How to write a book?
By Natalia Bielczyk
Edited by Carolina Makowski
Recently, I wrote my first book entitled ‘What is out there for me? The landscape post-PhD career tracks’; it is now available on Amazon (in an ebook and a paperback form). How did it happen? Was it hard to write a book?
Deep inside, I always wanted to write books. Writing makes me happy and I feel that I have an aptitude for writing as well (well, maybe there is some causal connection here…). Whenever I think about my dream future, I used to think that if ever I am lucky enough to get enough passive income, then one day I would like to live in the woods and write books. And in the end, it came to my mind: why not now?
To write a book, three conditions need to come together. Firstly, you need to have some interest in writing and enjoy the process. Secondly, you need to have a lot of time to be able to focus on this task. Thirdly, you need to have a topic for a book, where you can contribute some new, valuable content. In my case, I felt that all these conditions were met as I had a lot of materials about post-PhD career tracks which I could put together in the form of a book. And for me, the topic is really important and worth writing about.
I need to say that no one ever told me how to write a book. I have never gone through any courses on writing and I would not even say that I read a lot myself—merely a few books per year. Yet, I always wrote a lot of texts of all kinds. Between 14 and 25 years old I used to write a diary (around 200-300 pages per year). Since I turned 20, I was blogging (which is 13 years now). Plus, I wrote three 80-120-page long Master theses, a 260-page long PhD thesis, and more than 20 different research papers and other scientific texts and essays. Altogether since high school, I wrote at least 5,000 pages of text. So, I just wrote intuitively, in the way I felt it should be done.
In terms of style, I aimed for a bit more casual. I felt that PhDs are so burdened with textbooks and research articles that there is no point in writing another dry encyclopedic material but rather a light book, in which knowledge intertwines with anecdotes and colored pictures to summarize the content in an approachable way. I also felt that the layout should be simple, so I looked into a few recent, popular ebooks such as ‘How To Be Everything’ by Emily Wapnick, or ‘Start With Why’ by Simon Sinek. I felt that the simpler the layout, the better. From the very beginning, I also had a vision for the cover of the book: I wanted to see a scared girl walking through dark woods, and monsters hiding in the bush. I made a simple sketch and showed it to a graphic design artist I found on Fiverr: Roger from Taiwan. He made truly beautiful artwork for my cover.
My writing process was no different from many professional authors. It started with vomiting ideas for as long as necessary for the amount of material to reach a crucial mass for a book. Then I conceptualized what the particular chapters would be about, I organized ideas within each chapter with bullet points, and I wrote down a plan for the writing process day by day. I planned which bullet points I would unfold each day. Even though I swapped the chunks of work on multiple occasions, and I did not keep the same order of writing as the order of chapters in the book, I kept my internal deadline and I finished on the day I planned. (By the way, in the process I also discovered that I am a faster writer than Stephan King; he writes six pages a day while I write seven). Then, sculpting the text took me another few days—I had to go through the text with grammar correction tools and read through one more time carefully.
The hardest part of the process was the collateral stress. At some point, more or less halfway, I started reflecting on the fact that a book could expose me to a wider audience than before, and I do not necessarily want that. If you consider buying a book, you usually google the name of the author, right? For me, being recognized is a cost associated with conveying the message, rather than a reward in itself. A thought that people who do not know me could send me emails and knock at my door was really stressful—and at some point I froze for a while. I have since put myself together and decided to finish writing as fast as possible, before the doubts start to kick in.
I also experienced a new form of stress which I had not experienced before. As a scientist, you are used to critical comments concerning your work, which usually concerns abstract models or clinical experiments. If you write a book, you include a lot of your own opinions and conclusions which is much closer to you as a person—critical comments might feel much more personal as well. This collateral stress is also why it is often the case that when your hobby becomes your job, it becomes stressful and is not as enjoyable anymore.
Overall, though, I loved the process. For me, it is a type of activity where after eight hours of working, I feel more rested and energetic than at the very beginning. And, I could not believe that eight hours had passed. I also enjoyed the fact that writing is efficient, in the sense that I can state my points only once and reach out to a lot of people with this content. Since I set the Stichting Solaris foundation, I was getting the same job-related questions from PhD candidates over and over again, and now I could just write down all the answers in one document.
Writing for a living also has a lot of features of an ideal job for me. In writing, you live in a cycle: you go for meetings and events, talk to people, experience something, and then you get back home, digest what you experienced in peace, and produce new insights to further put them on paper. In a sense, you have a lot of contact with other people, but also a lot of time for yourself. I like both the periods of hassle and the periods of calm. Furthermore, as mentioned before, I love the process of writing—to me, it is the most relaxing activity ever. Plus, there is no boss and you can organize your time all by yourself. I also enjoy the fact that similarly as in academic research, you put your name on what you produce and in that sense, it is quite an individualistic activity and you can be proud of what you wrote. Plus, unlike academia, if you produce something that has a lot of value to a lot of people, you can start earning very decent money.
I was raised like any regular Polish kid, and I was always being taught that I should not think of myself too high—just be a decent person, have a ‘normal job’ and a ‘normal family’. ‘Normal’ meaning ‘just like everybody else’. So imagine that you were always told so—and then one day, you discover that maybe you won’t have a job like everybody else after all, but rather some quite rare profession instead. It is a weird feeling but at the end of the day, this is a turn for the good.
About the author: Natalia Bielczyk is the Founder, Director & Chairperson @ Stichting Solaris Onderzoek en Ontwikkeling, and an Owner @ Welcome Solutions. She is currently completing her PhD thesis within the Donders Graduate School, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. This post has also been featured on Natalia’s personal blog.