422 - How to Write a Book and Actually Finish It

0:00Did you know that 80 % of people say they have a book in them? So where's yours? In this episode, you're going to learn exactly how to take those beautiful ideas in your head and turn them into a real finished book. Let's go. Linda Sievertson is an award-winning author, a New York Times bestselling co-author, former ghostwriter, and a magazine editor who midwives books. She's been featured on Forbes.com, Teen Vogue, CNN, Glamour, and much more. Linda's the host of the Beautiful Writers podcast and her latest book with the same name, A Journey of Big Dreams and Messy Manuscripts with tricks of the trade from bestselling authors.

0:39Linda, oh my goodness, you are the woman that we need to hear from. And I am so excited for this conversation. I mean, first of all, I am obsessed with books. It's the thing that I own the most of in my life. And books have just changed my life on so many levels and continue to. And I was opening up with these incredible stats that for many people can feel quite depressing. And you are the human that can help us start to kind of demystify and also give us some tactics. So I want to start with something that I've heard a ton in my own career when people show up on my doorstep. And I would assume it's the same thing for books.

1:17This idea that it's already been done before. Like, oh my gosh, I have an idea for a book about divorce or food or business or spirituality, whatever the topic might be. yet people have this voice saying like, oh my God, it's all been done before. What would you say to that person? Yeah, that one makes me crazy because think about it. Every year, like say you're a relationship coach and you want to write a relationship book. Well, every year there's a new crop of about a million divorces in America. That was pre-COVID. Who knows what it is now? Yeah. But those people, they're weeping and exhausted and they stumble into the bookstore or they're 2am on amazon.com and they're looking for help and they want the latest greatest and they see they're seeing the latest books on the shelf.

2:07So every year there's this new available market for relationship books. And it's like that across the board. I mean, we always have like the staples, but there's always room for new. Yeah. I love that. And I don't think I thought about it from that perspective too. I mean, looking for the latest, right? What is the newest release in kind of any category that people would actually look for that? And it's a really great point. Well, consciousness is always expanding as is information, right? So all you have to do is talk to a 25 year old and you go, whoa, kids are smarter than we were. A lot of, at least the kids I'm talking to, especially in consciousness, in vibration, in expansion.

2:51And so books are the same. They're written by people. So as we evolve and grow, books do too. So you've interviewed close to 200 writers and you've helped thousands of people, right? Just complete and finish and actually publish their book. I'm curious if you can speak into the qualities that set people apart, like from the folks who finish or excuse me, that start and don't finish to the folks who actually follow through and get their work out into the world. Oh, wow. A lot of people start. They get super excited. It's so much fun to be taken over by an idea. You know, it's like having an affair and you just, uh, you can't wait to get back to the page and then life hits.

3:35I mean, there is something to be said for momentum, right? So I always tell people go where the juice is, start with the good stuff. Like don't force yourself to do the hard parts because at first, until you have some momentum. No wonder you're running from your desk. So go where the juice is, give yourself a break, take your time. But most people, I would say they start hitting that resistance, both internal and external, and they get dejected and they stop at some point. And oftentimes, as Stephen, our friend, Stephen Preston talks about, they'll stop right at the end. I mean, Steven said on my podcast and then in the book, you know, he blew up his life when he was 99 % done with a book.

4:23So, and that happens a lot. I have to fight it all the time too. It's like that last 10%. And do you experience it yourself or have you seen it in any way I've worked with? Like it's really, I've looked at it. It feels like getting over that last hump to finish. Almost any project, of course, books, but I've seen this in our own business, whether it's courses or whether it's a development project that has to do with coding and all kinds of technical stuff, right? Getting over that last bit. It's like, oh, it's big. So hard. It feels like you're dying sometimes. I mean, remember that. I love that story that you tell in the book about your proposal hackathon.

5:02And proposals are a good way to get yourself to the finish line because once Once you've shopped your proposal and you actually have a book deadline, heaven help you if you don't make it, right? So there's something about that pressure that I think makes all of us smarter really quickly. A hundred percent. Yeah. And I love that story that you said. You said, look, I wasn't getting the proposal done. My work was taking up all the hours, all the things, all the hours. Yeah, that was the thing. I kept hearing myself talking about, oh, this idea for the book, the idea for the book. I had done the talk on Oprah.

