Episode 53: What if my book isn't important?

Episode Description

In this episode of What If? For Authors, Claire explores the question many writers whisper (or shout) during overwhelm: What if my book isn’t important? She breaks down why this feeling often has less to do with your talent or discipline and more to do with nervous system overload, attention hijacking, and the way “importance” becomes relative when everything feels urgent.

Claire explains how to tell the difference between a book that truly isn’t important to you anymore… and a book that is important, but has been drowned out by noise, fear, and impossible expectations.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

  • Why overwhelm can make your creative brain “close up shop”

  • How hyperarousal (anxiety, rage, panic) and hypoarousal (freeze, fog, dissociation) sabotage focus

  • Why “my story doesn’t matter” is often a nervous-system message, not a truth

  • Three paths forward when your book feels unimportant:

    1. Reduce threatening noise

    2. Create a writing warm-up ritual to re-enter the story

    3. Consider whether the book truly isn’t important right now (and what freedom that offers)

  • How to make a story feel more important by increasing relevance and emotional resonance

  • The difference between “important,” “special,” “useful,” “successful,” and “safe”

  • How each Enneagram type can misread “this isn’t important” as a coping mechanism

Resources & Links

Support the Show

If this episode helped you reconnect with meaning (or at least stop beating yourself up), please leave a review on your favorite podcast platform and share it with an author friend who’s feeling overwhelmed.

Happy writing!

TRANSCRIPT:

Claire: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of What If For Authors. I'm glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor, and I'm an Enneagram certified coach for authors as well as a humor and mystery writer. All my services, courses and books for authors can be found@liberatedwriter.com. Go check it out. If you're curious about how you can build a more sustainable author career in uncertain times.

I have a new book out called Write Iconic Characters, all about using the Enneagram to develop realistic and relatable characters that live rent free in the reader's head. You can find that on most major retailers or go to books to read.com/wi.

I also want to mention that I have been publishing a lot on Substack lately, if you like, the content offered in this podcast, which. I hope that's why you keep coming back. I hope you do not just hate listening, but if you like this podcast, I think you'll like the additional thoughts and guidance that I offer over there on Substack.

If you search for Liberated [00:01:00] Writer there, uh, , you'll find me pretty easy. So follow me or subscribe to the account to receive the posts straight to your inbox. That's one thing I really like about Substack. You don't have to download the app or visit the website to receive the updates from accounts you subscribe to.

It just shows up in your inbox like a long email. Those who've been subscribed to my email list for a while know that I have a history of sending mega long emails with no sales pitch. Just value. Now, a lot of people like that, but I've also had a couple people email me over the years, a few people to offer the unsolicited advice that I should break up my big walls of texts with images or gifs and not send so much all at once.

I get that. The thing is, I like big walls of text. They don't scare me, and I think they're good for weeding out people who are looking for surface level catchphrases to solve their life's problems. Y'all know that ain't me. If a [00:02:00] pithy sentence were all it took to liberate people, Instagram would've done that a long time ago.

They would've gotten the job done. There'd be a whole lot more liberated people out there, and we wouldn't be in this mess either way. I thought it made sense to move some of my long form stuff for authors to substack, so only the people who want that delivered can receive it. And the ones who are intimidated by big blocks of text with no images can enjoy my regular email list where I drop all the promotional offers and so forth.

Since I left social media last year, I've shifted my expressive Enneagram attention more towards Substack. So there's already a lot of content there that you might enjoy or find useful for your author career, and it's the only place that you can chit chat with me in the comments now.

So some people use so Substack as a social media platform, but I don't recommend that obviously. A paid subscription to my Substack gets you the same thing [00:03:00] as a free subscription, but I do really appreciate all the paid subscribers. That certainly helps me legitimize to myself the hours I spend on the posts that I write there.

Yes, it's hours each post, just like I spend hours on each of these podcast episodes. Those are hours that I'm not spend writing my own books or coaching authors. Time and attention are of course, a zero sum game. I love writing on Substack, but yeah, I do also need to make the numbers work. So if you've been wondering how to give a little each month to support this podcast, a monthly subscription to Substack wouldn't be a bad option.

