Howdy Modern Authors!

I have a book sitting on my shelf that most people don't know I wrote.

It's called The Creation Event. It has a cover, a subtitle, chapters, and even a printed advance reader copy. I actually sent it out to people to read.

And then I killed it.

I didn't run out of time. I didn't get writer's block. I didn't abandon the project halfway through.

I finished the damn thing (you can see below... full on, ready-to-go book).

But no matter how many times I went back to it, I couldn't get it to a place where I loved it.

Which is a slightly embarrassing thing to admit when you've spent much of your professional life helping other people write books.

I've been thinking about that experience a lot lately, partly because I've been reading and listening to Adam Grant talk about his new book, Vibe, and partly because I've started working on a new project that borrows some of the ideas from the book I killed.

And I think I'm beginning to understand what went wrong.

A story I absolutely loved

Years ago, I walked into a classroom and told my students they were all going to write books that semester.

They almost revolted.
Seriously. They thought I'd lost my mind.

To be fair, I was asking them to do something pretty ridiculous. These were students who hadn't signed up to become authors. They'd signed up for a class, and suddenly their professor was telling them they were going to write and publish books.

But they stuck around.

And over the course of that semester, something pretty remarkable happened.

They wrote books. Real books. And the experience changed how I thought about education, entrepreneurship, and what people are capable of when they're challenged to create something.

It ultimately helped set me on the path to building Manuscripts and working with thousands of aspiring authors.

I've told that story hundreds of times over the years.

People love it.
I love telling it.

It's funny, it's surprising, and it has a pretty wonderful ending. What's not to love?

So naturally, I decided to write a book about it.

The idea eventually became The Creation Event: How Inflection Points Drive Our Success.

I wanted to explore how certain moments change the trajectories of our lives. How creating something can open doors we didn't even know existed. How we might have more influence over our futures than we realize.

And I had plenty of material.

The project grew out of years of conversations with my friend and collaborator Shane Mac. In the note to early readers, I actually wrote that the whole thing began with a four-word text message from Shane:

"Have them write books."

Over the following two years, we exchanged more than 212,000 words of text messages.

That's a lot of thinking about one idea.

And eventually, I had a complete manuscript.

There were chapters I liked. Stories I was proud of. Ideas I thought were genuinely interesting.

But something wasn't right.

The problem I couldn't solve

Here's what I've finally realized.

I had a great story.

I didn't have a great lesson.

I could tell people what happened in that classroom, and they'd lean in. I could explain why it had changed my life. I could talk about the remarkable things that happened afterward.

But I couldn't quite make the leap to why someone else needed to read an entire book about it.

What was the reader supposed to do differently?
What would they understand about their own life that they hadn't understood before?

I had answers to those questions. Or at least I thought I did.

But the answers always felt a little forced.

I'd revise the argument, move chapters around, add another story, try a different framing. Sometimes I'd convince myself I'd figured it out.

Then I'd come back a few weeks later and feel that same nagging disappointment.

I liked the book.

I just didn't love it.

And after enough rounds of that, I started to wonder whether I was trying to solve a problem that couldn't be solved through another revision.

Maybe I'd written the wrong book.

That's a pretty unpleasant possibility when you've already written the whole thing.

Why I've been thinking about vibes

Adam Grant has a new book called Vibe, which explores why we connect with certain people and what makes those connections work.

I've been reading about it and watching Adam discuss the ideas, including a fascinating conversation with David Epstein.

One of the things that caught my attention was the idea that our connections aren't all built on the same foundation. Sometimes we connect through shared goals, sometimes through shared interests, and sometimes through deeper values.

And it got me thinking about books.

I know Adam is talking about relationships between people, so I'm borrowing the idea pretty liberally here.

But I wonder whether we have something like a relationship with the books we write.

Some books make sense professionally. They're aligned with our expertise, our careers, or the opportunities we're pursuing.
Some books are intellectually fascinating. We love researching them, talking about them, and exploring the ideas.

And then there are books that connect to something a little deeper. Books we feel we need to write, even when the writing itself is difficult.

I think I've experienced all three.

And I don't think they're necessarily the same thing.