5:37So it was like, okay, I knew the book was going to be everything accountable. And my agent, Bonnie, was just like, okay, Marie, when do you think you can get a proposal in? And of course, with all the other things I'm doing to run the business and just actually have a life, it just kept getting pushed off and I couldn't find or make enough of a kind of open chunk to get deep enough in to get that momentum you were talking about. And then I finally got so fed up with myself. I was like, screw this. This is not working. And I set up, I remember that tech companies, I don't know if they still do this, but I'd read about it somewhere.

6:12They kind of have these hackathons where they're either going to build an entire product over 24 or 48 hours, or they're going to do something kind of wild within a very short, tight amount of time. And I said, why can't I use the same mechanism to force myself to make major progress rest of my book proposal. And I told Josh, my partner, I was like, look, you're going to have to just bring me the food. I'm not doing anything. I'm probably going to cry. I say that too. Yeah. And I'm just going to be a mess, but we're going to see if we can actually get this done. And as you noted, we got about 80 % of the way there.

6:44And once I got there and I showed my agent, she was like, Marie, this is really good. You just need to do X, Y, or Z. And I'm like, okay, I will do this. I turned into that bulldog. Yeah. That's the fun part. When you have enough to show somebody that you respect, they give you feedback, then it's like, okay, you're not just wandering around blind. You have tools in front of you to finish it. Let me ask you this, because this has been true for me. I've written two books so far, and I definitely want to do more. It's always an interesting kind of balance for me with the other things that we do to run the business, because I'm writing a lot.

7:20So it's like I'm writing, writing, writing, but not necessarily aiming it at a book. So I found for me that I'm very collaborative person. When I did my first book, I actually hired a book coach simply to have somebody to talk to, like to have somebody to show pages to, because I realized the same thing. It was like, if I don't have any outside accountability, this is going to be way more difficult than it needs to be. Have you seen in your experience that having some form of outside accountability, obviously in addition to a deadline or a publisher, but another human being that you can show pages to helps people?

7:55Makes all the difference. I mean, I myself have my mentor, Betsy Rappaport, who I've worked with maybe not on every book, but on most of my books, because otherwise you just go insane by yourself. I mean, it's just like, wow. And you get to the point where you can look at somebody else's proposal and know exactly what's missing or their storyline of the arc of their story. But with your own, it's like, wow. I mean, gibberish half the time. And so I'll send stuff to Betsy and say, what do you think? She'll give me notes. I'll rework it. Sometimes we'll go back and forth a whole bunch. And it's just heavenly.

8:32It makes me so excited. I can't wait to get her email. Same with my publisher at Ben Bella with my editor, Vi. She was so fantastic. Every time I got an email from her, it would just make my day because I'm no longer in a vacuum doing this shit by myself. I mean, it's just crazy making. So and I would say that, you know, most of the people from the podcast and in the book are the same. There were a few holdouts like Martha Beck for the longest time, never, ever showed her stuff to anyone. Ann Patchett, you know, these people are like so good at what they do that, that, but over the years they've gotten way more collaborative as well.

9:13And Martha says it's way more fun now. I mean, she and Liz Gilbert read their chapters to each other over the phone and, and, uh, she works with her daughter. So it's just, it's so much more fun and it's faster. Yeah. I keep anytime I go down the route of, uh, any part of my business or any part of writing with like, Oh, I got to get this. And I was like, nope, who else can I call in? I want to talk about self-doubt. And when you're writing things and you're kind of halfway down, you're starting to go like, God, is this all just shit? Like this is just terrible. When you want to just kind of burn it all down, what have you noticed with some of the most kind of prolific writers that you've interviewed or people that you've talked to?

9:57Do they have those same doubts and do they ever go away? Dude, it's always shit and it never goes away. So Sabah Tahir, who was just nominated for the American National Book Award for All My Rage, she used to work at the Washington Post. And she said it was the coolest thing to see that these Pulitzer Prize winning journalists would just turn in crap, like the first time they turned in a story. And then they would work with it and work with it. And over time, it would become magnificent, but it was always crap. And I think, you know, she says the same thing about her work. Cheryl Strait says the same thing.

