When we start writing, we get excited and want to share our happy news like a newly pregnant mother-to-be. We want to blab to everyone, ‘Hey, I’m writing a book.’ It’s hard to keep a secret as big and beautiful as this.

But we must. If we care about what we’re doing, we have to learn to shut up and keep secrets.

A writer I mentor sent me a tearful email because her husband (her number 1 fan and supporter with whom she was sharing all her writing) had innocently asked her, ‘So how exactly is this thing going to become a book?’

And just like that, the beautiful clean kitchen of her self esteem where she was cooking up her story, got trashed.

Even our biggest fans do not understand never to ask how, but when?
When is your book coming out? Not how?

There’s a great book by Peter Block called, The Answer to How is Yes.

‘How?’ is not a creative question and certainly not an empowering one. It is fear based. And as writers-in-the-making, we do not dabble with that devil.

We should not share our writing with the world while our writing is still a little book-foetus inside us.

If we’ve ever been pregnant, and seen our little pea with its beating heart on the ultrasound, we don’t ask, ‘How am I going to turn this blob into a baby?’ No, we just know that something is growing and by some magical alchemy of us, and God, and DNA, and folate, and bit of luck, that a baby will arrive. When it’s ready. We’re part of the process, but there are other forces at work too.

It’s like that with our writing. For a while, it’s a little book-blob. It doesn’t know yet how it’s going to grow its heart and toes and eyelashes. But it will. If we shut up, and let it get on with it. Mysteries don’t like to be interrogated.

Learning to shut up and keep secrets are inherent to the art of gestation. We don’t celebrate conception publicly. We wait for birth.