I’ll be honest with you. Every time I sit down to stare at a blinking cursor, a small part of my brain screams that I’m wasting my time. We live in a world where attention is measured in three-second increments. People are scrolling. They’re swiping. They’re watching a guy in a neon kitchen explain the stock market in sixty seconds. Yet, here I am, and here you are, thinking about long-form depth. The reality is that the reason why I write book drafts instead of just screaming into the social media void isn't about prestige. It’s about survival. Mental survival, mostly.
Writing a book is a slow-motion car crash of ideas. It’s messy. You start with this crystalline vision of a narrative or a thesis, and three weeks later, you’re looking at forty pages of garbage that feels like it was written by a caffeinated squirrel. But that’s the point.
The Internal Friction of Why I Write Book Manuscripts
Most people think authors write because they have something important to say. That’s rarely the whole truth. Usually, we write because we can’t figure out what we think until the words are physically sitting there on the screen, mocking us. Joan Didion famously noted that she wrote entirely to find out what she was thinking, what she was looking at, and what it meant. That resonates. If I could summarize my thoughts in a tweet, I wouldn’t need a 300-page manuscript.
Books allow for nuance.
You can’t have nuance in a TikTok comment section. You just can’t. When I commit to the long haul, I’m giving myself permission to be wrong in the first draft so I can be precise in the final one. It’s a grueling process. It’s lonely. Sometimes it feels like shouting into a well. But the depth you reach by chapter ten is something a blog post can’t touch.
Resistance and the "War of Art"
Steven Pressfield wrote a whole book about this called The War of Art. He calls the feeling of not wanting to work "Resistance." It’s that magnetic force that pushes you away from doing anything creative and toward doing something mindless, like checking your email for the fourteenth time.
I feel that every day.
The reason why I write book content despite that resistance is because the feeling of finishing is better than the feeling of hiding. There’s a specific kind of psychic weight that lifts when you finally bridge two difficult chapters. It’s better than any "like" count. It's the feeling of actually building a structure instead of just throwing sand at a wall.
Beyond the Ego: Why the World Still Needs Books
Let's look at the data for a second, because I’m not just being sentimental. Despite everyone saying "print is dead" every five years since 1995, the Association of American Publishers consistently shows that print books—especially hardbacks and trade paperbacks—remain incredibly resilient. In fact, during the early 2020s, book sales saw a massive spike. Why? Because digital fatigue is real.
People are tired of their eyes hurting.
They want a physical object that doesn't send them notifications about their boss's latest Slack message. When I write, I’m trying to create that sanctuary for someone else. I’m trying to build a place where a reader can go to be alone with a single idea for six hours. That’s a rare gift in 2026.
The Complexity Gap
We are losing our ability to handle complexity. We want "three easy steps" to solve "systemic problems." It’s nonsense.
When you dive into the mechanics of why I write book length material, you realize that some ideas require 80,000 words to be handled responsibly. If you’re writing about grief, or quantum physics, or the fall of the Roman Empire, you can’t "life hack" your way through that. You need the space to breathe. You need the digressions. You need the footnotes.
- Context: You can explain the "why" behind the "what."
- Empathy: You have time to make the reader feel what the characters feel.
- Authority: A book remains the gold standard for proving you actually know what you're talking about.
The Practical Side of the Page
Let’s talk about the business side, because I hate it when "experts" pretend it’s all about the muse. Writing a book is a massive branding exercise. It’s the ultimate business card. If you’re in the professional world, having "Author of..." next to your name changes the room. It just does. It’s a signal that you have the discipline to finish something hard.
Most people start books. Almost nobody finishes them.
The sheer attrition rate of the writing process means that if you actually get to the "The End" page, you've joined a very small percentage of the population. That’s a competitive advantage. It opens doors to speaking engagements, consulting gigs, and a level of credibility that a viral thread simply cannot replicate.
Does Anyone Actually Read Them?
That’s the fear, right? That you’ll spend two years bleeding onto the page and five people will buy it, and four of them are your cousins. Honestly, that happens. It’s a risk. But even if the "reach" is smaller than a viral video, the "impact" is deeper.
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I’d rather have 500 people read my book and have it change their career than have 50,000 people see a video and forget my name five seconds later. The "why" is the depth of the connection. A book is a private conversation between two minds. It’s intimate.
How to Actually Do It Without Losing Your Mind
If you’re sitting there wondering if you should start your own project, the answer is probably yes, but only if you change your expectations. Don't write for the "bestseller" list. That’s a lottery. Write because the idea is haunting you.
Kill the Perfectionism Early
Your first 10,000 words will be bad. Accept it. My first drafts look like they were translated from another language by a malfunctioning robot. The goal isn't to write well; the goal is to get the clay on the table. You can't sculpt a masterpiece if you don't have a big, ugly lump of clay to work with first.
- Set a word count, not a time limit. Time can be faked. You can sit at a desk for three hours and do nothing. You can't fake 500 words.
- Write at the same time every day. Your brain needs a schedule. It needs to know that at 7:00 AM, we don't check Instagram; we work.
- Don't edit while you write. This is the fastest way to kill a book. If you stop to fix a comma in paragraph one, you'll never reach chapter two.
Finding the Core Truth
The real reason why I write book projects is simpler than all the business and psychological reasons I’ve mentioned. It’s because it’s the only way I know how to leave a footprint.
Everything digital feels ephemeral. Webpages break. Servers go down. Apps get updated and lose their best features. But a book? A book is a technology that doesn't need a battery. It’s a physical artifact of a human thought. There is something deeply moving about the idea that a hundred years from now, someone could find a dusty copy of something I wrote in a used bookstore and for a brief moment, our brains will be synced up across time.
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That's the magic.
What You Should Do Next
If you’ve been sitting on an idea, stop talking about it. Talking about a book releases the same dopamine as writing it, but without the actual work. It’s "creative masturbation."
Stop telling people you’re writing a book and just start writing it.
- Identify your "One Big Idea": What is the one thing you know that other people don't? Or what is the one story only you can tell?
- Create a "Ugly Outline": Don't make it pretty. Just list 10 to 15 things that need to happen or be explained.
- Commit to 300 words a day: That’s it. It’s half a page. Anyone can do half a page. If you do that, you’ll have a manuscript in less than a year.
The world is loud and getting louder. Adding to the noise with more short-form content might get you a temporary dopamine hit, but building a legacy requires the long game. That’s why the book still matters. That’s why I keep showing up to the keyboard.
Write the first sentence. Then write the next one. Don't look back until you hit page fifty. By then, the book will start writing you, and that’s when the real fun begins. It’s a long road, but the view from the end of the manuscript is something you can’t get anywhere else.
Actionable Insights for Aspiring Authors
- Audit your "Input": If you want to write a book, you have to read books. If you only consume social media, your writing will sound like social media.
- Use "Placeholder" Text: When you get stuck on a fact or a name, just write [NEED FACT HERE] and keep going. Never let a detail stop your momentum.
- Build a "Beta" Circle: Find three people who will tell you the truth, not people who will tell you it's great. You need "brutal" friends to make a "brilliant" book.
- Focus on the "Transformation": Whether it's fiction or non-fiction, the reader should be different at the end of the book than they were at the beginning. If there's no change, there's no story.
The process of writing isn't about being "inspired." It's about being disciplined. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. Start your work today._