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1/ Writing a how to book for a mainstream audience is hard because there is no one-size-fits-all answer to which level of abstraction you should write at
2/ I.e. you can’t pick, say, an 8 out of 10, and write the whole book at that level of granularity/detail. Nor can you follow a predictable pattern like starting each chapter at an 8, and gradually move to a 2. Predictable = boring
3/ You have to constantly modulate the abstraction/specificity of your writing at a chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, and even word by word level
4/ This modulation has to map not just to one person’s level of existing knowledge, which is hard enough, but to an entire segment of the population. You have to write while holding in your head and empathizing with an aggregate model of your entire audience
5/ Writing, modeling, and empathizing are 3 of the most taxing things for a human to do. That times 60k words gives you the difficulty of writing an effective how to book
6/ And it gets worse. In order to truly be impactful the book has to map to their emotional narrative at each point. You have to sort of edge them sideways up against their comfort zone, without provoking any one of numerous reactions that might have them drop it
7/ And of course, you won’t be there in any capacity to help them, so all of this has to be modeled as well. It’s like inventing a virus to infect the emotional zeitgeist, for which only you have the cure
