On Being Ready to Write and Publish a Book
Author Elspeth Hay shares her story of getting a great book idea and then learning the hard way how difficult it is to write and publish it.
It took me five years to write my first book, released this July: Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food. In the fall of 2019, I learned that we humans can eat acorns, and in the months that followed I became fascinated with learning everything I could about this new-to-me food and its long entanglement with human history. I obsessed over the fact that for thousands of years all over the northern hemisphere, acorns have been a staple food—an every day crop as common on the table as today’s rice, corn, or wheat.
I reveled in Pliny the Elder’s commentary from the first century CE that it is “a well-known fact that acorns at this very day constitute the wealth of many nations.” I lingered under oak trees and over processing instructions for acorn flour, acorn starch, and acorn oil.
From acorns I branched out into a fascination with other nuts and other trees: chestnuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, hickories. Not only had all these foods once been staple crops, I began to understand, but also all are vital keystone species in their ecosystems—species so important to their home places that without them, the whole web of life begins to fall apart. In tending these trees, I saw, we once enhanced rather than destroyed the living world around us.
I began to imagine the profound changes that could take place with a return to tree tending. We could grow food in a way that puts carbon into the ground instead of pulling it out; we could increase rather than decrease biodiversity. Thus began a slow internal rewriting of my most foundational stories. Would the Earth actually be better off without us, as I’d always imagined? Perhaps not, I began to think—not if we ate from these trees.
I started working on a book proposal in March of 2020. Two days later, my children’s school shut down for months on end, and it took a year, but I got the proposal to an agent and finally signed a contract with a publisher in March of 2021. I knew I still had some research to do and some farms to visit—along with a weekly radio show to produce and two young children to raise—but still I promised to deliver my manuscript by the following January. I’d grown a human being in 9 months before, I reasoned. How long could a book take?
Ha! Much, much longer, I began to see quickly. The story I wanted to tell was layered, personal, messy. It was big, and so was the process.
“Do the Michael Pollan thing and divide it into three parts,” my agent had suggested as we wrote the proposal. But when I tried to use the parts we’d created to tell the story of how we’ve become so disconnected from tree crops and how we might change, nothing worked. My lived journey of personal discovery turned into a litany of facts, a series of confusing, disjointed bits of research.
I asked my publisher for another few months, and then another year. Extension after extension ensued. Hindsight, of course, is crystal clear, and it’s easy to see now that when I started writing, I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t see the story; I wasn’t done with the research; and I certainly wasn’t ready to make promises about how long turning a jumble of excitement into a book might take.
I wish I could go back to myself in that moment and offer a bit of advice: Don’t promise, yet; instead, estimate. And don’t be afraid to ask for help along the way.
Check out Elspeth Hay's Feed Us With Trees here:
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