A peek at how I'm building myself by writing a book on building ourselves by building

Hope that's "meta" enough for you

Me and The Reading Girl (Pietro Magni), National Gallery of Art, October 2018 (a loose metaphor for me inspecting my own book-writing process, obviously)

As my book draft deadline to Penguin approaches, I’m getting a lot of questions about how it’s going. The short answer is: it’s going fine, thanks. “Fine” spans a wide range of potential scenarios, though; as this is my first book, I’m trying to stay open to the full spectrum of ways it could plausibly play out, from “it’s in pretty good shape by June” to “it’ll need several massive re-writes that take another year or 2.”

That said, my sense of (largely false) urgency and impatience are not so easily quelled, as you can probably surmise from the journal excerpt I’m sharing with you below. My goal in sharing it is to offer you a kind of meta-preview of the book via this glimpse into a messy and emotionally fraught moment in my writing process, which itself instances (to an almost comical degree) some of the book’s core frameworks.

Warning: if you get squeamish at the sight of too much psychological skin, you might want to look the other way.

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Excerpt from Gena’s private writing journal, May 7, 2025

Why is it so hard for me to just write, without nitpicking at every word and censoring myself as I go? Whenever I try, I can immediately hear the din of the kinds of low-agency narratives that feel as native to me as the air I breathe: like “I can't trust myself to go back and bring order to these words unless I do it right now, because my executive function is a scarce and fleeting resource not to be counted on” (who knew I still hadn’t updated my self-view from the pre-Adderall days of 20+ years ago??). Or the more generic feeling that I just don't have time to write multiple drafts or to vomit a bunch of words onto the page that I won't then end up using in the book. “What a waste! Who has the luxury to just churn through multiple drafts of which only some small portion will ever see the light of day?” Hello, scarcity mindset, my old friend.

And when I get underneath all that, there’s the feeling of sadness and regret over the ways my writing style has actually lost some of its spontaneity and lyricism and flair since attending grad school and boxing myself into the constrictive mold of the academic writing regime; and there’s the leftover sting from when I recently read some writing by my 16-year-old self and actually felt a little jealous.

How do I revive that long-dormant sensibility and skillset? Is it by being gentler with myself than my inner drill sergeant wants to permit? By giving myself permission to step away from my laptop and take a walk or make some tea or talk to a friend, if I suspect this is the kind of environmental input, the kind of “nutriment” I need in order to nurture and fuel and reawaken that voice? Sometimes, yes; other times I may need to catch and redirect some of the Zen-master-ish tendencies within me to make excuses to procrastinate on the difficult, scary work of struggling through a paragraph or starting in on a new section, when in fact this is, in my own considered judgment, the right and necessary next step (as evidenced by the fact that it gets lets painful and even pleasurably absorbing once I start). And I need to remind myself that this book won't write itself, and also that it's really important to me, and a crucial stepping stone toward so much of what I want out of my career and life, to get these ideas on paper and to integrate them into an enduring form that can be greater than the sum of its parts.

And I need to keep using the tools that have already proven concretely helpful, like dictating into Otter and doing timed “writing drills” with friends. The only reason I’d avoided these tools up to now is because I knew they would force me to actually do what I feared, which is to “commit” unedited words to a page. [Author’s note: having just read

Cate Hall

’s newly published piece on “Crossing the cringe minefield”, I’m pleased to report that this was me crossing one of mine.] And, of course, it’s proven almost anticlimactically not that bad now that I’m finally doing it.

In this I’ve also had to recognize and admit to myself that there were still some residual bits of my old “people mode” creeping into my thought, insofar as the censorious editor who keeps butting in and editing every word as I write is largely the representative of whatever concrete or abstracted readers I feel I must impress or amuse or convince. As if I can’t just say what I want to say without the justification, the permission, the sanction of some drill-sergeant-y external party who chaperones my thought and gives it the ongoing stamp of approval.

So, what if I just experiment, right here and now, with writing just for myself? Is it really so hard to break out of the habit of writing for some abstracted audience that’s hovering over me as I type? And is that even what I’ve been doing this whole time? I can’t tell right now if that’s what’s happening or if it’s still happening now that I really am just rambling onto the page (and I’m definitely editing less than I normally do!), but - something like it seems plausible.

Then again, part of what slows me down as I’m writing is just that I pause to think about what I actually mean and want to say or how I want to convey it, which is obviously fine and not something I want to stamp out. But the challenge is to leave those pauses intact while removing all the needless realtime hemming and hawing and editorializing that prevents me from getting a thought out in the first place.

A question I haven’t even ventured to explore yet (and that wasn’t fully conscious to me until just this moment) is whether some part of my “free writing” problem is due, not to the presence of a drill-sergeant-esque running censor, but to the absence of a fluent thought stream. If this were true, how big a problem would this be (if at all), and what would be the solution? Presumably one possible cause of the problem would just be that I lack clarity on what I’m trying to say; that is, I need to do more research or thinking before I can form clear thoughts worth writing down on the page. Another possible cause is that I’m not prompting myself in the right way; perhaps I do in fact have a deep repository of verbalizable insight into a topic in this general vicinity, but I’m not accessing it because I’m asking myself the wrong question, or I’m stuck in a crossfire between two or more different sets of themes or topics, or I’m too focused on a given audience or not focused enough on the right one.

Funny enough, I think I’ve been “drill sergeanting” myself to some extent by framing the whole issue in terms of my “free-writing deficit” and my bad habit of editing as I write—implying that I’d be able to write just fine if only I stopped engaging in this vice, when actually the problem is in figuring out what I want to be writing and how to build the right context and conditions for it in the first place.

Fluent writing is not the default; it is a hard-won achievement built on many a session of halting, stammering prose.

And man does it feel good to unlock the achievement… even just for these 3 little journal paragraphs that I may or may not ever show anyone.

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Hope you enjoyed this sneak-peek into how I’m building myself alongside my book on building ourselves, etc. As you can see, I’ve decided to go ahead and show it to you, partly as an ironic reward to myself for managing to set aside any such agenda while I wrote. (You see, self? Maybe it’s not such a waste after all!)

Thanks for reading, and please share your ideas for other weird and interesting ways I can keep you all updated on my book progress.