If you want to write a book but you don’t have a topic yet, again, try the steps above and in the last edition with a few different possibilities—it’ll help. If you’re not there yet, you can also figure out your 3D goals for your book, since you’re more driven by the prospect of a book project than any one idea right now. But caution—without a strong idea that really excites and compels you, it’s going to be very difficult to sustain the book process over the long term. I encourage you to focus on questions at this stage—what are you curious about, what do you wonder, what do you wish you could know?

When you’re struggling defining the book you’re going to write, try to be finding your book instead—all possible versions are out there, they already exist, waiting in dock for you to board and give them purpose. Many are seaworthy. Your job is to find the ship you want to captain—the live one. That means priming your mind for creative wandering and test riding different ideas. In the next few posts, that’s what we’ll do—starting at the beginning, with an exercise below, and ending up with an outline for your next book.

Note-taking helps us practice key writer’s skills: attention, curiosity, focus, judgment, and perspective. But most importantly and most firstly, attention. Note-taking can lift the veils of boredom and dissatisfaction that you’ve come to assume are correct responses to your known environment. Note-taking wakes you up to what is. Note-taking provides a place for restlessness to run around and get out some kicks. Note-taking helps you isolate ideas to write about and record details to help bring those ideas to life. Note-taking helps you not lose your whole life to the passage of time.

You’re not obliged to agree, but I believe writing is a spiritual practice of which ritual is a part, and I encourage you to explore whatever that assertion makes you feel. Whether you embrace it, resist it, or lean around it, journal about what this notion brings up in you—is writing a spiritual practice? If so, how? If not, how do I describe it? And consider what it might mean for you, if you were to say yes to such an idea. I believe writing is a spiritual practice—act, or condition—of devotion to your own value and gratitude to your body, a creative act that shifts power, an honoring of perspective as a force, and an opportunity to do what I call “reaching toward”—how doing, sharing, and receiving writing is ultimately about connecting human beings, which is part of my own understanding of spirituality.

In the language of narrative therapy, a concept like laziness leaves us with a ‘thin conclusion’ where a ‘rich description’ could be. That’s because we tend to identify really strongly with certain concepts that diagnose our behavior. We say, “I am so goddamn lazy” or “I am the laziest person alive” because we don’t know why we are behaving a certain way, or what to do to change this behavior.

But, it doesn’t always go that way. Sometimes, and for some writers in particular, I get a lot of big sighs and ugghhs. I get a lot of self-judgment, as well as deep discomfort—obviously the question they’d wished I wouldn’t ask. In response to this question, I’ve seen one grown woman bang her fists on the table in front of her like a toddler and look at me wordlessly like, ‘Help!’

When people come to me with an impact or project goal, they often say they know they need to “write” or “write more” or “get better at writing” in order to reach that larger goal. These are too vague to be good starting points—3D goals are the bridge to your first steps. Setting them will help you figure out how to begin and make progress.