In recent years, wily entrepreneurs have turned book production in the speaker-promotion genre into a process:
- Sit down for a series of interviews,
- have them transcribed,
- let professional writers and editors shape the material to express your message,
- have graphic designers come up with a cover and book design, and
- print X number of copies.
In essence, productivity meets ghost-writing. It’s the fast food version of the literary art, as opposed to the slow-simmered, complex flavours of a book written from the heart by a writer who cares deeply about the work. It’s the latter I’m trying to achieve with my book-in-progress, An Ordinary Mystic.
An Ordinary Mystic visualized as a writing aid ~ æssmith photo
It took J. R. R. Tolkien a dozen years to write The Lord of the Rings, a deeply creative work of fiction. Alexander von Humboldt spent 25 years writing his beautiful Cosmos, a non-fiction work about the physical universe. I can hope it takes less time to complete my book, but I can only aspire to model their results. Then again, my book is a simple autobiography about how mystical “experiences” have shaped my life. To this work of non-fiction I try to bring the literary craft of a well-told story and the research skills of a journalist.
In his Get Published Audio Course, writer and productivity guru Michael Hyatt refers to the “ugly middle” of a book. It is apparently the hardest part to write, the barren land between hopeful departure and desired end. This is the part I’m about to tackle with Part Two of An Ordinary Mystic. Thankfully I have an advantage that I hope will keep me moving forward. It’s also one I think belongs to most writers of biography or autobiography.
Seen through the eyes of a storyteller, every life story has
- plots and counterplots,
- rewards and challenges,
- narrative arcs, and
- motivations both obvious and obscure.
The patterns in a life are like music. We need only identify them to hear their hidden melodies.
In An Ordinary Mystic there are two intertwined narratives. One is structured around mystical experiences and how they affected my life and shaped its trajectory. The other is framed by the four years I spent at university, unravelling the mystery of these events, and placing them in a historical context I didn’t even realize existed. Rather than fear the ugly middle, I will listen carefully for the music in these two accounts, and let it draw me forward. Following that duet, in which the narratives are closely related, yet separated in time until the very end, I can hope to forget the notion of the ugly middle altogether, and simply immerse myself in the music.