It's only $5 a month or $50 a year. Again, you don't get anything extra for the paid subscription yet, uh, other than my gratitude, but you will earn a lot of that. So that is liberated writer on Substack. Hope to see you there.

Okay. So onto the topic of today's show. This one has been coming up a lot with authors, and it sounds a little [00:04:00] different depending on the Enneagram type of the person I hear it from. So this episode will include an individual type breakdown.

The new cycle during the week that I'm recording this episode has been an especially stressful one, or at least I'm feeling it. I usually check the news maybe once a day.

But things have been developing so rapidly that I've found myself itching to stay updated hour by hour. I'm cutting that out, don't worry. But usually once that impulse starts for me, I really struggle to reset until the next day.

You might be wondering what events I'm talking about, but honestly, it's really fill in the blank here. It could be anything. Right when I'm recording this versus when you listen to it. , it could be anything. There is a big political change happening in the US and the US is being run by a bunch of maniacs who are making claims about shit that we see with our own eyes is just not true.[00:05:00]

And one of those maniacs has nuclear codes. So even if you're not in the US, you might find yourself feeling a little on edge lately. This is of course, a recipe for nervous system overload. It's easy to slip outside of our window of tolerance throughout the course of our week, either experiencing hyper arousal where we feel anxious, twitchy, panicked, angry or otherwise, and hyperdrive or slipping into hypo arousal where we become sleepy, foggy, brain dissociated.

We put our head in the sand, or we otherwise feel like burrowing into bed and not getting out for a while. I was very much in a state of hyper arousal yesterday and really struggling to come down. What that looked like for me was rage, uh, rage, extreme tension through my body. I was furious at someone for something that was probably not that big of a deal, and I was unable to focus on what I wanted to focus on.

So my fellow ones have [00:06:00] probably experienced this. My type ones. I was able to observe that maybe just maybe my energy was overly intense for the situation and I made the decision early in the evening, earlier than usual to put my phone away, go read a book and go the fuck to sleep. It was a good call. I started today with slightly better habits and I'm able to focus at least enough to record this podcast.

When we're feeling overwhelmed like this, which will probably all feel from time to time, it can be incredibly hard to focus on our writing. It is a rare writer who falls into hyper arousal or hypo arousal, and their first instinct is to sit and focus on their fiction. Rare. Very rare. This is because the parts of our brain needed for creative problem solving can really close up shop when our amygdala is hollering at us that we're not [00:07:00] safe.

Our brain likes to prioritize our survival and shout out to the brain for that. But what that looks like is our attention shooting toward whatever feels like imminent danger. It's like blood rushing to an injury. Our attention is a limited resource, so if something feels like imminent danger and our writing does not feel anything like that, we may struggle to bring our attention toward our plot and characters to the extent that we need to be present with a story.

What this can feel like in our body, our mind, our heart, is this story does not matter. Humans tend to think in terms of relativity, and relative to the threats we feel looming over us, the story feels relatively unimportant. So let's address that today in this episode where we ask what if my book isn't important?

When I hear someone voice their concern that their book isn't important, the first question [00:08:00] I ask is, what does it mean for a book to be important to you? The answers here vary, and it may be hard to articulate at first, so if you want, pause this podcast and ask yourself that question, what does it mean for a book to be important?

The Enneagram type two might say, it's only important if it helps others, somehow helps 'em feel less alone, helps them connect to the fact that they deserve love like everyone else. So on. Now, this isn't a rule, just a nudge toward what I tend to hear. Enneagram three might say the book is only important if it sells a lot of copies.

That might be their metric for importance that they're working on. Enneagram Type seven might say that the book is only important if it's fun and exciting. Or the seven this is. The enthusiast, of course, might be like, wait, books are supposed to be important. If that's the case for you, if you don't really need books to be important, , the move on from this episode, we all envy.

You don't make this an issue if it isn't [00:09:00] one. Now that being said, I do work with sevens who eventually hit a crisis of. Why am I doing this when it's so hard? And that's where we might wanna connect to the importance of the project. There's no right or wrong response to what makes a book feel important to you.