10:32Nia Varless was a big surprise to me because she's a screenwriter more known for screenwriter writing more than a book, although she does have a bestseller. But she she had written the Oscar nominated screenplay for My Big Fat Greek Wedding and all sorts of other scripts. and she said constantly, she's got this self-doubt voice in her head saying, you ain't nothing like just constantly. And that just, I think it's human nature. I don't know why it's that way. I don't know why we're all hardwired that way. Some of us, I have noticed, and I'll tell you, this is funny. The most grandiose people are the least talented.

11:16So here's how it works. Here's how it works. the people who I think are kind of destined to be writers, y 'all, like Steven Pressfield and you and Van Jones and Liz Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed and Terry McMillan and on and on, y 'all are destined to be writers. So you knew growing up that you had big shit to do here. I mean, we all kind of have an idea. I think we're all hard, hardwired for what we're here to do. So I think everyone across the board has some kind of idea, but especially the people that are going to be touching millions of people. They really have an idea. So I love grandiosity.

11:50I'm all about it. You have to think big to carry out something big. The people who call me and they're like, I'm going to be on Oprah in six weeks. They're crackers. They have no idea what they're talking about. And they don't understand that timeline for creating a masterpiece, how really rigorous it is. I mean, Mary Carr threw away 1 ,200 pages of lit. That's three or four whole books before she published lit, which was like the memoir to re-jump the whole genre. But Rosie Walsh with Ghosted, which was a huge bestseller, international, she threw away 40 ,000 words three times. okay and not always by choice this was her editor going uh not there yet and and that's just so common but it's common for the people who are the best the people who write you know you read their books and you think oh that's a masterpiece i guarantee you they threw away more writing than anybody else because that's what it takes it does and i remember having a conversation with uh Danny Shapiro about this.

13:01And she was telling me how, I forget how many, it might've been 12 ,000 words or it was just an enormous amount. And she was like, Maria, it was like, just done, gone, like was not going in the wrong direction and had to get back on track. And the track that she got back on turned out to be, you know, extraordinarily right. But the pain of that, and I love having these conversations because most people in books and in other creative endeavors, they just see the finished product. They see the course, they see the book, they see the speech, they see the movie, right? And they're like, oh, that must've just poured out of them.

13:41And it's like, not always. I sometimes have a bit of like wistful envy that I was really, you know, that I was like, oh, I wish I could do songs and sing because I've had so many like stories where it's like, oh, they were just like having, you know, a glass of wine or they were walking out and flying a kite and then this tune came in and then they wrote it down and it's like three or four minutes. But I was like, well, that's not me in this life. Books are very, very different. But I think it is important to hear that because, you know, I just came back from doing a speaking engagement and there's about, I don't know, over 4 ,000, 4 ,500 people in the room.

14:19And so many people ask me, they're like, do you still get nervous before a talk? I'm like, I'm a mess. I'm a freaking mess. I'm a total mess. I'm like, I'm shit. No one's going to want this. They already know it. It's literally a mess. And I've been doing this for over 20 freaking years. I'm like, this shit does not go away. It does not. It does not. And I think that's good though. But don't you think that's good? Because if it went away, it would mean maybe that we were just phoning it in, that we didn't give two shits anymore. Right? Totally. Totally. No, but I wanted people to hear that because again, it can feel really lonely.

14:58It can feel really isolating and you can feel really broken when you're in the midst of creating. Really, really broken. This is a big question. Big question. I want you to think about the answer, although it might just pop out of your head. What would you say is the single most important habit for a writer? And if there's not one, if there's not one single most important habit, you might have one. Give me like your top three. I would say it's got to be three. There's big, they, they're all equally important, but I would say mindset is the number one most important habit, because if you're thinking it right, you're not going to keep showing up or You're going to show up, but you're going to berate yourself and waste a lot of your damn time.

15:45I would say decide that you know it's going to be shit. Decide that it's not all up to you, that this is a collaboration with your muse, your God, just your unconscious that is trying to help your children live a better life. I don't care what your motivation is, but find it and then keep your thoughts right. and you know if people get messy with their thoughts garbage in garbage out look at what you're watching look at what you're listening to watch more marie tv watch seth godin what i mean there's so many people to watch there's so many great podcasts to listen to abby and and glennon i mean on and on and on there's so much value to be putting into your brain hey real quick are you coming to my goal setting master class i'm going live on january 8th to share three goal setting secrets of self-made millionaires.

