Everything I know about writing a complicated and difficult book
On November 4, the Book Bazaar on Twitch aired my 52-minute recorded video in which I talk about writing a complicated book. You can watch the video on demand, and here (below) is the transcript.
Transcript
I'm crowdfunding my poetry book, Attis & Aleph: Poems of the Daimonic, through the Book Bazaar. You can pledge anytime, now through the 19th of November.
Attis & Aleph is a true story about someone who lived in the 20th century. He had in mind a rather complicated book that he wanted to write. He worked really hard on it, and he just couldn't do it. It was an existential problem for him, and he literally died of it. I've written Attis & Aleph to talk about the lessons I've learned while reflecting on this. Attis & Aleph itself was a difficult book for me to write. It remains difficult. It's a large phenomenon in my life. It's a small book, but it's complicated and difficult. I've learned some things about writing that kind of book, and I've distilled some of that wisdom to share with you. I hope there will be some useful takeaways for you, if you yourself are thinking about writing a complicated and difficult book.
Seventy lessons about writing a complicated, difficult book
- In life, and in writing, the context and meaning are always changing. It's not going to stay still. The story sometimes hovers around you. It's less and more than who you are. On the one hand, it's just a story, just some information. But the stories and information that exist in the world are bigger than us sometimes.
- We have this problem of proportion: it's only a story, but it's the story inside of which we live.
- Another issue we encounter is that, if the story is someone else's, it might not be your story to tell. Find a version that's yours to tell. It's doable.
- You're the one who cares about the book, so when you write it, make it sound like you care. Don't deliberately make it boring. Sometimes, in school, we're taught to make things sound "objective." We're told that's a good way to phrase a sentence: making it sound a bit sterile or detached. But actually, if it's something you care about, you've got to make it sound like you care.
- Time is cyclical, and a cycle can draw to a close. Sometimes when we have to write a book, we're battling time. We're on deadline. We feel we've taken too long to write the book. Maybe someone's waiting, maybe not, but we take years and we're still not done. Deadlines are sometimes unhelpful. Sometimes we're operating on linear time, but maybe that's not the correct way to understand the time that we find ourselves in. Maybe time is a cycle. When we feel some time pressure, maybe what we feel is that the cycle is closing. It's not that we are running out of time; it's that we're starting over. We will have more time, but not in this cycle. A new cycle will start.
- If you're thinking about starting to write a difficult book, consider this your invitation. You may need an invitation. I'm here inviting you to write your book.
- Not everyone is going to be on the journey with you. When we write, part of what we're doing is saying: We're going to let people who aren't on our journey with us understand our journey. They don't need to come on it with us; they just need to tune in for a little while and understand what we're saying. So, when you describe past, present, future, you're not acknowledging your journey because you're talking just about one thing that happened in past, present, future. You're not seeing the journey as a whole. That's a pitfall we fall into. On the other end, when you describe your journey, you're not acknowledging your past, present, future moments. You're seeing the journey as a whole. Will you zoom in on a particular moment or describe the whole path you took?
- We're walking lines, borders, frontiers. One approach you can take is to say what it feels like to walk that line, to be on that pathway in the woods, to walk along the edge of the cliff or river. There's a poetry in that. Understand that people who walk borders are often perceived according to the definition of monstrosity. When we think about what is a monster, it's something that blurs borders or is on the edges of things. There's a fear that comes along with being someone who is walking edges and thinking about crossing over. That's fine. Monsters are in storytelling. They serve a big purpose in stories by showing the limits, and sometimes the limits can be crossed and then we become something else, something different from what we were.
- Sit for a spell and sip the elixir that enables you to tell the story. I'm a coffee drinker, but there's magic in having your drink of choice.
- There is a force all around us. I'm not religious or spiritual, but I'm telling you everything is connected. The force of the connection is what compels you to write. The animating force of Attis & Aleph is that something outside of you, bigger than you, is compelling you to write. For the character in my book, it was something in a box in the basement. Creativity is hell.
- The world will absorb us. We are mortal. Something will emerge after us. We are thinking about the things that we think about from the perspective of a mortal being who will be absorbed and will reemerge as something else later. That's why the book is difficult to write. We're seeing it from our perspective.
