I am re-watching Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, one of the greatest mysteries ever written and it has inspired me to think about what makes a great book great.

A simple way of looking at a book is that it is always a mystery. The book begins with a question (who killed so and so?) and the answer is found by taking a journey through getting to know the characters, what motivates each, and what actions each takes. The answer to the question emerges with an authenticity and inevitability encapsulated in Sherlock Holmes’, “Elementary, my dear Watson!” Of course, this is the way it must be.

This is a kind of magic.

It is the magic of hard work. Like the duck who looks serene on the surface and whose little webbed feet are paddling very fast and efficiently beneath, the good writer makes the complex appear simple.

It’s easy to see this in Murder on the Orient Express, but it is also true of books like Eat, Pray, Love or Big Magic. In them, the mystery is how to live an authentic life or how to be creative. The journey is the content of the book. In that journey, you will see that there is nothing in the book that isn’t used to create the ending and there is nothing that was needed to that conclusion that got left out.

This is the discipline of writing a good book.

There is a question on the first page. It is a question that matters, is urgent. And the reader is taken on a journey to get to the answer. The journey may seem wandering at times, the stories sometimes hopeless. And yet there is a momentum to it, a relentlessness. Nothing necessary is left out. Nothing unnecessary is left in.

This is why a collection of blogs, a well-formatted collection of notes, or the work of ChatGPT does not constitute a book.

Format is not what a book is about.

Meaning is what a book is about. Meaning that matters.

The deeper the meaning—the more important it is—and the more excellent the execution of the craft, the better the book will be.

Luckily for all of us who aspire to write a top-quality, meaningful book that brings transformation to ourselves and our readers, but who have, instead, a pile of stickies and notes kept on various note-taking platforms and possibly a lot of articles highlighted but no earthly idea what we are going to say that is meaningful, excellent, and important, there is hope!

The hope lies in the fact that writing a book is a process. It has stages of development and levels of drafts. In the whole process, there are 4 different stages and you will write at least 7 distinct drafts.

There are many ways of learning and practicing this process, but they all take time.

If you have a lot of great ideas and want to write a really good book, it’s time to get cracking!

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