Stop Trying to be Original!
It’s easier to combine what has already been said.
Nobody is really interested in your thoughts. What’s interesting to them, is when you can take a closer look at what other authors have said and comment on it. By contrasting different positions, you show that you have really studied this topic intensively.
Outline of this story:
- What Did You Learn?
- Have A Structure
- Choose Your Topic Well
- Combine Everything!
- Give Them New Ideas
- Add Your Own Twist
- Conclusion
1. What Did You Learn?
The reader wants to know what you have learned from it or to see with which eyes you have read the book. Because since you read the whole book, the insight you gained from it is much more valuable than a summary. Everyone reads a book differently and may recognise something that has remained hidden to others. So your point of view is always interesting because it is your point of view.
2. Have A Structure
So it’s not so much that you try to be imaginative. It will come to you automatically when you put on paper your insights from the books. We are concerned with those very insights and not just a summary of those texts. Writing a book is nothing else than putting your thoughts in order. Those who cannot write a book have probably not thought about it enough, let alone put it in order.
Those who do not think have nothing to write about. Accordingly, more focus should be placed on thinking than on writing.
3. Choose Your Topic Well
We know we need to create more when we look at what we have already written. This also eliminates the question: How much do you read a month? What you read shows in the output. But how do we create more output? We do this by thinking. In order to think about something, we first need something to think about. It’s not just what we think about, it’s how we think about something.
We worry too much about whether what we are telling might really be interesting. Instead, we should just tell.
This might even result in an anecdote. In any case, you have communicated something.
And that’s what this is about.
4. Combine Everything!
Do not try to be original and have great intellectual ideas. Instead, try to read different books and show your insight from these books in connection with each other. At best this will lead to a whole new insight and in any case the combination will be an interesting one.
This requires not only the ability to draw logical conclusions, but also the linguistic competence to communicate it in a way that is recognisable to the reader. The genius lies not in pointing out facts, but in combining them and deriving insight from them. If you can make the reader see a new point of view, that is more valuable than telling them what they could have looked up on Wikipedia.
5. Give Them New Ideas
And it will be interesting in the end, because it is interesting for the reader how you think about something — if it is really your view and not what sells well. Because that would be something that would reinforce the status quo, wouldn’t it? It is not in people’s interest if you point out facts to them, but if you put them into a new context, whereby these people can also realise that knowing these facts can benefit them.
Not least because they can remember facts better in a meaningful context. Trying to record all the knowledge of their time was a major motivation of many polyhistors. Today, the internet gives us the opportunity to access facts in a targeted way. The information no longer has to be recorded, but put together in different ways and reinterpreted.
6. Add Your Own Twist
I keep saying that everyone should write their own book. They then think that the information in it would not be valuable, because in the end no one would be interested. They assume that they should write a biography, about their own life, as I have mentioned in other posts. Rather, it is not about the knowledge they impart, but about their (world-)view.
Thus Sartre also writes:
“The writer’s commitment aims at the communication of the non-mediate (the experienced being-in-the-world) […]”
– Jean-Paul Sartre, A Plea for Intellectuals
7. Conclusion
One does not have to write about oneself.
It is enough if one simply writes.
In doing so, one realises oneself in that very work.
It’s also called …
🔥 Genius Mastermind is a persona that is still being developed. More things need to be learned, more books need to be written. Follow for more articles on Book Writing and how to write your own book.
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