16:37If you want more money, success, and abundance in 2025, click the link in the description to sign up now. It's totally free and I know you're going to love it. So I have a friend of mine who is a painter and she's awesome. And we were talking just about the creative process and I was going into a new project and I said, you know, I'm going, I'm taking myself away. I was going to, you know, just fly across the country. Josh is going to be New York, I was going to be in LA for a while to just kind of get into it. And she said, Marie, you need to give yourself a few days to get back in the zone. Just meaning like do not expect Monday morning, for example, to sit down, new day, new place.

17:17And then like you're kind of cold and just to get back in. She's like every time for her when she's starting a new series or she's starting just a new piece or kind of getting it, she's like, I always need this warmup time of a couple days to get into it. Have you seen that A to be true with yourself and with the writers that you've either interviewed or coached? I don't think so with myself because I had a really kind of tumultuous first marriage. So I was married for 19 years and we fought more in like one month than I had fought with anybody in my entire life, everybody combined. So we radically loved each other and we had lots of drama.

17:56And then we had a kid, really great recipe, right? And then a million animals. And so, and then my parents were dying and I moved home to take care of them and on and on and on, right? The distractions in all of our lives are incredible. In mine, we're like on steroids. And so I had to learn how to write in any situation, in any amount of time as quickly as possible. And I got really good at it. Like I can write, I don't want to say in a storm, but I can write in a lot of drama. No, it's interesting. I think people are just built differently. Like I also have friends who just, they can just go.

18:33And I have other friends who are just like, it's a little bit more of a slow burn. You know what I mean? It's a little bit. I will say I edit like a mother. I mean, I edit endlessly. I heard once that, that Hemingway edited every chapter 50 to a hundred times. And I'm like, all right, Well, hot damn, then I'm like Hemingway because I'm an obsessive editor. So I just forego sleep. I have really bad habits that way. I'll just not anymore. But for a lot of my career, I just didn't sleep. You were just into it. Okay. So this is something interesting you've said before. Writer's block isn't in our vocabulary.

19:09What do you mean by that? And what's your advice on how folks can kind of avoid writer's block altogether? You know, my favorite line is actually not mine. at Seth Godin's where he says, you know, nobody has talkers blocks. So just write like you talk and then you'll go. I just, I think that people have to figure out their way of hearing themselves because they think we're all open channels. Well, I take that back. Some people have to get therapy. They have to find out why they're blocked. What's scaring them? What's clouding this space. But once you've done that, I think that you just have to find the mode that helps you create.

19:50So you are a mover, right? I know that about you. So you'll, you'll take your, your phone and talk into it, or you'll take your computer and walk around the house and talk into it or talk to your team as you're walking or dancing or whatever. You're just a real movement oriented person. And, and you, you know that about yourself. I remember Arianna Huffington said that she was having trouble writing. And then she went, but wait a minute, I can talk for an hour with no notes on stage. Why don't I act like I'm on stage and just talk it? Lisa Gibbons talks her books. Tom Hanks in the car, he's talking into a dictaphone.

20:26He says he takes that dictaphone with him everywhere he goes because the ideas are constant. So I just think you have to know how you best work and then set yourself up in your life up for creating in that space. It's such good advice. And I actually have to do it more. Like I have such a structure in my head that in order to write, I must sit down and write, right? Even though I get tons of ideas when I move and I talk and it's like super collaborative and good copy comes out, I want to experiment more with that on kind of my next projects. Because I have this belief, And it's probably like a bullshit limiting belief.

21:07But I have this belief that when I merely talk, that it is not going to be as eloquent, well-structured, or kind of cogent. And you don't even... Yeah. And powerful than when I kind of sit down and drill out a sentence. But I think I might need to give myself a little bit of a break on that. Yeah. And at least get the bones down and then we can... I was going to say, get the foundation down and then you just put the mouth... mascara on the eyelashes with the editing. Editing is actually, Linda, one of my favorite things to do. I'll tell the teams all the time. Oh my gosh. Like just finding that right turn of phrase or moving something that was at the end to the beginning or like shaving something down.

