Envision Before You Write

I used to have a mantra that I thought was the solution to all writerly problems: THINK BEFORE YOU WRITE.

This mantra encapsulated my beliefs about what writers tend to most often get wrong. They launch into writing without knowing what they are going to write; they don’t take time to think about WHY they are writing; they don’t consider what they are trying to prove or accomplish or DO with their writing. And as a result, their writing often goes nowhere and accomplishes nothing.

All these risky behaviors are born of the idea that writing a book other people want to read should come easily and naturally — the “struck by lightning” or “genius in the attic” theory of creativity. It’s one of the most ill-conceived and damaging ideas out there. Because while YES, some people ARE native geniuses who can have an idea, set about executing it, and produce something that can impact readers all over the globe for generations to come, MOST mortals can’t.

These risky behaviors are compounded by the fact that for people drawn to writing, writing feels good. Writers like to write — it helps them figure out their thoughts, make sense of the world, and escape the world, and all these are excellent things. But writing for pleasure or self-understanding is a very different undertaking than writing to impact other readers. Many writers don’t consciously step over the line from writing for themselves to writing for other people. They sort of close their eyes and tiptoe over it, dragging the habits and practices and beliefs they had when they wrote for themselves into the realm of writing for other people. When their writing doesn’t immediately capture other people’s attention, they feel frustrated and confused, and sometimes resentful and angry, and sometimes defeated and beat down.

For all these reasons, when a writer wants to write for other people, I would always say, “Great! You have to think before you write.” To me, this meant that you have to be intentional about the decision to impact other readers. You have to be conscious of your goals and clear-eyed about your weaknesses and strengths. You have to follow the “rules” of the publishing world (or at least know them if you want to break them) so that your work has a chance to being seen.

But more and more, I am seeing that thinking is only part of the imperative. More and more, I have come to believe the work you have to do is to ENVISION your book.

This is a much less catchy mantra, but it’s a far more accurate one, because it brings in the process of imagination and the reality of the marketplace.

Envisioning your book means being able to SEE it as a finished entity before you write a single word.

It means being able to picture where it will sit on the bookstore shelf.

It means imagining how your readers will interact with it, what they will take away from it, what they will say to their friends about it, what the impact will be.

Envisioning your book is a kind of conjuring — “the performance of tricks which are seemingly magical, typically involving sleight of hand” (dictionary.com). It is a kind of dark art, which is why the creative process seems so mysterious and magical and even frightening, in a way, to those who are not involved in it.

But those of us who ARE involved in it know that it’s not mysterious at all: it’s a series of decisions and actions we take to bring to life the thing we are seeing in our mind’s eye.

We envision a book and then we work to write it — to pin that vision in our mind onto the page with words — and then we work to make it in an object, which is to say a product of the marketplace that people can exchange for money and hold in their hands.

Doing this envisioning takes even more intention than merely thinking about the book. If we just think about it, we might be able to decide on a structure, and plan out the argument, and track the reader transformation, and (for fiction) hammer out the plot, and develop the characters — and these are all KEY steps. But once we get into envisioning, we are now doing the word of seeing it in the world of readers.

And being in the world of readers is where writers want to end up — at least those who are interested in moving away from writing for themselves.

My clients often tell me that they feel as though I could see their book before they can — and that is exactly right. That is the deep work I believe I am doing as a book coach, and the work I am teaching our book coaching students to do, too.

To do it, I ask a ton of questions of my writers:

· Why do you want to write this book — Why this book? Why now?

· What would you consider success with this book — are you on a talk show, a radio show, a writing conference panel? Is the book on a bestseller list, a classroom bulletin board, a magazine cover, the table at a bookstore?

· What are you talking about with your readers? What is the conversation?

· What other books are your readers reading and why do they love them?

· Why do they love your book?

· How does the book unfold for the reader? What is the experience like for them as they encounter your characters or your ideas?

· What do your readers say to their friends about the book when they press it into their hands and say, “You have to read this book!”

And then what I do is listen — for the clues, for the hints, for the flashes of insight. That book is coming to life in the writer’s mind, but sometimes it is sneaky or cagey or hidden from view. I try to catch a glimpse of it and help the writer see it, too, by holding a mirror up to what they are bringing forth.

All of this is done before they write. Or if they have written something and it is not working the way they intended it to, it is done in a pause from the creation process. Because it’s very, very hard to do the two things at the same time — to envision and create at the same time

More and more, I believe that envisioning is its own process, and that it must come first.

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