My last post talks about how I arrived at the idea for the book Never Ask for the Sale. All the posts in the series are linked here.
Once I had the idea for what was then called Youmanship and I used the successful workshop on selling as a forcing mechanism for an outline, I went home and started writing.
I had read Anne Lamott’s famous book Bird by Bird during the many years I was committed to not writing a book. That book offered freedom to aspiring authors to write a “shitty first draft.” I had heard Elizabeth Gilbert speak about her writing process, setting a conventional egg timer for progressively longer time blocks daily during which she would increase her tolerance for sitting down and doing the writing. I bought an actual egg timer for this purpose! But I didn’t need it.
I practically ran to my desk, which by that time was sitting in a perfect office I had created during COVID, and started typing. I didn’t need the egg timer because I had the opposite problem. Once everything lined up in my mind and heart, once I had clarity and a direction, I was on fire. I had to set a timer to take breaks, eat a meal, talk to the person who miraculously became my husband after this period of time. I was not necessarily my best self during this time any more than I was my best self when I babysat once as a kid and ate a significant portion of a giant chocolate heart by shaving little (little) pieces off to preserve the heart form. I was obsessed. I set word goals every day. I didn’t stop to edit myself. I wrote as shittily as I could. I hit almost no blockers. I kicked my imposter voice out to the curb for an entire month.
At the end of that month, I had a 60,000-word shitty first draft of a manuscript for Youmanship. It was as if those many years of delay, those many efforts at outlining different things that I wanted to say from my different career forays all found their home in this topic of sales. Or advocacy. Or selling without selling.
In my work as a conscious leadership executive coach, I talk about different “ways of being.” There is “to me,” where I am at the effect of everything happening around me, and there is “by me” where I am an actor and creator of my own experience. Then there is “through me.” With a “through me” experience, I am not doing anything, whatever is happening is simply moving through me. It is, having experienced it a time or two, an absolutely exquisite feeling. I did not write the book; the book was written “through me.”
So writing this manuscript was not a marathon. It was a one-month, all-out, leaving everything in my desk chair sprint. I wrote for 5-10 hours a day. I kept Post-its by the bed for heading-to-sleep and wake-up ideas. It was immersive, exhausting, fabulous, anti-social, and rewarding.
And when it was “complete,” I had a pile of words and a sense that they hung together fairly well, but absolutely no idea if what I had done would be useful to anyone.
So I took the next step that seemed reasonable to me. At this point, I didn’t know if I was going to try to sell this thing to a publisher, publish it myself, or delete the file from my computer and never think about it again. But I had enough conviction about the topic and the content that I looked around to find a talented early editor who could provide an outside perspective on the quality of the writing, the general structure, and the value of all those words placed roughly in the order in which I’d placed them.
My husband introduced me to a friend of his from college, Kimberly Weisul. She had a bunch of experience as a journalist writing on business for business publications. She had gone to Brown University with my husband, and I had a story that everyone who got in there was seriously smart. We spoke once, and she took the project entirely out of my hands for a few weeks. Those were delightful, if expensive weeks.
Kimberly came back to me with a number of ideas and a general conceptual thumbs up on the value of the effort, so I decided to keep going. I implemented her changes. I hired another journalist and author – Natalie Lampert – to conduct interviews with a number of entrepreneurs whose stories were featured in the manuscript. I integrated that. I asked my best friend Leah Pearlman to read the draft, and although she is my “best” friend, she is also my most discerning friend. This whole thing was her idea in the first place. She loved what she saw, gave me more feedback. My crack colleague Liz Nelson (who also has edited this blog and everything I write publicly) read it as well and made it better.
My shitty rough draft was actually coming together. One month for writing. Two months for improving. I had something I was ready to show to potential publishers.
Read my next post, Deciding to Try to Sell to a Publisher After One Self-publishing Foray.
Any thoughts, feelings, or blurts? Share them here.
