Writing A Book

I made a gross misjudgment. And, I failed to learn from it. No, though acknowledgment of it may be rare, making mistakes and not learning from them are not necessarily rare occurrences for me. I know you’re shocked but it is true.

When I began to consider writing my first book it seemed an easy task. After all, I had some writing background, as a foreign correspondent and writing for an academic journal.

All I needed to do was put on paper, or screen, what I knew about the subject. I had been giving speeches across the country and abroad. Some people looked upon me as having a degree of expertise. Many would suggest that I write a book. I did.

There was a problem though. The book was only 25 pages long. Basically, it was one of my speeches.

Obviously, 25 pages does not a book make. All I needed to do was elaborate, known by some as padding. That got me 45 pages or so. Still not enough. After a while I realized that I didn’t know enough to write a book.

The answer was to do some research. I decided a year of research would do it. It became a 14-year project. And that was just the research. The writing took nearly another three years.

Even with far more research materials than required for one book, I still struggled. Why? Writing is writing and I knew how to write. I had experience.

Well, there is writing short and writing long. I had no inkling of the difference. I usually explain it as one person riding a bicycle and another piloting a 747. Both are involved in transportation but there is a difference.

I struggled and struggled. I can’t explain it but, of a sudden, I could write long. The final two-thirds of the book was written in less than eight months. And it seemed the writing was better.

That covers the writing but doesn’t address the 14 years of research. During that period, the focus and scope of the book seemed to constantly change. As you research, you learn. As you learn more, it affects your perspective. It is happening again.

Before I get to the subject of the next book, I need to plug that first one. The subject is mental illness. It covers neurobiology and neurophysiology. Don’t let that scare you. It was written for the general reader. My word processor rates it as being written to the 9^th grade level. That’s the same as the New York Times.

Having observed the nonsense on which the bulk of public discourse on our economic situation is based, I thought it would be helpful to provide a reality-based primer on political and economic theories. If you’ve read many of the posts on this blog, you are aware that even the putative experts could benefit from trashing the established dogmata on these subjects.

The first step was to do the obligatory research. As with the writing of all nonfiction books, this is a necessary quagmire one must traverse. The surety of focus and scope I initially felt has evaporated.

I went back to the Greeks. I went even further. I began with the earliest organizational forms of the Sumerians, the Medes, the Babylonians, the Chinese, the early civilizations of the Indus Valley. It was obviously necessary to include the Egyptians. After all, they maintained a relatively stable society for nearly 3,000 years. No one else has come close.

The forays back to those ancien régimes lent an even starker contrast to what we have adopted and adapted from the Greeks. Additionally, it highlighted, even more than suspected, how much of those earliest models we continue to cling to.

I am stuck. I am trying to decide how deeply to go analytically. I think I have mastered the long form sufficiently to write at book length a relatively superficial tome. Even such a casual approach could still be of benefit to members of the public getting their arms around the issues. It would fail, however, to satisfy my most basic propensities.

I may be afflicted with a form of glossolalia. My chief problem as a teacher was probably in going too far; not knowing when to stop. Just because I find it interesting and enlightening doesn’t require me to inflict it upon my readers. Still, I’m leaning towards the more encompassing approach.

It would be nice to have some opinions from others before I get too far along. I intend to discuss the question with a few close friends from academia and less than friends from the realm of politics. That, however, must be delayed for a few months. If any reader wants to be an adviser on this, I am receptive to comments to this post or emails for longer missives, or for those who wish not to bear any guilt by association.

Tagged as: academia, babylonia, book, dogma, Economics, egypt, glossalalia, greek, indus valley, medes, mental illness, neurobiology, neurophysiology, Politics, read, research, sumer, writing