18,000 Words

More than 18,000 words into my next book, and where do I go next? I feel as if I’ve pushed myself out from shore, the city shrinking as my boat heads out into the choppy waters of writing, and I’m wondering whether to put up sail, get out the oars, float with the currents, fire up the engine, or – no – I’m not heading back to shore. But where am I heading? A reality moment in writing.

My next book, that I refer to as Muddling By, is sort of a sequel to Dream. Invest. Live. I’m sure I’ve written about it in other posts. Instead of a book that described my strategy and tactics in individual investing, Muddling By is my roller-coaster ride through America’s wealth classes. I feel a bit of urgency to finish before the US becomes the Untied States instead of the United States. Hence, shoving myself out from shore to write a book that hopefully highlights some things that unite us, as well as unmasking some facades that hinder us.

Grand enough ambition? What the heck? Why not?

18,000 words. 18 chapters. Didn’t plan it. It just happened. 

It probably is not a surprise that I do not outline, plan, and analyze what I am going to write. I write, then make the mold fit the product. Welcome to a view into this step, a step that happens during the first draft. Do I go broader, deeper, further, or start again?

18,000 words is a respectable set of notes, but far too few words to publish. My shortest book may be Dream. Invest. Live., which I think is ~65,000 words. Extra drafts will fill out logic holes, or too-sketchy descriptions, but quadrupling the current content can be a lot of fluff and fill.

18 chapters (and every time I start a sentence with a number, I feel my editor friends cringe and clutch their red pens) are covering, well, 18 topics, but describing various aspects of modern life and how they change for each wealth class does not cover a life. 

But how many topics, how many chapters are too many? Too few? Some I will leave out because they aren’t part of my life: children and religion. My main source should be my blog (trimbathcreative.net), which has over a thousand posts. Another resource is my social media posts, as well as those of my friends. One approach that gets me out of the house is to hang out in a coffeeshop and listen to the folks who are speaking loudly enough to be heard across the room and over the espresso machine. They usually talk about things I would never consider. Folks may want to hear about sports, but I am not a spectator. I’ll skip topics and conspiracy theories for enough reasons to fill another book. Ironically and sadly, libraries work that way, too. The era of Shh is over.

So much of writing is covered in style advice, manuals of style, character arcs, rising and falling action, very literate things. But it is easy to overlook the basic and practical moment when there’s a sunk cost that may be best justified by struggling through to some other shore – even if there’s only water on the horizon. 

That’s where I am. It is also a good example of what writers groups are good for. The right group might have advice on broader, deeper, further. I wouldn’t ask anyone about starting over because discouragement is too easy to reinforce, especially when writing about something like personal finance that few folks want to write about.

As usual, I’ll probably do a bit of each. 

18 chapters are enough to make a point, but too easy to find that I’ve missed topics that a wider audience will engage with. Back to the coffeeshop.

Each chapter will be expanded so they all fit a similar format: general comment on the topic, personal experience on the topic, and at least three perspectives across the income and wealth range, and maybe a bullet summary. That should double each chapter from where they are now.

Further will be a few more chapters because there’s no intro or conclusion otherwise. I have such chapters already, but I can tell that there are nuances that make wide generalizations invalid. Every person is different, and it is good to show that, but in the extreme, that would be over eight billion chapters.

And, of course, you may have noticed that I am using this post as a way to share my experiences, but also to work through some of the possibilities. Maybe such a post is useful to other writers. Maybe not. I’ve realized that, while I have an opinion about such things, you, the reader and possibly fellow writer, is the ultimate judge. That’s true for this post, as well as this and every book I write. 

I wish I’d save this one comment/compliment I received over a decade ago.
“Thank you. I needed to read those words, written this way, at this time.” 
I don’t know which words they referred to, and I’m sort of glad. It would be too easy to concentrate on words rather than writing. We may never know how we affect each other, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. 

Only tens of thousands of words to go – and that’s only the first draft.