I inherited a pattern from my father, a writer, which has felt burdensome for a good many years, yet familiar enough to also feel normal. It has to do with keeping one’s writings in the closet.

In my father’s case, I mean it literally. He had piles of notebooks containing ideas for stories in the hall closet, vertical stacks of them. They were found after his death, all those spiral-bound notebooks filled with his careful cursive scrawls. They weighed on my heart for years after; they seemed a symbol of the dreams he did not let himself play out fully.

But in hindsight, two things have come to me.

One, ideas are relatively easy to come by.

We all have that “What if…?” part of our mind, which invites possibilities to come to us. If we write down what comes, we often do shelve it somewhere – in the back of our minds, our computers, perhaps even our closets.

It’s retrieving those jottings that turns the possibility into an actuality—retrieving them and giving them the encouragement of our time, our attention, and our care. It’s the process of turning the not-yet-formed into a form unique to what we make of it that begins to have substance, meaning, even delight in the telling. That, over time, turns it into an experience-through-writing that can make a difference to the hearts, minds, and souls of others (aka, readers).

So having a pile of not-yet-used ideas is not, in itself, a cause for lament. It may be a matter of going with the ones that actually call you to them, and letting the rest go.

And yet, two: I have a closet similar to my father’s.

It’s the closet in the hall. And instead of piles of small notebooks with scribbles of “What if…?” ideas, I have loose-leaf binders filled with books that I started writing years ago: chapters in progress, in various versions that I had invested myself in during moments of belief and urgency, and then closed the door on when I didn’t know what to do next. These binders represented more than one book, on more than one subject. And although some were in colors difficult to overlook—orange, red, purple, along with the ubiquitous white—somehow, I managed to overlook them each time I opened the closet door to get something from a different shelf. (I keep fabric on the bottom, for sewing projects that may happen someday.) I actually stopped seeing them when I opened the closet door.

And then I decided to bring the books to life.

WRITING A BOOK CAN BE A DREAM YOU LET COME TRUE, EVEN IF IT’S BEEN SHELVED FOR A WHILE

One day, when I was contemplating the legacy (material and otherwise) that I wanted to leave my family and the world, I thought about those abandoned books in the closet. It was uncomfortable, at first, to think about them; they had become a fixture by now, those unseen bits of orange in the closet, those 2-inch-wide binders housing dreams I’d had and given up on. To give them attention, even just in my mind, was to face my embarrassment, and my disappointment in myself, and my feelings of helplessness. (If I had known what to do with those books, I would have already done it, right?)

But after not a very long time of this discomfort, what welled up in me was . . . interest. Once, I had believed these books mattered, hadn’t I? What was it that had compelled my interest? And I began to reflect on this.

It is so very different to allow yourself to simply reflect on something than to crowd it out with negative judgments about it, and yourself. What was it about the books that had drawn me that far as to have volumes of binders of writing in the closet on those subjects?

There were several subjects – on money and the inner life; on the creative process; on regaining the love of the Mother, and allowing that to infuse everything – so they were not identical. But here’s what they had in common:

They were all seekings. They were all longings calling me to explore and let into my consciousness (and, I had hoped, my life) something that — because of my personal and cultural conditioning — I had believed I lacked.

And, having lived too long and too constrictedly with the experience of that lack for my own true comfort, something in me had called me to go a little further, a little deeper — to find out, “Could what I need be found? Could writing a book be a way to do it?” I had gone as far as I could with those volumes before confusion and self-doubt kicked in. And into the closet the volumes went.

Our Books, Our Legacies, Our Gifts

When I considered them in light of the legacy I wanted to leave — that is, when I considered the fact of my mortality as best I was able — a new understanding, a new wish, began to emerge:

What if these book journeys were part of my legacy? That is, what if what I had sought to discover for myself was also something that other people longed for, struggled with, did not know how to find their way into? What if my earlier belief that I had lacked whatever it was that I had to make that writing journey for was not a source of shame after all, but a gift? That it could show people to themselves, and open doors that wanted opening?

