No, You Don’t Need to Surrender to Your Book
It already gave itself to you.
“Just surrender to the process.”
“Let the book guide you.”
“Give yourself over to the writing.”
It sounds like sacred advice, like something you’re supposed to obey. But it’s off. Because the book already gave itself to you.
Book coaches love to say it’s the other way around. That you have to align yourself with it, devote yourself, earn its permission. But the book isn’t waiting for your surrender. It’s already yours.
Words show up when they feel like it. Lines pop into your head out of nowhere. Ideas appear without warning, even when you’re not looking for them.
The book doesn’t care if you’re ready or not. It’s spilling itself out before you even try to catch it. It’s already there, scattered and incomplete, messy and unfiltered.
It’s fine with being misunderstood, rewritten, ignored. The book isn’t waiting for you to be perfect. It doesn’t care about your effort or how hard you try to make sense of it.
Maybe the problem isn’t that you can’t surrender to the book. Maybe it’s that you don’t see how freely it’s already given itself to you.