What's crucial is that if it doesn't meet that criteria, you may struggle to keep writing when there are so many other things in your life that feel more important.

Let's. Talk about money right quick. Sometimes the importance of the book is that selling it is how you make money and pay your bills. Now, this is definitely important, but I'll share a secret with you. This doesn't feel important to everyone saying money is important or feeling money. Stress doesn't necessarily mean your brain will then connect deeply to the manuscript because it's your path to more money.

Frequently money stress can disconnect us from the importance of our book. It can cheapen the [00:10:00] storytelling experience or rather it encourages us to cheapen it. I see a lot of threes who can refer to their books as products and think of their stories as content and not really struggle with the existential question of, what if this isn't important?

Their internal patterns are more supportive to this approach than those of other types. For a while, there can come a point when more and more and more money stops feeling fulfilling, and maybe that four wing of the three sneaks in and starts demanding more connection to the storytelling process.

Threes are not unemotional or shallow, not even a little bit. They've learned to put their deep feelings aside to get things done, but as they mature, they start to feel the loss of those feelings, those emotions more acutely. That's usually when they come see me and we get things back on track. No sweat, but for the other types, adopting an approach of measuring your book's, importance by sales numbers or popularity, it isn't gonna hit the [00:11:00] same way for you even for a little while.

Discovering what makes a book feel important enough to sit down and write is a crucial meditation for the rest of us. If you're struggling to connect to the importance of your book, there are three directions I would encourage you to explore. The first direction are you letting in threatening noise like I did yesterday?

Remember that importance is felt relative to other things. So if you're flooding your brain with information that feels like an emergency, it's going to be difficult to settle into your chair and write. If you suspect that this is the case, then you may want to set some boundaries around that. This could look like not checking your phone in the morning until you've written, or the less extreme restraint of downloading an app like freedom and restricting your access to social media and the news while continuing to allow for texts or calls to come through.

And I mentioned the phone and computer because these are the [00:12:00] doorways through which most of the information we encounter that is disturbing, but that there is no immediate action for us to take. These are the doorways through which it finds us. When we see something mentally, emotionally, or spiritually disruptive, but it's not within our power to influence it, we can quickly get stuck in a stress loop.

Okay, so maybe you've been doing this stuff already and you're like, I've limited my exposure to this stuff, but the book still doesn't feel important, Claire. Fair enough. The second direction I'd explore if you've already limited the sources of noise is to create a settling and focus ritual ahead of writing.

So maybe the book is important, but you need to reconnect to the importance of it. If you have no problem sitting down opening the manuscript and diving in, then you don't need this step. But if that process is a strain for you and maybe it is some days, maybe not others, then you might need to find a warmup that works for you.

So I think about watching Austin FC [00:13:00] play. They're the professional soccer team that I root for, and I go to as many games as possible live 'cause it's super fun. Now these players are professional. They know how to play soccer. Some of them get paid a lot for what they do. They've practiced their whole lives to develop the skills that they have, but they still come out on the field before a game and warm up.

That's how they check in with their muscles, avoid injuries, and build up to the intensity of the match. It's how they focus their minds on the match rather than what's happening in the world. Their marriage, their finances. They're still people. They still have whole lives going on, but they need to focus in on what they're about to do.

They respect the need for a warmup. It is not considered wasting time. No coach would ever let their players out on the field without warming them up first. That would be a really shitty coach. So can you allow yourself to warm up? This might look like asking what emotions are they feeling in the [00:14:00] scene?

What beliefs are they questioning? What actions are they taking? What are they trying to achieve? Those questions can help connect you to the importance of the story you're telling or pinpoint where you might not know what's going on with your characters if you don't know that yet. Yeah, it can be tricky to connect to the importance of the scene, let alone the book.

Your warmup may look like reading over the last page that you wrote. If that doesn't lead you into an inner critic trap, it may look like doing 30 seconds of deep breathing as you remember why you love this story, or imagine how your ideal reader will feel about the scene you're working on. It could look like anything.

Your warmup is gonna be very personalized, and if you need help building a warmup, come see me. But I bet you can experiment with some different techniques to find one that really helps you where you are right now. Just notice when you feel like you shouldn't need a warmup. Right. Notice that voice that says, I shouldn't need this.

