I never set out to be a writer. I never had the slightest thought that I would ever write a book. As someone who had gone to trade school instead of regular college — I’m a graduate of the New England Conservatory — I never took freshman comp, never had to take a writing-intensive seminar, and definitely never took a creative writing class because those simply didn’t exist in that environment.
I became a writer by accident. In hindsight I realize that I’d always written, always loved words, always a reader, always a prolific letter-writer, now and then a zinester.
Remember ‘zines? ‘Zines were great, like Substacks if no one could possibly ever make a damn dime from them. If you were very lucky you might sell enough copies to break even on photocopying, stapling, and postage, with the result that they were true labors of love and/or evidence of genuine (occasionally scary) obsession.
Some lived in a borderland between mainstream print mag and ‘zine turf, some were artsy, some were basically chapbooks, some were as deliberately gritty and punk-ass-punk as you could compel a photocopy of a collage sprinkled with Black Flag lyrics to be. Some of the best, like Karen Eng’s gorgeous, beautifully produced food ‘zine pekopeko, were glorious, ferociously focused, intensely imbued with a singular spirit. I once had an essay published in pekopeko and I was so proud of it I could’ve burst. I’ve still got a copy somewhere, even after my massive digitization of my print publications files a few years back where I recycled bales and bales of paper with my byline on it. I love it that much.
I made a ‘zine for a while in the mid-1990s because I wanted to be one of the cool kids but also because I wanted to see something in print that I never had. As a then-young fat woman, I wanted something to acknowledge that people like me could be sexy and sexually interesting and sexually interested. At that point the only publications that existed in which fat people even remotely existed in a sexual context were ones made by and for straight cis men who liked fat women. Great as far as it went, but it left me limp in every conceivable way, and why wouldn’t it? Straight cis dudes have always, always driven the market for sexual content in media. I mean, that’s been true since before Aretino, before the handy instructional/inspirational murals on the walls in the brothels of Pompeii. But being that I’m not a straight cis dude, most of it has never been up my street, and some has never even been on my continent.
So I made something that was. It was a fun project and I got to work with some really great writers and artists who first became contributors and later friends. One day something really weird happened. It wasn’t anything I’d imagined happening, or thought about as a possibility. I certainly never did the ‘zine in hopes that anyone in the book publishing world would take notice. Then a small niche publisher specializing in alternative sex titles approached me and asked me if I’d consider writing a book based on the ‘zine and I thought “well, huh, I’ve never written a book before.”
I like to joke that the reason that I wrote my first book is because I follow the school of the British composer and writer Arnold Bax, who said "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.”
I wrote that first book more or less on the basis of having read a lot of books and knowing that probably they ought to have things like chapters and some junk. To say that I was without a map is a kind way to describe it. I cannot claim that the result was a work of deathless prose or that it’s the kind of book I’d write today; it was not even the kind of book I wrote a decade later when another publisher hired me to write a new edition. Nevertheless it was a book, and in its own small way, a groundbreaking one: I was to learn that while a few people had tried to create a book on the same subject, no one had ever previously managed to convince a book publisher to take on such a project.
I’ve written more books since then, and as I’ve written more books I’ve gotten more serious about the writing of them. I’ve done a lot of thinking about what it takes to make a book work — especially a nonfiction book, since I appear to be constitutionally incapable of writing fiction longer than about ten thousand words and even then, only when writing pastiche!1 — and about what kinds of scaffolding and infrastructure must exist to build the right matrix for the reader to get invested and really give a damn about a nonfiction subject.
Along the way, more or less between this book and that one, I also got a Ph.D. in history, and did graduate work in bioethics. Academic writers aren’t exactly famous for going out of their way to create a good experience for the reader. For researchers, the what of it, the information itself, is the whole point. The how of it, I think, is probably most accurately described as being wholly dependent on the whim and the native abilities of the academic as a writer. I haven’t done a survey of every Ph.D. program in the world but I’m fairly sure that writing well for the sake of one’s readership isn’t a core curriculum item in any of them.
I taught myself to write books by reading them and writing them. Getting a Ph.D. taught me some things about how to write them a lot better by teaching me just how relevant it is for every writer to understand your subject as separate from your project and your argument. It taught me why writers should think more consciously about time and about chronology, and why it’s impossible to separate time and place and culture (and why that means being explicit about them). It made me read nonacademic books a lot more carefully, and to notice how much of a difference it makes when an author — like
, like , like , like — gets this kind of stuff right.At the moment, I’ve just embarked on writing a new and more than vaguely terrifying book project. I’m the kind of writer who can’t say too much about a brand new project; I have to write most of it first before it stops feeling as slippery and fragile as a raw egg yolk. But I do, at this point, at least know where to begin.
I’ve never taken a journalism class but I learned about “the 5 W’s” in eighth grade English and they still hold up as a place to start the work. I know that I’ll have to figure out what preconceptions a reader is likely to bring to the subject, for good or ill, and what I might need to do about that. Experience has taught me that every book does a job, or as I like to think of it, it fills a hole in the shelves, and that in order to write mine I need to know which hole in the shelves it fills. For so many reasons I have to have some sense what my book does, or at least what I want it to do, that is different from other books on similar subjects.
I’ve done this thing enough times that I know that every book gets itself written differently. Heaven knows I’ve done it enough times to know that you can only ever be completely sure about how to write the last book, not the next one. But I’ve also done it enough times that I know what questions to ask, what conditions the project has to fulfill if it’s going to succeed, what demands I need to be able to make on myself as a writer and on you as my reader, and what I need to give you in order for the book to do the thing I mean for the book to do. Every book is its own world, or at least its own little self-contained pocket of the world, and the demands of worldbuilding are not always identical but they are, at least, knowable.
That knowledge, that experience is the lifeline I have tied around my waist as I wade into writing this new book. How to start writing a book is less of a mystery than you think. (It’s even less of a mystery than I sometimes think.) You start with the world and go from there.
Here I go.
If you’d like to start with the world and go from there and end up with something book-shaped at the end, too, I’m teaching a course on how to do it this fall.
Join me for the class — there’s still a space or two — or let’s work one-on-one.
Why yes, I just outed myself as a sometime writer of fanfic. What can I say, I fell in with a crowd of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells and wanted to see if I could pull it off too. I could, and it was fun.