First, a quick congratulations to Ben Meer on How to Be Good at Life becoming an instant #1 New York Times bestseller.
I wasn’t going to write about it, but after mentioning Vanessa Van Edwards’s new book Conversation in September singlehandedly drove it to the top of the bestseller list, I decided I owe it to Ben to get him on the list for a second week. (As the old saying goes, correlation equals causation.)
Ben’s book draws on years spent researching, developing, and writing about systems. He took his time and did the work. When the opportunity came to write his book, he was able to draw on a rich foundation of ideas, tools, and research.
Healthy soil leads to a productive harvest.
To extend the gardening metaphor, “writer’s block” indicates depleted soil. You’re sitting there at the keyboard with nothing coming to mind because your brain is a Dust Bowl, plowed relentlessly and unreplenished. You haven’t established the necessary conditions for steady creative output.
Nobody can grow a plant. All you can do is feed the soil with nutrients and ensure a steady supply of water, light, and fresh air. The plant does the growing.
This is an old idea. The Confucian scholar Mencius wrote about a farmer who, worried that his sprouts weren’t growing fast enough, tugged each one up to help it along. Naturally, the whole field withered. The farmer, Mencius wrote, should have spent his time weeding. Let the corn take care of itself.
Fretting about quality and quantity creates a block because output is the one aspect of the creative process you can’t control. You really don’t know what you’re going to say—if anything—until you sit down and put your fingers on the keyboard. So stop tugging at your sentences. Invest your energy in establishing the necessary conditions. Let the work take care of itself.
Get rid of distractions: phone out of the room, notifications off.
Create a workspace, per David Lynch in Catching the Big Fish: “It’s crucial to have a setup, so that, at any given moment, when you get an idea, you have the place and the tools to make it happen.”
Fill the well, per Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way: “Artist dates,” reading widely, research, etc.
Get an accountability partner: I guarantee that somebody in your extended network is also working on a book. Form an alliance!
Get a deadline: Erika Dreifus’s The Practicing Writer 2.0 curates fee-free and paying calls and competitions. Pick one. Let its submission guidelines provide your structure and its deadline provide your schedule.
Immerse yourself in a creative environment: Join a writing group: A writing class. Both. Go to readings. Lectures. Whatever you do, do it in person if possible.
Back in 2016, I used fishing as the metaphor. Same general idea: you decide whether to cast or not. Beyond that, it’s up to the fish.
Which is to say that you can take all of the advice, do all of the hard work needed, and come up with a big fat zero. The odds of an American or British person making it to the top of the list are already incredibly minuscule, So yes, it is worth praising the authors for somehow getting to this point.
Even so, the odds are so stacked against everybody else that you have better odds of getting to Mars this weekend.
Roughly 65% of the authors who hit these lists are American, while about 30% are British. The remaining ~5% is split among the rest of the world (Canada, Australia, Ireland, Europe, etc.).And then it's other countries, which is an even smaller percentage, even though they might be English-speaking authors.
The advice works, but where you live and what resources you have are really the biggest benchmarks of all, because it can't be that the rest of the world doesn't know how to write well.