21:53It is, it feels to me like one of the most joyful processes ever. I know. It's so addictive. Yeah. No, it's so good. What have you seen to be the difference between people who land a big book deal and people who don't? Oh, well, you know, there is some good news on that front because we're all so terrified of the platform numbers, right? People are so worried about their Facebook numbers and their Twitter numbers, and they get it. And that is a real thing. publishers if publishers are looking at two different authors and one has no social media and the other one is really active on social media and everything else is equal they love their projects equally they're going to lean towards the person with the social media so they have a partner in the marketing right it's just that simple it's just how it works however um and years ago mary carr told me that if you write a really good book it doesn't matter like it will get sold.

22:53Ann Patchett says the same thing. A lot of the people who started out in publishing and got famous before social media, they say that. And I was like, I'm not really sure. I'm not really sure I'm buying that. That's maybe old school, but that's not so. However, oh my God, I had a client recently, 1200 followers on all of the socials. And she got a million dollar preempt from Simon & Schuster. And the reason was because what she wrote was so beautiful and mass market. Like, I don't want to give too much away about the book, but it's the kind of thing that helps you with time. It helps you with organization.

23:33It's super, super mass market, beautifully done. She's a designer. So she made it just so delicious and hard to put down. And boom, Simon Schuster fought to keep it off the market. And I see that over and over with high, high quality stuff. So the people that I've seen who are the most successful are the people who've been teaching their work for a long time. So they own it, they embody it, they live it, they breathe it. a publisher doesn't have to worry that they haven't really thought it all through or that or that the arc won't work or that the ending you know they'll buy the proposal with the sample chapters but then the ending won't ever make sense because the person hasn't figured it out none of that is a worry if you've been teaching the material for a long time so I think those people are the most successful I have a couple of clients recently who've sold really big novel deals.

24:31Again, very little social media because the books were just unputdownable. I mean, I mean, that's where my heart still gets so happy with this industry is that the people who are saying yes and no, they got into this industry, not for the money, God knows, because if you work at Random House as a new person, you know, you go from intern to associate editor, you're not making much money, you probably can't even afford to live in New York. So they get into it because they love stories. And that's something I want every writer who's listening to this to hold in their heart. That, you know, look at agents and editors not as like mean people or scary people or even intimidating.

25:19They're just lovers of stories and ideas. And the reason they're intimidating is because they see so much great stuff. So it's hard to get their attention. But if what you deliver is beautiful and well done, you're going to have success. I love that. So let's go to, and I love this as we're kind of rounding out to the end, these three ways that people can set themselves up to actually write their book. You've got three H's habits, health, and happiness. Let's talk about habits first. You know, you have to set yourself up for success. So the people that I admire the most are the ones who have boundaries like you.

26:04I mean, Liz Gilbert said that she, she almost had a nervous breakdown. Like she just gave it all away and to the point where she was left with nothing. Right. And so, So I think the biggest and most important habit is around time. Time. Scheduling your life appropriately. I was looking at your time course today. Time genius. Yeah, I got to do that. I mean, I did a whole talk on time debt, and I'm still wrestling with time, right? Of course, we all are. So I can't wait to do, I'm going to do time genius. But at any rate, so putting boundaries around time, I think that's like the most important habit of all.

26:42But health is just key. Liz tells a really funny story. If you know you're going to write at 5 a.m. tomorrow morning, you don't binge watch Netflix. You don't drink a bottle of wine the night before. You really got to think about it. You know, we have in this country, we have a real entertainment zombie sort of approach to our time. And I think the national average is five hours of television a day. I mean, we take less vacation time than medieval peasants. Okay, hear that? Less vacation time than medieval peasants. So you've got to like fuel your life with, you know, good stuff, good food, good water, good habits.

27:27I didn't sleep a lot throughout my career, but I ate so clean. I exercised. I was happy. You know, I felt great. And so I was able to deliver. Let's see what else. Happiness. You know, drama makes for really good stories, but not a great life. Yeah. I mean, I had a lot of drama in my first marriage, but we also had a lot of great stuff. And I, for whatever reason, thank you, God, I am a naturally high serotonin person. Thank my parents. So because of that, I think I could handle more drama than the average bear. But why put yourself in it, right? So happiness, I think, is really key to being a beautiful writer.