The Large White Book

I’ve been writing, rewriting, deleting, rearranging, and generally wrestling with Part One of my book for months. Part Two, the section where I will actually discuss each individual card of my deck, remains mostly theoretical. I’ve written about only three of the seventy-eight cards! The Fool is not the only one on a long journey.

To nudge myself forward, I asked the UPS store to print a hard copy of the book. I thought seeing it would be motivational. I was not prepared for the size of it!

They handed me a brick.

A 254-page brick.

I hadn't realized how much material I’d dumped into my Google document. Three-quarters of it is still a chaotic constellation of notes, half-formed ideas, and passages muttering to themselves in the margins.

It could have been intimidating, but holding that heavy stack of paper made the project feel strangely real... solid, so to speak.

And then, instead of pressing forward with Part Two, I made the mistake of reading Chapter One.

Within one paragraph, I was thinking, "That needs work."
By the end of the page: ״Oh no, all that needs to be fixed!"
By the end of the chapter, "How could I have written something that bad?"

So now I have a dilemma: which should I do first? I can't bear to leave Part One in such a state, but if I don't move on to Part Two, the project will never be finished. And of course, once Part Two is written, there will undoubtedly more reasons to revise Part One. Again.

So maybe the wisest choice is to a deep breath, accept that writing is a messy business, and keep moving forward.

On the other hand... maybe the book feels poorly written because I’m used to writing for my blog and keeping an audience in mind. Maybe if I try posting those initial chapters to my blog, just to see them in a more public light, I’ll see how to improve them.