This is wasting time. Professional athletes don't [00:15:00] claim that they know the importance of it. You're a professional writer. So take a page from their book, pun intended. The third direction I would look into for this question of what if my book is an important is this, maybe it's not. Maybe your book is not important enough right now for you to be spending time on it.

That might be painful to think about, but it can also be freeing if you've been torturing yourself about that.

Maybe your story isn't important to you. Or to others. Maybe it felt important a year ago when your life was one way, but things have changed and the story just doesn't matter to you anymore. Maybe you genuinely have more important business to go handle, and the best thing you can do for your wellbeing is to set the book aside.

Go handle your shit and come back when things feel more settled, or maybe you never come back to it or to writing at all. Just sit with that possibility. It's okay if it's uncomfortable, but [00:16:00] just sit with it. Notice what sensations you feel in your body, what your mind jumps to, what emotions bubble up, but the idea of putting the book aside and possibly never returning to it.

Some of you listening might feel relief. If that's the case, it could be time to take a break to attend to other things in your life and relieve yourself of the burden of also working on the book. That doesn't feel important. Just consider it. If you feel fear at the idea of putting the book aside, ask yourself what that's about.

What are you afraid is going to happen and is that actually likely? This may be something to explore with a close friend or a therapist even, but definitely explore it.

If you determine that your book isn't important right now, you also have the option of reimagining it to feel more important to you. This doesn't mean putting up a pre-order for it so that it becomes urgent to finish. That only leaves you with an urgent and unimportant task, which [00:17:00] is self-imposed misery.

How does one make a manuscript feel more important? So here's an example that may hit for some of you. Let's say you're writing a cozy mystery that was fun to chip away at, but now your heart is absorbed in the horror of ice occupying American cities and murdering peaceful protestors. You're struggling to sit and write about, say, a stolen artifact and you're story when you're feeling the collective pain and terror of others, relatively, the book doesn't feel important to you, so how can you make it more important?

Maybe you decide to do some rewrites and focus on a theme of community. You create a resolution in your story that mirrors the one you wish to see in reality. Now, the story feels connected to the situation that's pulling your attention. Reading stories that bring us comfort in this way is important. If you've ever read just the right book at the right time, when it feels like [00:18:00] balm for the pain in your life, then you understand how important this is.

Now, it may take some rejiggering in your story to bring out more of that sense of community, say, and to show characters banding together to solve the conflict. But that puzzle is likely to hook your attention more and give you a sense of importance to what you're creating. Relevance creates importance.

Does the story you're telling seem relevant to your life or the world today? If not, it probably won't feel that important. Now you can do this, this exercise of making it more important. You can do this with westerns, horror, romance, sci-fi, women's fiction, thriller, whatever genre you're writing, you can develop the story to feel more important to you, more emotionally resonant with the present moment you're experiencing.

There are some Enneagram types who use. It's not important as a coping mechanism to avoid their core fear. So I want to look at each type more closely. So [00:19:00] nobody takes the wrong message away from this and says, Claire says not to bother when what I would tell that particular person is, no, you need to fucking bother.

So here's a little advice for each type. When each type starts to wonder, what if my book isn't important?

Type one, the reformer. If your manuscript doesn't feel important, you won't be able to write it. Look toward your virtue of serenity here by accepting what you cannot change the courage to have the impact where you can like your story and the wisdom to know the difference. Yes, that is ripping off the serenity prayer, but we need it once.

Even if you're not religious. Print that shit out and keep it on your desk.

Type two, the helper. Your attention can get caught up trying to help people who either don't want your help or who cannot be helped by you. As long as your attention keeps flowing toward these impossible cases, your manuscript will not feel as important. It's okay to [00:20:00] only help those who want your help, like the readers who love you.

Ask how your story can offer support and comfort to the readers who want and need it, and then build your story around that

type three, the achiever I. When you determine the importance of your book based on the sales, you're handing over your self-esteem and agency to forces outside of your control. And right now the data set of what's selling is super hard to read, and it's poisoned by the flooded and manipulation attention economy.

