the feeling of writing my book

(a guest post by Penny Wincer)

Image by Penny Wincer from Home Matters

Today, I’m excited to present the first ever Small Stories guest post, from author and non-fiction book coach,

Penny Wincer

. In a moment of strange synchronicity, Penny’s upcoming book Home Matters—which shares an editor and publisher with my first book, Little Stories of Your Life—is due to be published on the same day as Chasing Fog (ONE WEEK TODAY on 29th August)!

Following a chat on Instagram about our upcoming shared publication day, I asked Penny to share with us the feeling of writing her book. You’re in for a treat—she’s written a gorgeously heartfelt and juicy post about how it really feels to write a book. As you know, pre-orders matter, so please do consider pre-ordering Home Matters and if you have a non-fiction book dream of your own, check out the link to Penny’s book coaching at the bottom of the post.

In the meantime, here’s Penny…

As a writer I feel doomed to have busy summers. Two years ago, I was completing a masters degree, the dissertation due on September 1^st. Last year I had promised myself I would not do the same so when HOME MATTERS was commissioned, we decided on July 15^th as the deadline. Of course, life had other plans and at some point in the spring, a mid-summer deadline looked impossible to keep. So yet again I had an early September one.

This year, the publishing date for HOME MATTERS was supposed to be in early July but due to a printing delay, the date was shifted to August 29^th. End of the summer. Again. As a parent to a disabled teenager with little support in August, this is far from ideal. But perhaps not as bad as my first publishing experience in 2020, when every bookstore in the country was closed.

If there is one thing I can say about the writing and publishing of a book, it’s that it is a lesson in both humility and lack of control. Capable of dragging you down a few pegs, as well as building you up, filled with highs and lows of excruciating proportions. This is only my second published book and both times when the proposal was sold the elation was followed quickly by the fear I would not be able to write the book I had proposed. As people around me congratulated me on the enormous feat that is selling a book, running through my mind was ‘What have I done?’

You could say that writing a book proposal is the ultimate leap of faith. Huge amounts of work must be done to prove that this is a book that needs to be out in the world. It is a road map for a landscape that does not yet exist. One that as a writer, we must believe in whole heartedly, to be able to entice others to believe in it too. And then when a publisher does believe in it, it is our job to follow through on those promises. To create that landscape from the bones of a proposal and give it flesh. And there is nothing more exciting, tortuous and at times shame-filled, when it both exceeds and fails to live up to our own expectations in various ways.

HOME MATTERS differs significantly from how it first began. The deeper I got into the writing of it, the more personal it became. The more conversations I had, the more complex the picture looked. What began as a sketch became an intricate painting with many layers.

Image by Penny Wincer

This is what is both so hard and what I love about writing books. The size of the project and the length of time it takes to write and publish them, gives them a depth almost impossible to replicate elsewhere. This slow, clunky process of working for months on a proposal and then months (or even years) on writing, researching and editing, is actually what gives books their edge. So much of the world is fast. Content is made and consumed at high speed. Articles and posts are knocked out and skim read. But books are read and reread and reread by a small team of people who each have a vision for what it could become.

But humility is not just required for our own expectations of the quality of what we write. Publishing itself requires it. One book is a speck in the sea of publishing in any given week. Even when we are proud of our work, know that we pulled something from our soul that has some value, it is impossible not to feel overwhelmed, drowned out, insignificant. What is one small voice? What is one book? What does it mean not to be included on lists, or be highly visible or find a place in coveted media slots? What if you have the misfortune of publishing on the day of a significant tragedy or major event? Two or three years of work is drowned out by the noise of something nothing to do with you. Talk about a lesson in humility.

Does a book still have the same value if only a small number of people read it? What if those small numbers are more moved and changed by our words than by another whose books have sold in vast quantities? How do we even quantify what ‘success’ looks like? Most people are shocked to discover how few thousand books you need to sell to become a Sunday Times Bestseller. But those people are usually also shocked by how few books the general public actually buy (and how little money a typical author makes).

Image by Penny Wincer from Home Matters

Why then do we do it when the process can feel like torture? Can make us feel like everything is out of our control and that no one cares anyway?

The urge to create and to explore my own world within a book is an urge I feel unable to say no to. No matter the failures I have experienced (and there have been many), for some reason I can’t stop.

To create something, anything, is to be humbled. To be humbled by how our skills don’t match our vision. To be humbled by how small we are in the scheme of things. And the lack of control over how others will see our work and experience our words is terrifying. But to allow those things to stop us, is a distraction. Because there is no creative work without failures of some kind. A piece of art and how its seen is unable to be completely controlled. And that is part of what makes art what it is. No longer the domain of the artist. An uncontrollable conversation that happens (or doesn’t happen) out there, beyond us.

So we continue to work and continue to be humbled. And hope that out there somewhere, our words find an audience.

Portrait of Penny by Carmel King

About me: I’m Penny Wincer, author and non-fiction book coach. My first book Tender is about unpaid care and my second Home Matters is out in 2024. I help writers put non-fiction book proposals together, through group programs, workshops and one to one coaching. I’m also the host of Not Too Busy To Write podcast, where I talk with authors from every genre, about how they write and create, amongst life’s many other demands.