- In 2026, the year I'm speaking from, there's a magic lever in the computer. I did not invent this thing. Other people in tech companies have invented this thing to spit out words. You push a button and the words get spit out. Many years ago, if you had asked me if I want a magic button to write my book for me, I would have said: Sure, that sounds great! Books are really difficult to write. What we need is a magic button that takes away the difficulty. I no longer think that, because as soon as I was presented with a magic button, I said: Absolutely not, I don't want that. You can't pull a magic lever to have your book written for you. You just can't. In this poetry book, Attis & Aleph, I'm making that argument indirectly. I'm talking about someone who was writing in the 1930s. He was writing by hand with pencil and paper. He probably would have told you that he wanted a magic lever to pull and write his book for him, but that's not how it works. The various reasons it doesn't work that way are something we experience. We experience it slowly through the process of writing. It's something we learn from living.
- What is the philosophy? What is the way of life? What does it mean that we're looking for a philosophy or trying to practice a way of life? When you sing, each note matters, but it's also about how the notes relate to each other. It's about individual actions and perceptions and also about how they form a context.
- Beyond that, what we are doing when we write a book is making a discourse. The discourse is really about something beyond what it claims. The discourse is often not what it's directly talking about or what it pretends to talk about. When we're talking about the trees, it looks like we're forming some sentences about the trees, but actually my discourse about the trees is about something more than a tree outside my window. I'm talking about some larger ideas. I'm making words in service of some agenda, and I'm invoking ideas that I did not come up with. Maybe I'm invoking someone else's ideas about trees.
- Part of where the book has got to come from is in you. You've got to know who you are. If you don't know who you are, you can't complete your book. You're going to get stuck. Focus on what you know, what you intuit. There's information you just know. You don't necessarily know where you know it from, but you know that you know it. That information's coming through you and you're just the conduit for it.
- Sometimes we need an adventure. You hear the call to adventure and answer it. You can refuse the call, which is valid. One way or the other, you're responding to something in the world that is calling you, and you're making a choice. That goes into your book.
- If you're busy or distracted, you could lock yourself in your room until you finish the book. Then you could go back in your memory to visit the beautiful expansive place. You don't have to be literally on an adventure on a path in the big wide world. Either way, whether you're sitting at home or out on the road, you'll find ideas that are in you because you're the person living your life.
- Sometimes the information you need is in shadow. The information you can't see very clearly that's half-hidden is helping you make sense of what's in the direct light. Just because it's a little fuzzy or hard to see doesn't mean it's not important. Sometimes the answer is in the darkness. We look in all the corners: illuminated, shadowy.
- We make a promise to ourselves, a commitment to write this book. What you promise now affects what happens next. The promise is a constraint that you put upon yourself and on your life. You move within that constraint. It directs your path to a focused goal.
- The world that we find ourselves in doesn't need to be photocopied. There's a lot of information out there. For those of us who are attracted to the idea of research, there's a tendency to write it all down on index cards, do the bilbliography, make ten photocopies of it. The world, though, doesn't ultimately need to be copied in a photocopy machine, and you are not a photocopy machine. That's not why you were born onto this planet.
- Other people aren't things to be photocopied. They're people you can know. If you don't know a person but you're writing about them, you might just be photocopying them. Maybe you should get to know them. If the difference between knowing someone and relating to them and imitating them as if they were a photocopy that you can take and fold in a binder - if that difference isn't clear, it's maybe something to think about. How would I treat people differently if I weren't trying to turn them into information for a book? What if I knew the person?
- If you get to be talking to people, sometimes you develop these friendships. With your friends, you're deciding what's true, false, important, ridiculous. But things are not more true just because your friends say they're true. There's something true about the friendship, yes. However, a statement about the world that isn't factual doesn't become factual just because you and your friends are patting each other on the back publicly as a display of loyalty. If you're bullshitting, your bullshit doesn't become true just because your friends want it to be true. Repeating things, by the way, does not make them true either. You can keep at it for hours. You can write book after book. If the fact is false and is a non-fact, the repetition won't turn it into a true fact.
- There is a force in this world -as I said, it's the force of everything that's connected. Think of it as gravity. In physics, there are forces that hold this universe together. It's not something you can inherit. It's not something that goes into your bank account. Rather, you are an inheritance for it. I am something getting passed along from past to future. I don't know what the universe wants to do with me, but here I am, I was around last year, I'm around this year, hopefully I'm around next year. I'm just getting passed around for purposes that are far beyond me.
- People want to hear about your work, by the way. I don't know what their level of sincerity is when they ask. Some people are very sincere when they want to hear about your work; other people are just making conversation. When people ask, you may feel like an impostor because your book is difficult, complicated, unfinished.
