58 You Have a Book in You sonality. He won over 2,000 major awards, was a philan- thropist, real estate investor, and was the richest man in Hollywood. However, he started out as a penniless immigrant from England. Be like Bob! You can have a rich, deep, meaningful, and fully functional life and life- style, and it will make you an in昀椀nitely better writer and person. Writing books can be a little like raising children. 吀栀ere are advantages to growing up in a big family. Some- times authors feel that working on multiple books will diminish their energy or concentration. 吀栀e truth is prob- ably just the opposite. If you’re a real writer, you need to write—and when you’re not writing, you can start to lose con昀椀dence in your creative identity. 吀栀e solution? When, for whatever reason, you can’t write the book you’ve been working on, work on a di昀昀erent book for a while. But keep working, because that’s what you really want to do. Cut the Beginning One of the most ancient rules of writing is that the story should begin in the middle of things. 吀栀e Iliad, the ancient Greek epic about the Trojan War, starts when the war has already been going on for ten years. What worked then still works now. Likewise, when I record my books, I complete the entire recording and then go back and redo the 昀椀rst chap-