The Slog - What No One Told Me About Writing A Book.

There’s still so much prestige and status attached to a book deal. I'm not sure that’s how it should be—but just 0.1% of the global population have been traditionally published, and even when you include self-publishing (and you should), it only jumps to 0.15%.

But writing a book has been so wildly romanticised that I never considered anything but joy, inspiration, and flow.

I didn’t expect it to be easy, but the ways in which it was hard surprised me.

Writing a Book is Boring.

Oh, so boring.

Admittedly, ADHD is in play here—working on the same thing every day for a year is my brain’s worst nightmare. But beyond that, I didn’t expect the repetition. It was forcing myself to sit down and write every single day, putting unwilling words on the page, one by one, as an act of sheer, stubborn determination—nothing else.

Writing isn’t all new sentences and bursts of imagination and artistry. It’s drowning in online thesaurus tabs, rewriting the same lines over and over, moving paragraphs somewhere, then moving them back. Writing and reading until it sounds good, then reading aloud and realising it doesn’t.

It shocked me that in such an obvious act of creation—pulling a whole world from nothing—mundanity was so present.

Flow State is a Lie.

For me, flow state—one of those 3,000-word days—was rare. The few times I remember it happening, I thought I’d finally cracked the code.

Then I read it back. And most of it was garbled trash—words with no purpose beyond unburdening. And that, my friends, is not good writing.

The best writing is the writing I fought for. It was focused slog. A choice.

Flow state is what I wanted to write—a confessional, an outpouring, compulsion even. But that rarely served the book. What worked for me and what worked on the page were, in my experience, two different things.

I got attached. I convinced myself a section was too good to cut, that a paragraph was essential. It wasn’t. If it didn’t move the book forward, it went. It didn’t matter how much I loved it, how hard I worked on it, how much of myself was in it. Either it served the story, or it died—usually begging for its life.

It’s not just kill your darlings. Kill their families too. Burn their houses down. Salt the earth where they stood.

Flow state is the opposite of this. Flow state is ease. Great writing is discipline. Hard decisions. Relentless cuts. So, I suppose I can say that I don’t bemoan the lack of flow state.

The slog is a gift.

Writing Isn’t Always Writing.

You can lead a horse to a laptop, but you can’t always make it write. And not just because of the complicated hoof situation. Some days, that horse will simply refuse to write a single damn word.

I’ve found that writing is as much in the body as it is in the mind. And if one of the two was likely to get stuck, it was always my mind. My body unstuck it.

Writing was slamming shut the laptop, putting in headphones, and playing air drums to Queens of the Stone Age. It was a long shower. It was running, breathless. It was building a wall until my hands ached from hammering.

To me, writing often felt like problem-solving. And staring at a problem rarely solves it. The moment of inspiration always came when I was free from the problem.

And when it came, I was throwing the hammer to the ground, sprinting back toward the house, drying myself fast as hell, and dropping the drumsticks right then and there—just to get back to the page before the answer disappeared.

Writing a Book is Vast.

I’d written before—blogs, articles. I knew how to fill a page with words.

Shorter forms of writing have clear boundaries—a beginning, a middle, an end. But with a book, I lost my way. It sprawled. A maze.

I thought memoir would be simple—my life had already happened, chronologically no less. I have never been more wrong.

Life happens, but stories need structure.

What went in? What stayed out? Did an event belong in strict chronological order, or did it serve the book better elsewhere? Did I choose the right moments to illustrate a point, or did I miss something crucial? And memory isn't linear. Writing one thing unearthed another.

It was a cloudy, muddy, swirling, twilight-filled place.

It's an Emotional Marathon.

I suspect the emotional toll of writing is high no matter the genre. Because a book—even a fictional one—contains parts of whoever wrote it.

For me, memoir demanded deep introspection and clarity. Truthfully, I couldn’t have written this book even three years ago.

Well, I could have, but it would have been angry, unsettled, and unsure.

And it became my whole world. I thought about the book constantly, and that in itself was exhausting.

At first, when people asked if it was cathartic, I said, “Maybe I am immune to catharsis. After all, I've had a lot of therapy.”

Eight months in, I realised there had been no catharsis because I had avoided the difficult parts—writing around them, leaving out the details that mattered (to me and to the book).

The emotional meat was what I came to last, already tired, already overwhelmed.

And my God, that was like being emotionally skinned alive. In fact, six months later I'm still not quite over it.

Writing is Lonely.

Only I knew. Only I understood. Only I was holding—and was able to hold—that whole book in my head and heart.

I’m lucky to have many supportive people in my life, and they supported me in all the ways they could. But the truth is, it was my baby. My burden. My annoying, maniacal, obsessive thinking.

There was no way to articulate it exactly as it existed in my mind.

No one, not even my best writer friends (and if you don’t have them, find them), could understand as fully as I did.

And that’s okay. But it’s also lonely.

I think that’s how it’s supposed to be. Because once it’s out in the world, it’s sharing like I have never shared before.

The book had to belong to me first before it could belong to others.

Maybe the loneliness of writing is what makes the connection of reading so powerful.

And That’s It.

That’s the slog of writing a book.

It’s not romantic, not mystical or magical—it’s work.

If you can handle a year of boredom, relentlessness, and exhaustion, you can do it too.

No one’s stopping you.

But no one’s making you either.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate you being here.

If you like my words and images, consider sharing on social media or with friends who might enjoy it too. You can subscribe to my newsletter at the 'signup' link below. You can also read more about my book here and if you like the sound of it, you can buy it here.