- One of your motivations as a writer might be to be accepted. To be seen for who you are. To be heard and believed because you are saying something that you believe is true and important. You want it to give you a place in the world among people. That's a hard thing. It's tricky. Just because you write a book doesn't mean you'll be seen and heard and believed and accepted. Keep at it. Sometimes we can do that for other people. We can see and hear and believe other writers. That's what we're doing here.
- If you're trying to connect with other writers, you can keep at it. Keep trying for ten years if you want. If the writer is dead, hold a seance, keep lighting that candle until the dead writer talks back to you. We're trying to make connection here.
- In the book, you express what you see and what you don't see. That's really helpful. If you're stuck on your very complicated book, think about what you don't see. Let your eyes adjust to the darkness. If you assume that you need to walk into a room that's full of light and then write about everything you see under the light, you'll be disoriented and confused when the lights go out. But if the lights are out, you can just pause and wait for your vision to adjust, then talk about what that process is like. Why is it that when we can't see very clearly, we are alarmed or confused or feel as though everything's complicated? What's that feeling like? What are we learning from it? It's just seeing in the darkness.
- Sometimes we've got the question we're aware of, and then a parent question that underlies it. Think about where the questions are arising from. One of my questions right now is: What's the purpose of trying to photocopy stuff for the book? Am I memorializing something static in the past? That's a question that expands to bigger questions. What is 'the past'? What is 'making a memorial'? What is 'making a copy'? What is 'doing a good job'? Big abstract questions that are in the extended family of questions.
- You want people to believe you, to believe you can write your book. They'll believe you if you do it, so go do it.
- You don't know where the information is. Try asking someone. Your sibling may remember where the information was put, for example.
- Sometimes you're fighting with a ghost. You've got to have that fight with the ghost.
- It's your book. You know how it works. You may not be ready to explain it, but that's one step you can take. Be ready to explain your book when someone asks you. If that's all you do today when you work on your book - just being ready to explain what it's about when someone asks you - that's pretty big.
- Another way to begin work on a complicated book: Begin by naming differences. Observing differences, making distinctions, classifying the things, architecting the information of the book, that's how it becomes useful. That's all very active.
- There's also a role for passivity. Wait for the light to arrive. Turn a bottle of molasses upside down. Molasses moves slowly, like a solid. Is molasses a liquid or a solid? I don't know. It moves slowly. You're waiting outside at dawn, and you're waiting for the light to arrive, and that sun rises very slowly. The slow pace of the light arriving into the darkness is measuring history as it comes. It's measuring time. You're going to be paying attention to where you're going. You're the one who's in charge of this. You're in charge of seeing where you're going.
- Sometimes it arrives in riddles, like the sort of riddle the Sphinx might ask you, and your life depends on getting the right answer. Just be aware you might encounter a riddle. Answer it.
- Be sure you know yourself. You also know things that are intuitive to you. You just know them. You do.
- By the time you grasp the light that has arrived for you, it's already moved on. That's the weird thing about seeing light that arrives from far away, from the sun. The sun is very far away, and the light takes some time to arrive. By the time you can see the sun, the sun is just not exactly in that position anymore. There's this sense that we are always a little bit behind. We're always learning and by the time we learn something, we're a little bit late. There's a fear that if we focus too long on a topic and take too long to learn it, we'll be behind the game, no longer in sync with the universe, and maybe that we won't have seized on other opportunities, we'll lose those opportunities, and we won't have anything left to write. Maybe we only have one book in us. I sort of feel like Attis & Aleph is the only story I tell ever, so there's a fear of what comes after my book Attis & Aleph. That's part of what makes it difficult. Maybe I don't have another book.
- We're bound by fate. There are constraints on our lives. In that sense, we are not free. We are not free with respect to whatever it is that contrains us. That's something we can explore when we're writing a book. It's part of the nature of whatever is making our book feel difficult: maybe we don't feel we have unlimited power or unfettered capacity to write it. We can explore: What are those boundaries that we feel around our life?
- When philosophers think about the questions that most interest them, sometimes they're really abstract. Some care about: What's goodness, beauty, right and wrong? Others are more interested in: Who has power? What's the power dynamic between people? They're both important. We tend to gravitate more toward one than the other. It's the nature of our personalities or our education. But we can change over time, change our focus, get both into play. What are ideas? Also, what are the material forces that shape how we ask the question?
- You need money to write your book, for example. That's a material force and constraint. Having money to have somewhere to live, to have breakfast to eat, that's part of what goes into writing a book. On the other hand, sometimes money is not the thing that writes the book. It might be something else, something a lot more nebulous.
