How James Clear is Writing His Next Book

James Clear is in the creative muck on his next book. It’s currently a 600 page Google Doc—and he’s trying to compress that down into chapters, sections, and sentences. It’s a big task, but he seems more or less undaunted.

“I think if I was earlier in my career, it would be tougher,” he says. He’s in a black shirt, with a shaved head, spatters of stubble on his face, and blue pooled around his pupils.  “I say that, because as you embark on any creative project you explore a lot of dead ends: it's mushy, the vision is pretty foggy, and it doesn't start to crystallize until you keep working on it and iterating and refining and editing.”

This brings up a burning question: how does someone like James break through the creative muck? His last book, Atomic Habits, was a huge best-seller. How is he going about writing a follow-up?

To him, the process is two-fold: both finding what he wants to say, and how to say it so that it will resonate. He has a high-level idea of the book he wants to write, and he’s continually gathering material that relates to it. He collects it into his gigantic Google Doc—and he’s constantly working with it, filling it out and converting it into useful prose.

But as he’s doing this, he’s also running a parallel process: positioning. It’s the most important thing for him at this stage. He wants to know how to package the ideas in his book so that people will pay attention to them. He spends what he calls “unreasonable” amounts of time on this. He uses Twitter as a tool to throw compressed versions of his ideas out into the world to see what sticks. He’s constantly playing with words and sentence structures, trying to figure out what might work as a chapter title or a section heading. 

In short, his process is all about figuring out where his readers currently are—what resonates with them, what they care about—and bringing them where he wants them to go. 

In this interview, I talk to James about his process for the book, how he thinks about positioning, how he uses Asana, Google Docs, and Evernote, and how he keeps perspective as he works on his next project. 

Let’s dive in! 

These are James’ answers as told to Dan Shipper, summarized, condensed, and edited for length and clarity.

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James introduces himself

I'm an author and an entrepreneur, probably best known for writing Atomic Habits—a book about habits, behavior change, and continuous improvement.

The other major projects that I work on are at jamesclear.com, and they include 3-2-1, my weekly newsletter, which has over a million subscribers. I also do keynote speeches, and work with businesses on building better habits and improving performance. 

Let me take one step back before we get into this. One thing that I want to make clear is that, I as I talk about my process, this is just how it is right now for me. It’s not how it’s always been, or how it will continue to be.  I think that it’s really important that people understand that none of this is set in stone.

How I’m writing my next book

From a high level, I'm just trying to show up every day and do the work. 

But more specifically, a lot of the work early on in a book is about positioning. Positioning the product, packaging the ideas, figuring out the right frame, so that it's something that people will be interested in. 

Different people write for different reasons, but in my personal opinion, the only reason that you would put ideas into book format is because you want to reach people. When you write for yourself, it's called a journal, but when you write for other people it's called a book. 

And so if part of your objective is to spread ideas, and to help others, and to do that as widely as possible, then if you’re writing a book you need to ask a series of questions that are related to: How do I reach people? What do people want to read? What kind of books will they open?

You can, and should, still write about what you want to write about. But the idea is to learn to frame what you want to write about in a way that people will be interested in.

So what I’m mostly focused on right now for this book is positioning it. Here’s how I think about it.

Positioning is starting where the reader is, and bringing them to where you want them to go

I’m not smart enough to come up with a really good idea right away, in the first hour of day one. I need to sit with ideas for a long time.

I will spend what might seem to others like an unreasonable amount of time doing this. A lot of people might be like, ‘OK, we worked on positioning for a week—let’s move on and start executing!’ But I will sit with it for six months, or a year—however long it takes for the idea to feel like it’s fully formed.

Here’s why giving this process time works so well: you know how if you’re playing a game of I Spy, and someone says, ‘I spy the blue thing’—it seems like every blue thing in the room instantly starts to light up to you?

When you have a big concept in the back of your mind, it becomes a filter that everything you experience runs through. Now, you’re not simply having experiences throughout the year—you’re having a whole year’s worth of experiences that all get related to the concepts you’re thinking about and working on.

That really helps not just with the details, and with fleshing out chapters. It also helps you see how the idea interfaces with everyday life. You start to see the connections between the idea you want to write about and the world around you.

And that puts you in a better position to figure out what the positioning of the book should be. 

This is the reverse of how most people write. Most people start with something they want to say or a point they want to make, and try to move from that point to the reader.

I think it’s actually better to work the other way—to ask what people already desire. Then move backwards from there to that point you wanted to make. If you do that, you don’t have to fight an uphill battle. 

I’ll give you an example. Atomic Habits has a chapter where I talk about deliberate practice. Now, it could have been a whole book about deliberate practice, in which I talked about habits. Instead, it was a book about habits where I talked about deliberate practice. I think the difference between how those two books would sell is enormous.

 I don’t need to convince you that habits play an important role in life—just by virtue of growing up in society you know that having good habits is favorable, and having bad habits is unfavorable.

On the other hand, ‘deliberate practice’ is a term that takes at least thirty seconds to unpack—and you don’t get thirty seconds. If somebody is just browsing and comes across your book, chances are they have no idea who you are, and you’re not going to be there in person to explain ‘deliberate practice’. You’ve already lost them.

You don’t want to have to convince people that they should care about your idea. It’s much better to be convincing them that you have the best book or product on an idea they already care about.