“I want to write a book – I have a lot of ideas – but it’s just a matter of sitting down and doing it, you know?”
Tell me more.
“Sometimes I wonder if I could just pay a person to write a book for me. Like a ghostwriter.”
What stops you?
“I worry my ideas wouldn’t come out right if someone else wrote them.”
You’re right.
This isn’t about coaching, per se, but it is about something I was once very good at and cared about more deeply than anything or anyone. From time to time, I imagine, I’ll revisit on this blog parts of the writing process, because I enjoy their reflection.
Philip Roth covered a point like the one above in a series of interviews he collected in an interesting book called Reading Myself and Others.
At some point in one of those interviews, Roth begins discussing the work of writing, and the interviewer seems to cut him off – wanting to get to the genesis of Roth’s ideas for novels.
Roth is having none of it and tells the interviewer, and I’m paraphrasing: Every guy swinging from a strap on the subway has an idea for a novel; what makes me different is the writing of them.
The craft of writing is bottomless in this sense: The better you are, the deeper you go, and the deeper you go the more obvious it becomes how little you’ve fathomed.
Surely it’s this way with any passion for anyone who’s passionate.
And perhaps this is the greatest lasting effect of having a talent and abandoning yourself to it: Once you have become very good at something, you instantly recognize others who are very good at things, and you recognize nearly as instantly the things you are not very good at and won’t be.