Writing a book about preventing addiction
The process of writing "Addiction, Chaos, Discipline: How to Stay Free from Addiction"
This is an article about the history of my book Addiction, Chaos, Discipline: How to Stay Free from Addiction. I will describe the book’s purpose and why I wrote it.
What is the book about, and what does it do?
The book is about how to avoid ending up with an addiction. Most books about addiction are about quitting addiction, but this book tries to prevent people from ending up in an addiction.
The first three-quarters of the book are memoirs. You follow my dad and me from my birth until his death. The book is written through my eyes, but I hope I have successfully described several viewpoints of my dad’s life. I talked with my family to gather their experiences around my dad and incorporated that into the story.
You will find a story about a man with a heavy alcohol addiction. During the day, my dad worked a regular day job, but in the evening, he was transformed into a drunk with a bad temper. My dad could hold his career, most of his life, and put food on the table. However, there were things he could not manage well in his life. For example, I remember him as someone who could not handle money well.
Then there is also the story about me, who has made many mistakes and dumb stuff throughout my life. However, I learned enough from my dad’s mistakes to turn things around for myself. I swore never to end up as an alcoholic quite early in life. So far, I have successfully avoided that. Another thing I found a bit later in life was how helpful a bit of self-discipline and direction can be when you need to build something good.
The second part of the book is the “how-to “ part. I present the practices I have adopted throughout life that have helped me stay free from addiction. Because I have no formal education in addiction treatment or psychology, the memoirs at the beginning of the book are needed. I try to anchor the good practices to science but also link the practices to events in the book’s first part.
From the title of my book, you can probably guess one of the practices I discuss: You need to have self-discipline. I will discuss why discipline is essential and how to develop self-discipline.
Another thing I underline about these practices is that they need to be practiced to work. You can’t just read about them; that won’t help you. You have to start living the practices.
Why did I write it?
It all started with my kids asking questions about my dad. For example, when my daughter was about 6 years old, she wondered why we always went to a cafe with Granddad and never visited his home. I wanted to tell her why and the background, but I could not find the words. I just told her that it was because Granddad had a bit messy at his place and did not want us to visit that mess. Through the years, I got more questions; all I could give were shallow answers.
One day, I decided to write it down instead. For a long time, I have found it easier to sort my thoughts by writing them down and scrutinizing what I have written. I write, then I read through it and ask myself: Are these the right words to describe my thoughts? It is a straightforward process. It felt really good to put down everything I had in my head on paper. It was very freeing, and I felt like I did not need to have the thoughts in my head anymore.
After writing for a few nights after the family had gone to bed, I thought someone else might benefit from my writing. I can’t remember who wrote it or where I read it, but one way of dealing with a bad experience is to listen to or read about others who have gone through a similar experience. I decided to start writing for a bigger audience.
The process
My first decision was to write in English and translate the book into Swedish. I have tried writing longer texts in Swedish. I can do it, but I find my best flow when I write in English. The reason is that I mostly read and write in English, because of my work. This decision might sound strange because I wrote this book for my Swedish kids. However, Swedish kids start learning English when they are about 6 years old. Another reason is that the book's topic is quite heavy, and my kids should wait until they are 15 to read it. By the age of 15, most kids in Sweden would be able to read longer books in English.
Before Addiction, Chaos, Discipline: How to Stay Free from Addiction, I had no experience writing books. The first thing when I started to work on the book was to stop writing. Why, you may ask? All of my writing thus far was an experiment. I wrote down bits and pieces from my life and tried to puzzle them into a coherent text. It was a flawed method. Instead, I started from blank and wrote down every significant event in my life as a chapter name and then a brief note about what I did mean with the chapter name. For example, one chapter name I remember creating was the chapter named Divorce. The short note was: My parents divorced when I was 6 years old because my dad drank too much. I made chapter names covering the period from birth to my father’s death. Later, some chapters would change names, others would merge, and a couple would be added. Then, I started to fill the chapters with point lists of things that happened during that chapter’s time period and tried to remember in what order these things happened. I did similar for the “how-to” part of the book but without any timeline. In this part of the book, I focused more on finding all my adopted practices and formulating why they are essential to addiction prevention. I also had to start finding relevant source material to deepen my knowledge within these areas. This was not an one-evening job, I can tell you.
When I finished the book’s basic structure, I started to write. Even if I had never written a book, I had a plan for how to get this done. For many years, I have followed Jocko Willink, and according to him, all is pure math: If you write 1000 words a day and limit the time to do it to one hour, you will have 30,000 words after one month. Inspired by that, I told myself I would do at least 500 words for 30 minutes daily. I know myself; I have a hard time focusing, and a lot of stuff is happening around me. Most days, I fulfilled my quota and a bit more; other days, I fell short because I got lost in how to formulate myself or remember precisely what had happened at some event in my family’s life. At one point, I surprised myself. During one weekend, I wrote over 7000 words. Ultimately, it took about 5 months to write the first draft of the book. It was not too shabby for a first-time author.
Another thing Jocko has said almost as often as “write 1000 words a day” is that writing the first draft of the book is only a small part of the work. He was not wrong. I have gone through my book more than 10 times, reorganizing, adding, removing text, and fixing things my editors discovered in my text. Finishing off the hands-on job of the book was the formatting of the e-book and the paper book and taking it to publishing. In total, my first book took about two years to make and publish.
Because I have no patience for getting a publisher, I thought I should also try publishing the book myself. It is very easy to get your book published using Amazon KDP or Draft2Digital, to name a couple of big actors. However, getting people interested in your book is much, much harder. I am at this stage, trying to market my book so people will buy it.
If you get your hands on my book, you would do me a big favor if you wrote a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you bought it. Maybe, you have a blog where you can write a sentence or two about the book. The thing is, because I self-publish, reviews help a lot to market the book.
If you want me to write about my successes and failures in book marketing, please leave a comment below.
Thanks for reading.