- Who you are, in the sense of your body or your lineage, matters. Those are more material facts about your life. It is not, however, always the answer to the question you're asking. Sometimes people phrase a question: What 'is' something? What is beauty? What is goodness? It sounds literal, and so people say, Oh, well, it's literally this, and they point to the thing or a definition of it. But it turns out that the question, What is it? is not always literal. Sometimes what is really wanted is something figurative, half-visible, something you can't fully grasp. It's something to play with.
- How much is literal, how much figurative? You can't literally count things that are figurative, so you can't do percentages there. You can't say it's 60% literal and 40% figurative. There's no calculation to be done there. Still, there's a balance. Every word is a little bit literal and a little bit figurative. If it weren't both, it wouldn't be useful or make sense, so we need that ambiguity all the time. Are you being literal when you're speaking, or is this somehow an abstraction, a metaphor? Every word in your book is like that. It can be understood in both dimensions. That's why a book is difficult to write.
- Also, books are a balance of work and contemplation, and what's interesting to you may not interest everyone. You have to put in work to generate the book, sitting at your desk, writing with a pencil, typing into your computer. It's work. There's also the contemplation that goes into it. It comes out of your imagination. The extra wild card is that other people have their interests too. What interests you may not interest them, and vice versa. It's hard to get feedback to know if you've worked hard enough on your own contemplation to write your own book, because who's going to judge it for you?
- Sometimes you just write the book incorrectly. That's what happened to my character in Attis & Aleph. He knew he'd messed up his book and written it incorrectly. You might know your book is wrong but you don't know where it has broken down. OK! That's OK. Start with the intuition that something is wrong. That's a positive thing: you've got the intuition, and starting with that intuition, you're going to fix your book.
- While recording this talk, I paused for a moment because there was a noise. This happens to writers frequently. We're thinking in the quiet of our own homes and then the building vibrates because the world is under construction and we're part of it.
- Anyway, resuming my train of thought…I'm thinking about violets in Attis & Aleph. Are you more likely to directly perceive a flower as a flower (a biological organism) or to understand the flower as a symbol of something else? Does it convey to you transcendence or give you direct access to transcendence? Or does it tell you about the person who's telling you about it? Are you learning about the flower itself, whatever the flower itself may be, or are you learning about people's perceptions of flowers? Are you having a discourse about flowers and the discourse is about itself, not the actual flower? This is why books are complicated. You're making words and you don't know if the words are describing the thing you want to talk about or if the words are massaging themselves and talking to themselves, pointing to something or someone else.
- Speaking about the sublime - flowers, transcendence, beauty, truth… Too many people value violence, theft and extraction more than they value the sublime. I don't know what to tell you about that, except that things can be beautiful even when they are not popular or something you can sell or consume. You can enjoy something without exploiting anyone for it. That is sometimes a key to arriving at simplicity and clarity. Sometimes things feel complicated and difficult in an unpleasant way when we are trying to extract them. When we can just be present to them and enjoy them, they become simpler. You can go for a walk in the park to figure it out.
- You can feel that you're looking at something from a great height, from an aerial view. It gives a certain clarity to the situation. You can distance yourself from it. You don't have to always be stuck in the taffy of that context.
- You can sit with your feeling of what it means to want whatever it is that you want. What does it mean to want something, or to feel that you want something? What does it mean to change what you want?
- Maybe you're trying to settle a score with someone, with the world. You may be in competition with someone. Maybe that's part of what you want.
- On the topic of not believing everything you hear: If you've heard that someone else is gullible, and if you believe that, maybe you're the gullible one. Always investigate what you believe.
- If you believe there are no books on your topic and no other kinds of external knowledge sources by which you can learn about it, yet you believe you know something about it, this is really great because it suggests that you yourself are a source of knowledge about your topic. You think you know something? Where did it come from? It came from you! You do know what you need to know to write your book. You started your day upset that there were no books in the library on your topic, but actually you know something that's already inside you, so you have a starting point.
- If you think you need to get your ideas checked out, you can do that. You can go to the psychoanalyst. That's your decision to make. You can have a discovery process in a dream.
- I don't think it helps to put your manuscript under the pillow as you would for the tooth fairy, but you can have dreams and focus on them. You just don't control when the dreams arrive.