So I don't believe it's actually demonstrative of what people like. So you may feel lost trying to find a common thread in the market to know what the market is so that you can write to it. So this could be a turning point where you can either connect more to what you believe is important at storytelling, or you can become more fixated on performing for a fickle, nebulous, and manipulated audience who don't actually care about you as a human.

Type four, the [00:21:00] individualist. If you don't feel like the manuscript is important, you're going to struggle hard to keep writing it, but look for where you've conflated important and special. Your story doesn't have to be unlike anything else for it to be important. Also, if you're expecting this story to be the thing that finally gets you seen and recognized, you might be attaching too much importance to it, which can put you on an emotional rollercoaster of, this is the most important thing in my life one day, then this doesn't matter and nobody will ever appreciate it The next day,

Type five, the investigator. If your manuscript doesn't seem mentally challenging enough, it might start to feel unimportant to you. That anxiety can look like your attention flowing more toward learning about writing than writing. Try to put more importance on action. The action of writing. It's probably just your anxiety that's making you research more than usual anyway.

And once we start down that path, there's no end to it unless we declare an end [00:22:00] to it.

Type six, the loyalist. Who are you deferring to when it comes to the importance of your manuscript? Whose approval do you need? What authority might you be trying to please with it? And could you instead use this as an opportunity to ask yourself what you think is important? Where might what you think is important, be clashing with what you think is safe to write, and how might that be limiting your progress in an aligned direction?

Type seven, the enthusiast. You might be avoiding what feels important because you worry it'll tie you down or feel like a limiting responsibility. Your heart, mind, and body do demand something of substance in your writing life, though, even if you tell yourself otherwise, to avoid feeling burdened or tied down.

So sevens often say they write to escape life. That's fine. But what if that dance has run its course and your current struggle with distraction is a result of not digging a little deeper into the purpose and importance [00:23:00] of your storytelling. What if you're distracting yourself because you're simply scared of that call of writing something that feels more important to you?

Type eight, the challenger. Ask yourself, what makes something feel important to you? Is it speaking truth to power? A character who takes no shit on their quest to get what they want? What are you letting compel you into action right now? If your usual ask kicking protagonist isn't hitting for you as much lately, could it be that you're feeling a call to tell a story about more of a collective effort?

Type nine, the peacemaker. Is your story unimportant or are you scared of the conflict? An important story might create? Don't mistake the inertia you can slip into for actual exhaustion here. Your types go to when it meets friction is to say, eh, it's not that important anyway, and then just kind of let the project drop.

Now that doesn't mean the project is unimportant, it just means that you probably have some work to do [00:24:00] around disappearing. There is no safer place to practice speaking up than in a draft of your manuscript. So if not there, where? If not now, when? No matter your type, if you're wondering, what if my book's not important, I'll say Important to whom?

And if you don't feel like it's important, well maybe it's not, but that doesn't mean you can't make some adjustments or start another project that does feel important. And maybe now might be the time when so many people need so much to put in the effort to write something more important than you have before.

I know you can do it, but your fear might be taking you off course or warning you away from it altogether. You're free to allow that fear to keep doing that. But if you're listening to this podcast, I assume you don't want to. You don't have to listen to your fear. That's great news for all of us because the world really needs writers to be brave.

If you're [00:25:00] not up for the challenge, that's okay. That's okay. You can continue to struggle with your manuscripts. Don't feel important enough for you, or you can go do something else. There are options. None of us have to be writers. My hope is that even one person listening to this hears the call to be brave and decides to listen.

You don't have to write revolutionary fiction. Just write what feels important to you today. Your voice really matters. Don't silence it. Preemptively liberated. Writers don't comply in advance. We root out the internal tyrant, that inner critic, the voice of the crowd, and we tell the story that's inside of us.

Beneath all that noise, you don't have to be a liberated writer. There are other kinds of writers to be, but if you want to be a liberated writer, this work is the way you get there. That's it for this episode of What If for Authors? I am Claire Taylor still, and if you want to go [00:26:00] a little deeper on this work, please come find me in my offerings@liberatedwriter.com or go follow my liberated writer Substack.

Thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. Happy writing.