Learning in Public

I have this problem with always wanting to look like I know what I'm doing. So I sell the idea for The Undressing of America to FSG and I immediately assume my duty is to turn in a draft that shows what a great investment they made. I'm impressed with my editor, Eric Chinski, and promptly think, "I can't send this guy anything less than brilliant." Which by itself accounts for about a year's worth of abortive drafts.

      But as I blog about these questions I have around the strangeness of Bernarr Macfadden, the surprising ordinariness of his wife Mary, the implications of picking a beginning point, I realize how much learning I'm doing with this book—not just about the subject, but about writing itself. There's some tricky new stuff for me to master here, and that's what's best about Undressing right now. (And yeah, I do mean Undressing and metaphorically "undressing.") Whether I knew it consciously at the time or not, I took this book on not as a chance to prove what I'd already learned but to learn something new and hard. And working with Eric—whose reputation is as a brilliant text-editor—is a chance not to impress him but to learn from him. Starting today, stop thinking of this as my masterwork and think about it as a school project. Show some humility for a change, and come out of it with some tools I would never have found on my own.