This perspective touched my heart. Perhaps anything we do to find our way out of the constrictions of separateness — no matter how tentatively, at first — is a gift to the world. Maybe even at the intention level, where we hope our gift reverberates into the atmosphere and touches people invisibly. But even more so when we have the courage and the dedication to take a “What if…?” idea that comes to us and carry it out all the way — for our own sake, but also as a gift to others who also are bound by the strictures we experience, and would love to find their way into some more true and beautiful reality that we might indeed find through our book-writing journey.

What Came Out of This

I decided that, bit by bit, I would go through the binders in the closet and see what spoke to me now. I was more adept at putting books together than when I had first forayed into those territories, and more courageous, more confident, more . . . light. In the thick of writing a given book, I might have despaired of its value or of finding a way forward; but now, years later, I trusted myself to discern what spoke to me and what didn’t; to find ways to work with what didn’t (including just letting those parts go without attachment), and to build fruitfully on what did.

And so it has become an ongoing part of my work life to give a bit of time each week to one or another of those closeted books. On a Monday morning, say, before I start planning my week, I may sit down with one of the binders, open it up with interest, and type up what’s on the page into my computer. (I no longer have the original files to just plug in; they exist in formats no longer current.) I’ll reflect on what I’m typing, see if it touches me in my mind or heart or body. I may do a bit of rewriting, or simply skip over certain parts that (I see in retrospect) were more for my own psychological processing than for others to read. When my timer goes off after an hour or so, I take the physical pages I typed (now in residence on my computer) and happily put them into the recycling bin.

were you writing a book? You may already have written some pages worth bringing back to life

So I whittle down the bulk of what takes up room in the closet, knowing that the more fragrant distillations are safely kept in my computer. Seeing the abandoned volumes gradually shrink means that the renewed revision is growing.

All this makes me happy.

It will take time to transfer and revise the usable parts of all the books in my closet (I had better live long!), and I’m not giving myself a deadline by which to finish. But I am, voluntarily, carrying out — with consistency and the discipline born of interest, even love — continuing to go through them until I feel they are done. At that point, I will celebrate and publish the book(s) and share them with readers who may want access to the fruits of my journeys.

And this is on top of writing a current book!

But it’s really not a tug-of-war. The current book is a journey of discovery I haven’t made all the way; I’m only at the place where I am now, and I’ve found a way to be interested in how it will unfold rather than (as in the past) giving myself a hard time for not knowing everything about what’s to come. I trust that being in the moment, while also having a sense—at least a hope—for the arc of the past, present, and future of the book is enough to carry me into its world and allow me to emerge richer and deeper and truer because of that, and then share those findings with others.

And meanwhile, taking my once-abandoned books out of the closet and allowing the refreshing light of day to reveal what's still valuable in them gives me more than only the satisfaction of knowing I am no longer abandoning what I once believed in. These books, which don't have to be started from scratch, form a kind of intentional ballast. Even an hour a week on a given book tells me that I have a genuine book-writing practice; that the treasures that sought to be revealed in the older books still have blessings to confer; and that even if I stumble in the writing of the current book, at some point a distillation will have taken place (the dregs sunken to the bottom, the essence risen to the top) as happened with the older, rescued books.

What this might mean in terms of your life?

There are some ideas that come that don’t need to be lived out through being written. It's enough that they come, inspire for a moment, and go.

But for those that do need to be engaged in more fully — those ideas for books that call you to give them life and shape, and to reveal to you your hidden treasures in the very process of writing them — it’s good to take your book out of the closet (in whatever stage it exists) and let its pages bless your life, even as they are unfolding.

INSPIRED TO WRITE YOUR BOOK?
BUT DON’T WANT TO DO IT ALL ALONE?

NAOMI ROSE, BOOK COACH / BOOK DEVELOPER & CREATIVE MIDWIFE, WELCOMES YOUR INQUIRIES AND OFFERS A GIFT SESSION

I help people who value the inner life write the book of their heart.

Together, we listen out what's there wanting to be written. And we discover your natural ways of creating, so you can be even more of yourself) in the process.

Because you are essential to the writing of your book.

And only you can do it.

As the creator of the "Writing from the Deeper Self" process, with over 30 years in the publications field, I have worked with many wonderful authors (often, first-time authors) whose books are now in print. I also provide help with self-publishing.