Writing a book is easy.
NOT!
But once upon a time, I thought that. Really. Until I started to write something. Then I changed my mind. Some days I felt like Leonardo da Vinci or Nikola Tesla. Creativity was spilling out of me so fast I couldn’t get it all down on paper. But that was the exception. Then there were the other days, the days when nothing was happening. If ideas were like water, then someone at municipal services had cut off the flow to my brain. And the little that was flowing through my head had gotten mixed up with the sewage system. It was rubbish. And I was just plain stalled.
One day, my wife handed me a book to read. I took one look at it and said “ Uhmm...no”. Let’s face it, anything with pastel colours and three eggs on the front is shouting “Run Away!” My impression was that this was another cheesy Christian book. However, I noticed it was a New York Times best seller. So I cracked it open. And ...
... couldn’t put it down!
It was Ann Voskamp’s, 1,000 Gifts. A book about thankfulness and finding God in every moment of life. And it was brilliant. I had stumbled upon not just a good writer, but a great writer. It was freaking amazing! Immediately I started to light up inside. I was inspired to write. I felt free to use big words and grammatically incorrect sentences, and detailed images. Everything came alive again.
In retrospect, I should have known this would happen. The accumulated wisdom of the writer’s guild says that if you want to write great books, you need to read great inspiring writers. And that’s true. Really, really true. And it got me totally unstuck. It didn't make writing a book easy. But it made it possible.