With The Creation Event, I was fascinated by the story and the ideas. I had a professional reason to write it. It was connected to the work I was doing.

But something about the book itself never quite clicked.

Compare that with Super Mentors.

I felt called to write that book.

I'd spent years thinking about mentorship, interviewing people, and trying to understand why certain relationships had such an extraordinary impact on our lives.

I had questions I couldn't stop asking.

And while writing the book certainly wasn't easy, I had a much stronger sense of why I wanted people to read it.

I wanted them to rethink how mentorship actually works. I wanted them to recognize opportunities for meaningful relationships they might otherwise overlook.

I cared deeply about getting that message right.

That's a different feeling from simply having an interesting idea.

And I'm starting to wonder whether that difference matters more than I've appreciated.

Hard doesn't necessarily mean wrong

Now, I want to be careful here.

I don't think authors should abandon a book because the writing gets difficult.

Honestly, if that were the standard, we'd have very few books.

I've seen plenty of authors hit a difficult stretch, question everything, and eventually produce something wonderful.

I've done it myself.

And I don't think you necessarily need to feel some magical connection to an idea on day one. Sometimes the relationship develops as you do the work.

That's actually one of the things I find interesting about Adam's work on connection. We tend to put a lot of weight on whether something clicks immediately, even though meaningful connections can take time to develop.

So I'm certainly not advocating that everyone sit around waiting for the perfect book idea to arrive.

But I do think there's a difference between struggling to write a book you believe in and struggling to believe in the book you're writing.

I wish I'd understood that distinction earlier.

Because with The Creation Event, I kept assuming the next revision would fix the problem.

And maybe that's why I kept going as long as I did.

I'd already invested so much in the project. I had a manuscript. I had a cover. I had early readers.

It looked like a book.

Surely I could make it work.

Except eventually I had to admit something I really didn't want to admit.

I wasn't excited about publishing it.

And that probably should have told me something.

The ideas weren't wasted

Here's the funny part.

I've recently started working on something new, and some of my favorite ideas from The Creation Event are finding their way into it.

I haven't abandoned everything I learned.

I still love the classroom story. I still believe creating things can change people's lives. I still think there are fascinating lessons about the opportunities we create for ourselves.

But I'm no longer trying to make all of those ideas fit inside the book I originally imagined.

And that's been surprisingly freeing.

I think sometimes we become so attached to the project we've created that we forget we're allowed to change our minds about what it should become.

Maybe a story belongs in a different book.
Maybe an idea needs a different audience.
Maybe something that felt like the central argument turns out to be one chapter.

Or maybe you simply weren't ready to write the book you were trying to write.

I don't know exactly which of those explains The Creation Event.

I'm still figuring that out.

But I'm glad I finally gave myself permission to stop trying to rescue it.

Something I'd ask before starting your next book

I spend a lot of time encouraging people to write books.

And I believe deeply in that work.

But this experience has made me think we should spend a little more time helping people figure out whether they're writing the right one.

Not just whether the idea is marketable.
Or whether they have enough expertise.
Or whether the topic fits their professional goals.

Those things matter, of course.

But I'd also want to know whether they feel connected to what they're trying to say.

Can they explain why the book matters to them?
Do they have a sense of what they want readers to take away?
Are they curious enough about the subject to spend months wrestling with it?
And perhaps most importantly, do they feel some genuine pull toward the project, even knowing how much work it's going to require?

I'm not sure there's a perfect way to measure that.

And I'm definitely not proposing some elaborate Vibe Assessment for Authors. Although knowing me, I'll probably be tempted to build one.

For now, I think it's worth simply paying attention to the feeling.

Because I've learned that you can have a great story, an interesting idea, a complete manuscript, and even a printed book sitting on your shelf...

And still not have the book you really want to write.

I have the physical evidence sitting right here.

Maybe someday I'll revisit The Creation Event. Maybe I won't.

But I'm excited about the new project, and I think that's telling me something.

For the first time in a while, I'm more interested in where these ideas might go than in trying to make the old manuscript work.

And that feels pretty good.

Happy writing, my friends.

Eric