Reasons to Write a Book #3: The Medium Demands It

I’ve already touched on the compulsion one has to write and third-party credibility as a reason to write a book. Another, perhaps subtler, reason I like to give for writing a book is that it demands certain disciplines and constraints that may not be present in other media, which in turn will shape your argument, style, tone, and delivery.

For instance, a book can take its time and afford to be expansive in a way that a poem or a short story cannot. Film can offer a great deal of information in a glance or a scene, but words can offer an expansive role for the imagination and a more detailed description of internal thought processes than the visual arts. A book requires—or should—more time, more thought, more rigor, and more commitment than shorter prose forms, and it lends itself to arguments, visions, and explorations that, in turn, require more thought, rigor, time, and commitment from the reader.

So, if the book is what the work demands and you demand from your reader, then a book is how your thoughts should bring themselves before the public. Whether they choose to read it, however, is a whole other story.

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