Some Thoughts Upon Finishing A Book by Alyce Barry

I recently completed a project I've worked on for the past seven years: a book about Shadow Work.

After something like eighteen drafts, I finished the last chapter of the final draft in March. The book, titled Shameless: Life Beyond the Box, will be published this summer by the small press I've started, Practically Shameless Press.

Since completing the manuscript, I've been wanting to write about what the process has been like, but it's felt a little overwhelming. The process has been long and complex and not always enjoyable.

I would be too unoriginal to say that it's been a journey. It's really been much more than that; it's been more like a remaking. Writing this book has grown me the way a gardener grows a seed into a plant.

I want to share a few things about the process, things that were hard and wonderful, and some valuable things I learned. I'm guessing there's someone reading this who is thinking about writing a book; I hope you'll find something here helpful.

One of the first things I learned was that it's a lot harder to write a book than it looks. I worked as a technical writer for sixteen years and produced a shelf full of manuals. And there was a voice inside that said, "If you can talk, you can write a book." I had no idea how different the two are and how much it takes to organize and shape talking into a publishable book.

Harder than the writing itself, though, was that this was a book about shadow. And that meant I had to face my shadow – my shame -- at every turn.

SHAME-LIFTING

In Shadow Work, we use the term "shame-lifting" to change shame into self-acceptance. Long before the book was titled Shameless, I had to continually lift the shame I felt in order to continue writing.

There was shame about writing itself: about whether I could write well enough, richly and colorfully enough, with a style people would enjoy reading. About whether I could express the ideas clearly enough that readers could understand and absorb them and even, I hoped, be able to incorporate them into their lives in some way.

The hardest shame about writing was about my role as writer. Was I putting myself forward as the expert when there were others far more experienced than I? If I didn't detail the history of Shadow Work's creation, would it sound as if I were claiming to have invented it?

This will probably sound simple and obvious, but it took me a while to get: when writing a book, you have to express your beliefs and opinions as if they are truth. No one wants to read a book with the words "in my judgment" or "I believe" beginning every paragraph.

And what that means, in a practical sense, is that you have to be certain you believe every word you're writing, even when you can hear in your head all the truths you can't fit into the sentence and all the other ways in which your truth might be expressed.

GLIB VERSUS CORE

One of the things I learned was that I have several writing voices. One is named Glib.

Glib can write quickly because she doesn't offer much depth or sincerity, only smooth prose with no bumps. When I reread something I'd written the day before, I was often surprised to find that Glib had been the one at the keyboard. No wonder the words had come so easily! With each draft, I discovered passages that Glib had written and rewrote them so that they came more from my core. It was often hard, and sometimes even terrifying, a little like having open-heart surgery.

But there were huge rewards. I could sometimes describe experiences and express longings in a way that was deeply satisfying, so that afterwards I felt as if I'd eaten a sumptuous meal. There were also days when I struck some deeper groundwater and found tears streaming down my face as I typed. Those were the best.

I was raised Christian, and although I no longer think of the Bible as literal truth, I believe its stories are symbolic of what we all experience as humans. There's a story in the Old Testament about a man named Jacob wrestling all night with an angel. That's exactly what writing the book has felt like: I've been wrestling with the self I could become. It's occasionally been dicey, unclear whether I was going to win and become that self or give up or go another way. I'm very happy with where I've ended up, very grateful to have had this very difficult but very growth-creating experience.

TAKING FEEDBACK

One way I've grown is that I've gotten much better at taking feedback. There was a time when I would invite feedback on my writing and become immediately defensive upon receiving it. I feel proud that the manuscript is 100% different now from where it began, and all in response to feedback.

Let me share one piece of feedback I got that will, I think, be helpful to other writers.

An author named Kabir Jaffe looked over an early draft in which I was trying to explain the whole of Shadow Work, and the basics of Jungian psychology to boot. The manuscript was 330 pages long.

Kabir said, "Don't try to give them the whole pie. Give them just one slice."

One slice meant giving the reader one strong, clear, useful idea. More than that would be too much to digest, and the reader might not finish the book.

One of the most surprising but valuable things I learned -- both personally and as a writer -- was my tendency to detach. This was particularly clear in the first two drafts, when I wrote from my head about the ideas without ever letting the reader connect to me emotionally. In 2002, I began using a story about a little girl named Grace, who was based largely on me, and for the first time the friends who read it really felt something.

It wasn't until 2006 that I began using my own story instead, and my difficulty staying connected to the reader took center stage. I thought I was doing so well, and my editor would comment on the "big disconnect" in the middle of the manuscript. As I wrote and rewrote the story, I found I was able to stay in it and not detach for longer and longer periods of time. I have an image of that rewriting in my head, of my hands smoothing out a tray filled with sand. I detach, a lump appears in the sand, and I smooth it out. I rewrite, a lump appears farther down, and I keep smoothing. Rewriting, smoothing.

On a personal level, it became all too obvious that the same issue with staying connected happened in my life, and I had so many different ways to detach from myself.

READER IMPACT

Here's a useful question for any writers out there: What impact do you want your book to have on your reader?

The first person to ask me this was Cynthia Morris, a wonderful writing coach I worked with for six months. She asked a lot of fascinating, intriguing, and terrifying questions over those months that helped me focus and refocus in so many ways.

My answer was that I wanted the book to have the kind of impact that Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael had had on me.

I had read Ishmael some years earlier. While I didn't agree with everything Quinn had to say, reading it was an extraordinary experience of being plucked out of my culture and given an entirely different way of looking at it, as if from a distance.

I wanted my book to do something similar: to step my readers back from their lives and their personal issues and give them an entirely different way of looking at themselves, as if from a distance. I wanted to offer them a view of themselves as beings who have acted in their lives for the best reasons available at the time; as beings who need to regret nothing. In other words, to show them a shame-free way of looking at themselves and their lives.

That's the greatest gift of Carl Jung, I believe, and of Shadow Work as well: the gift of lifting shame.

Alyce Barry
(303) 485-5400
Author of Shameless: Life Beyond the Box, summer 2007
www.PracticallyShameless.com
New!  The Practically Shameless blog at
http://blog.practicallyshameless.com/