About What to Write for a Book

A friend of mine wrote in her blog the other day naming the top 5 things she liked, hated, etc. One of the things she wrote was what she wanted to do before she is gone. She wanted to write a book. Being a book lover, I naturally inquired as to what book/s she planned on writing. Her answer was that she doesn’t have an idea and ask me for a suggestion. Well, I hated to make this a subject of a blog article of mine but I felt answering in a comment box is inadequate. Anyway, I had my ideas as to what to write because I too harbor the thought of writing a book before my time is up and if this helps her or others like her get some ideas on what to write, then that will be just great. Former Georgian president and Soviet foreign minister, Edward Shervanadze once said and I fully agree that there are three things a man should do in his life. First, do something important, then, retire and write a book, and finally, buy and run a farm. People other than professional writers write books for a number of reasons. Take example my professor, Elfren Cruz. He recently launched his first book on family business. Aside from teaching strategic management, professor Cruz is into business consultancy handling specifically Filipino Chinese family businesses. Therefore, his book can be considered to be the crystallization of his life works. From this, we could gather the first of the reasons people write books and that is to impart the wisdom and experience they have gathered over their lifetime to others and in the process help the readers. Corollary to this is the second reason, which could be independent from the first and this is the desire to create their ultimate “masterpiece” or lifework, or “blood work” that people would remember them for as a sort of “fitting” monument of their existence. Yet, the third reason people in their advance state of age wanting to write a book is to present an “accurate” picture of themselves to be preserved for posterity, to “correct” any “misunderstanding/s” or “inaccurate” interpretation/s of the choices they made in their lifetime, and lastly, to provide the “real” history of their prime years. It is to this reason that we have the autobiographies of famous people. For who is the better authority on what really happened? You or your worst critic? Would anybody prefer their detractors to write about them and blacken their memories forever? The answer is quite obvious. The fourth and the last reason that I could think of is we write books because we want to inspire others. We want to convince them that life is not totally hopeless and life goes on and life always manages to find a way. One of the advantages of writing when one is his advance age is that one has already experienced through the thick and trough of life. Thus, this gave us (I’m speaking of the future, old us not the present) the “right” to tell the “young” ones that we’ve been there, we’ve done that, and don’t despair when things turn bad, keep on fighting, and forge the will to go on. Persevere, for there is always a light at the end of the tunnel and that things could turn out fine in the end. There is HOPE! There are a lot of people out there who don’t see any HOPE and they aren’t necessarily the “young” ones and if by our example, we could convince them to go on and eventually “better” themselves, then wouldn’t that be a fitting epitaph? I’m on the process of writing hopefully be a worthy story of mine that I could someday publish before my time is up but in the meantime, I’m saving some money for that farm I’m retiring to perhaps in 30 – 40 years time. What about you? Have you made up your mind on what to write?