- We are shoved into the world when we are born. We can't walk away from our fate. We cannot walk away from our fate. We don't control it. You've got to have our hand in our own work because it's our work to do. But you've also got to loosen your grip because you have to receive information. It's not entirely about what you're grasping. It's about the fact that you grasp it, that you are the one who grasps it. You can't take it. You have to receive it. It's a combination of those things. There are moments when you want to take it and when you want to receive it. There's a role for activity and passivity.
- You are the one who's there all the time. You're never away from yourself. You are the one who is taking or receiving the information. You're the one who is writing this book.
- Nonetheless, it helps to do this learning and self-realization in community. Where are your people? You need a commune? Go and build one. You need to be talking to other people before people will be talking to you.
- Some people think you've got to go to school to write a book. I think, ultimately, it does not matter where you went to school. What matters is if you can figure out how things are connected or separated, or how you identify with or "other" something. If you can figure that out, that's the education, you've got the education.
- You are not going to liberate other people by talking about them, especially not by talking about them badly. (If they're already dead, we have got other issues in the attempt to liberate them.) If you're writing for liberation, there has got to be less talking about people and more talking with them. When you do this kind of work, on your own and in community, you'll have a thesis, and you can write out your thesis, and then you'll have a book. If you don't do this kind of work, that is your choice. You're not doing the work that your difficult book is calling you to do. If you choose not to do it but you're still looking for it, you're still halfway responding to the call, then what you are looking for is in a life you are not leading, and you have got to change your life.
- Making a very long list of people or things won't undo the absence of those people and things in your actual life. Making a list does not cure the loss of the things that are on the list.
- Listing people, in particular, treats them as objects. Listing things they did treats their lives as objects. It makes them brittle and thingified. You cannot understand what anything meant because the lifeforce has been drained out of the context. So, be careful with making lists, with objectifying things to go on the list.
- Here's a contrary opinion though, in favor of lists - you have to break down your knowledge into manageable units and manageable tasks. Otherwise it'll be an uninterpretable mega-pile of stuff. You have to break it down while keeping all the information in context so it doesn't become a meaningless pile of dust. That's the trick: put your knowledge in list form, just to make it an achievable task, but in this form it doesn't mean anything. It has to be in context in the world to be alive.
- Sometimes you want to categorize people by traits they don't have. Say, rather than making a list everyone who lives in Colombia (I'm here right now), you could make a list of everyone who doesn't live in Colombia. Making a negative list, the "not"s: that's a hard way to categorize anything. Not only because of the size of the category, given everything that fits into it. It's just a hard way to categorize, because you're trying to connect people by something they don't share in common, say, somewhere they don't live. You may find that this category is not very useful and the reason your book has become difficult and complicated is that the connections are too tenuous. They're non-connections. It's a book about all the people who don't live in a certain place.
- You do have to structure your book somehow. Your categories may not feel real. They're too specific, too literal, too overdetermined. You don't actually know what goes in those categories. You're just trying to make chapters because you think a book needs chapters. A book probably does need chapters. You are struggling with the meaning of the categories that undergird those chapters.
- One solution there is to lean into your values. Your values structure your life, if not necessarily your book. You're putting yourself into your book, and you are a person who has a life structured by values. Look through that lens and get an idea of how to structure your book. The information in your book is like a matrix in which you can grow as an author. The information is scaffolding, it's support for your life. Your book supports you, and you support the book. Think of it as a growth tool and a plant climbing up the trellis. I don't know if you climb up the trellis of your book or your book climbs up the trellis of you, but if you start there, it starts to feel more real, and you don't run into the problem of feeling you're dividing your book into fake chapters.
- You can catalog a bunch of stuff for your book. The interesting thing won't be how much you catalog but the fact that you are the one who catalogued it. You did it in a certain way. That was you. And there was a pathway by which all that information ended up in your hands. The interesting thing is not what's on the list but who writes the list.
- You want to use everything you can find. There's so much information out there. Your book is complicated. You need all this information. But you don't have to be in a rush. Time is cyclical, and everything will recur in cycles. If it doesn't happen now, you'll come back to it later.
- Meanwhile, for better or worse, you have absorbed what you're interested in. It sticks to you.
- If you do this correctly - the whole book - then, after many years, you will realize that the great book you have always wanted is the one you have written, and the great writer you have been waiting for is you.
- Do not hide.
This is everything I know about writing a complicated and difficult book.
My poetry book that I'm releasing through the Book Bazaar is called Attis & Aleph, and I am the author, Tucker Lieberman.
Everything I just discussed is mentioned in the book.
I wish you everything that is already inside yourself.
