Take the Leap: What to Do When Your Book Hits the Wall

I'm about 75% of the way through the messy first draft of a ghostwriting project, and sh*t is starting to get real.

For the past 6 weeks or so, this project has blissfully lived in the "I'll figure out how all these pieces fit together later" phase. That phase is forgiving, freeing, even fun. You get to create without too many guardrails. You can write a story here, an idea there, and tell yourself the tenuous link (that might all be in your head) will turn into strong connective tissue eventually. 

But eventually arrives whether you're ready or not, and here we are — the phase where I have to move from "later" to "okay, I see exactly how these pieces weave together to form a coherent whole."

This is the hardest part of the process. It's stressful because soon I’m going to put all my cards on the table in front of my client and hope he sees things my way. If he doesn't, we go back to the drawing board.

I was talking to my friend Jill about this during my triptych of identity crises last week, and she said, "You say this every time." 

Rude. But also she's absolutely right. I feel this way every single time. And every single time, I figure it out. 

I felt an instant wave of relief when she said it. And the ensuing conversation made me realize this is part of my creative rhythm.

I’m so grateful for conversations like this because it’s exactly what I need to hear, and I seem incapable of talking myself down from the ledge. That’s what friends are for (though I worry they’ll get tired of having the same conversations with me every few months).

Honestly though, it’s not about stepping back from the edge at all. It’s about taking the leap. 

Finding Agency

I see the same thing happening with my clients. One of my developmental editing clients found me after four painful years of not opening the manuscript file on her computer. Her book was 75% of the way finished. 

She was anxious. And I reminded her that feeling anxious is not a sign that what you’re doing is wrong or not worth the risk. It’s a sign that you’re stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone — which, if you think about it, is the only way anything worth finishing ever gets done.

At this point in any big project, you face a choice: back away slowly, or take the leap. The authorpreneurs who finish their books aren't the ones who feel less anxious at this point. They're the ones who've learned to read the anxiety as a sign that it’s time to "take the leap," rather than "back away slowly."

When you learn to do this, you hold the keys to your own liberation.

Now, I'm not saying the answer is to grit your teeth and push through. I actually want to push back pretty hard against that idea. White-knuckling your way toward the edge, telling yourself the pain is temporary, might get you a few steps closer. But it doesn't make the leap any less scary. More often than not, self flagellation just makes the cliff feel higher.

What actually helps, in my experience, is changing the story you're telling yourself. My conversation with Jill allowed me to reframe this moment of self-doubt as part of my creative rhythm. She didn’t hype me up with empty platitudes like a toxic cheerleader. She didn’t lie to me or encourage me to lie to myself. That might have made me feel better until the end of the conversation. 

What she did was give me back my agency. She allowed me to tell myself a different story.

If you’re stuck, the key is to realize you have a choice. Once you figure out what story you’re telling yourself, you can start to tell a different one.

Let Go of the Perfect Book

Part of taking the leap, for most of the writers I work with, starts with letting go of the idea that they're writing the perfect book — the definitive, end-all-be-all, once-and-for-all version of their Big Idea.

That's an enormous amount of pressure to carry into a first draft, and it's exactly the kind of pressure that turns the structuring phase into a scary cliff edge instead of an exciting leap. If every decision feels irreversible, of course you tense up.

So instead, I tell my clients — and I remind myself — to get experimental. Toss out the hair-brained idea. See what happens when you rearrange three chapters in an order that makes no obvious sense yet. Brainstorm with AI just to see what surprising connections surface when you ask different questions.

Let It Percolate

The other piece of advice I give, which feels counterintuitive, is to stop bearing down and let the idea percolate instead.

Go for a walk. Preferably outside, preferably somewhere with trees or water and without a screen. Better yet, take a few days away from thinking about your book if you can spare the time. Whether it’s for a few hours or a few days, do something that relaxes you enough that your conscious, effortful, problem-solving brain steps back and lets your subconscious take a swing at the problem instead.

My tendency when I’m stuck is to try to force something to happen, and if someone were to suggest taking a break at the wrong moment, I’d want to bite their head off.. But they’d be right.

Bearing down harder on a structural problem often just produces more of the same tangled thinking that got you stuck. Stepping away is often what lets the pieces click into place two days later, seemingly out of nowhere.

It isn't out of nowhere, of course. It's your subconscious, unbothered by deadlines, quietly sorting the pieces you’ve handed it. But you have to step away for real. You can’t trick your brain by pretending to step away while you keep chewing on the idea with a clenched jaw.

What Story Are You Telling Yourself?

So now it’s that time. Time to ask what story you're telling yourself about writing your book.

Maybe you’ve been telling yourself a story like this: I'm not a good writer. My English 101 professor told me my writing lacked pizzazz. Every paper I got back that first semester was covered in red ink, like he’d opened a vein and bled all over it.

That story is real. It happened. But it’s not the only story available. It’s just the loudest one.

There’s another chapter you could focus on instead. 

Maybe you also have a story like this: When I talk to my team about the difference between exponential growth and linear growth, they genuinely pay attention. Their eyes light up, and I can almost see them connecting the dots in real time. This is something I love to talk about. I'm always excited when people start nerding out with me about it.

This story is also real. It's a different, equally true chapter — and a far better one to hold onto when you're staring down a messy draft.

As for me, I’m on vacation this week and when I get back, I’ll be ready to take the leap with my client’s project. I trust that my unconscious is figuring it all out right now. And if for some reason that doesn’t work, then I’ll choose a different story to tell myself.

Image by V.Ivash at Freepik