Last year, Eve and I started working on a new book, Love More, Be Awesome. It’s a followup to More Than Two, intended for a wider audience than just poly folks. We have an ambitious goal: Love More, Be Awesome is intended to be a user’s manual for being a decent human being.
The book was originally slated to be on shelves at the end of this year, which means it should be in the final stages of proofreading right about now. It’s not.
This afternoon, we set fire to the first draft.
We’ve been blocked on it for a long time. More Than Two wanted to be written; this book doesn’t. We’ve been spinning our wheels, struggling to get anything out. And last week, we finally figured out why: for the last year, we’ve been thinking about the book in completely the wrong way.
You see, there’s no such thing as writer’s block, as it turns out. Instead, there’s “you can’t write because you’re approaching this wrong.”
So this afternoon, we torched everything. All our notes, our diagrams, everything about the book, all went into the fire. (Well, except for the bits that exist as bits; those bits just got deleted.)
It was incredibly freeing. Now we can start again, blank slate, with an entirely new approach.
I can’t wait to get writing.
I love this, Franklin. Fresh start, fresh perspective. In some ways, the essence of the story. Being willing to re-create, rather than sticking to the script 🙂
wow I commend thee your courage.
Thank you for sharing.
I’m looking forward to whatever you end up writing. Just finished “The Game Changer”, and I’m very moved. Great work.
so fun! That took a whole slew of courage and listening. Excited to see what happens next
Writing for a wider audience than just poly folks is awesome ambition. It’s so encouraging to see these efforts, e.g. Esther Perel and many new names popping up on TED.com actually. Can’t wait to read it.
This is inspiring and provoking. I am at a similar point in my embodiment business with my co worker. Maybe its time to start again.
I’ve been brainstorming for a while about writing something similar, with ‘consent as an awareness practice’ as a guiding principle, but one thing that has kept me from fully committing to this project is my feeling that telling other people how to live their lives (even how to live their lives decently) is itself indecent. I have been trying to think about structural approaches to limit ‘telling’ and instead invite a space for personal questioning, processing, and opening so that the guidebook would feel (and be) more self-guided, while still retaining a structure informed by certain principles of decency. Wondering if these thoughts at all resonate with what felt wrong about your approach. I’d love to share thoughts if you’re interested!