Process: Find The True Value of Writing Your Book

Is there more to writing than making money?

Like many writers, I have a dream of getting on the best sellers lists, seeing my book sitting on a shelf in the grocery store for all to see.

I imagine that if I reach enough people with my amazing writing, then I’ll not only have respect, invitations to hang out with really cool people, a hoard of fans, but I’ll also have a very nice paycheck to enjoy as I sit in some international destination in a lounge chair next to a mixed drink complete with a baby umbrella.

Do you imagine something similar?

What is the dream you have about your book, or where your writing is going?

Whatever your dream is about how your writing will be received, there is real value in writing your book.

Maybe no publishers will want it. Maybe no one will press “add to cart” on Amazon.

Maybe none of the things that you hoped would happen happened.

But what if the true value of writing your book is something different altogether?

What if the process of writing your book is of such enormous value that by the time you finish, you won’t even care how your book is received?

For more than a year I have been writing or revising my book From Girl to Goddess.

That’s a long haul. I think I have a great book idea, and I do believe it fills a void in the marketplace.

I believe it will start some amazing conversations, and will open doors for me to participate in those to discuss women’s empowerment, sexuality, spirituality, stereotypes and gender norms. All of these are interests of mine.

I believe my book will advance my career. It will help me to be a spiritual life coach to amazing and unusual women. It will help those amazing clients find me, which is priceless.

I believe it will also allow me to teach others to write in a bigger way. I’ve been a writer since forever, a blogger for 15 years, a novelist for 5, but there is something magical about becoming published.

But what I never believed, it that in the editing process, I would evaluate not just my story but also my life. I would learn new things about myself, my past, my perspective, my voice, and who I want to be from now on.

No matter what anyone thinks about the lines across the page, I am a new person. I am a new confident whole person.

I have gained so much from the revision process, that I highly encourage anyone reading, especially anyone who has say an unedited NaNoWriMo draft sitting on their hard drive–to revise your book.

Finish your book. Look at your book.

And if you are a blogger–go through and make your blog a book.

Edit. Edit. Edit.

Because it is though the laborious editing process that you will see things about yourself more objectively than you have ever seen before.

You will learn new things about yourself that you could never have otherwise known.

You are ready to write a book and change your life forever.

It’s a process akin to life—you don’t have a real roadmap. You can make a guide, a plan, but what you have to do no matter what is take one foot and put it in front of the other.

Take the next step. Read that next page. Write your notes down and then read the next page and write the next notes.

Keep going.

And that’s how you’ll discover the true value of writing a book.

Blessings

xx Sofia Wren