How do I write my next book?

everything I do is boring

I have a new working title for my next book - Drink Up: a social history of drinks, ingredients, and flavour

I do not want to write a book about race and culture, identity and politics. I do not want to write another semi-memoir book that is relational to my lens on the world. I do not want to write a book that is mining my pain, my joy, my desire, my political view point.

I want to write a ‘big’ book that delves into history and examines social constructs and interviews experts. But every time I sketch this out, god it sounds boring.

Is it boring?

Or am stuck with the idea that I guess could be called ‘imposter syndrome’?

I think it is boring.

I think it is boring because I actually want to be funny. I want to write something funny. Funny, but also urgent. Funny and about booze, because I love booze. But everything I structure is so dry. It comes across as a history book, and I am not a historian and so it lacks weight. I realise that, despite what I don’t want to do, I also I want make a comment on the world. But what is my point of view? I worry that the only reason I ‘can write’ is because I have nothing else but continued teenage angst about who I am in the world. My identity is the only interesting thing about me.

Everything I write has to have a purpose – and I believe this, because vanity does not make for exciting writing. But I have honed in on my proposal too much into the ‘why does this matter?’ and ‘who will read this?’ instead of just writing? Instead of telling a story.

i do refuse to write something that isn’t honed into making a point. So I am back to my book being boring. Because ultimately I don’t know why anyone would care about the social history of ingredients. I care! I’d want to read it! And it is important for us to know what we are consuming! Climate change! Fascist regimes! Exploitative labour! etc. But does anyone else?

I read Youngmi Mayer’s substack, I always find it chaotic but making perfect sense. It inspires me to be a good writer, to tell a story that isn’t vocalised often, or to question every aspect of (my) identity. And then I get stuck over the next book I want to write. Like, am i just writing a white person book?!

Books don’t see colour, babes. But is there part of me trying to write something that will be recognised by the (white) establishment? I will still be niche, because it is about food, but maybe it will get readership beyond ESEA!? But also, maybe it won’t because I am not white. I want to write a book like I write article, absent of me. Just information. Will it get taken seriously? Been seen of value?

I would very much like to be someone with a pseudonym.

But to have a pseudonym you need to have a book – or publishers need to believe in the myth of you – that they will put money behind the marketing, as very very few books sell on merit alone; books rarely ‘get discovered’. I just don’t think they will put money behind someone like me. The business of books. The whiteness of books. The class-ness of books. What is my value with ‘me’? What is my value without ‘me’?

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So after writing the above, I went back to the drawing board and stopped with my proposal and started writing an intro to a section of the book. I then went to bed.

I threw all the idea of professional academic / journalist out the window, which is the stance I wanted to take, and wrote about an incident with drinking too many martinis.

I think I have to be ok with the way into the story being through me and my experience. And maybe the way to pitch this book is a lot more ‘show’ and not 'tell’. I have no myth making about me for publishers to buy into.

But the point stands that I don’t know how to sell my idea, how to pitch it as something worthwhile, unless it is placing me at the centre. So the question is around my worth as a writer (both to myself, and to the industry), or am i performing self and identity like clickbait? Does it matter? Or am I over thinking and actually I just don’t have a good idea for a book?

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In Soho there is a church, St Giles-In-The-Fields. As a site of worship it has existed since 1101 when, according to its website, Queen Matilda, wife of Henry I, founded a leper hospital and thus a space for prayer was included. The hospital ceased to be needed when leprosy died out, and in 1542 the hospital chapel became a parish church and graveyard. This was the beginning of a village, and then the area became a wealthy suburb. It is key to remember that Soho was a hunting ground for Henry VIII and not a centre of London.

It was outside this church, on the cusp of 40, that I was violently sick due the excessive amounts of gin martinis. Heaving waves of vomit, where I thought I would just prefer to die than feel this bad. I had been fine, until I wasn’t. Rushing out of the bar, leaving my friend behind, and grotesquely ill on a historic site of god.

I was there on professional terms. Writing a martini map for a publication. A bar crawl of straight gin, and never once thinking trouble would arise. I was newly single, the world was attempting to open up after a pandemic, and I had invited someone on this adventure who I desperately wanted to fuck – rom-com levels of ‘this is not going to turn out well’.

The story of gin is one of good ideas and disastrous outcomes; horrific ideas and violent outcomes.

In 1524, not quite two decades before St Giles-In-The-Fields was founded as a church, Vasco Da Gama was named Governor of India and the foundations of the European colonial empire were hammered firmly in place. India would later, with the British East India Company, be a key part of the myth making of gin. Violently sick behaviour would be carried out in the name of empire, bloated Brits full of gin (and other booze) would make professional decisions that changed the future of the world that we are still living with.

So what does the role of gin play in a global understanding of power? Following the history of gin’s two main ingredients – juniper and cumin – we can unravel a story of trade, colonialism and power.

These two ingredients have different origin stories, but they came together in ancient Egypt as medicinal ingredients. Cumin followed a European colonial journey, finding its way to the Americas via the Spanish and Portuguese, and juniper is found throughout Europe.