposed or publishing-imposed deadline can help you create positive certainty anchors and give you something to look forward to in uncertain times.
If you’ve been thinking about book publishing or other ways to get your writing out into the world, I welcome you to join us! It’s so much fun for me to engage with other writers, and now that we can meet on Zoom, we’re able to make it so much more affordable and accessible than the writing retreats I teach internationally at retreat centers around the world. So…I hope to see you on Zoom!