It started around midnight. My cat, ever the curious hunter, spotted a lizard scurrying across the living room floor. She froze, wide eyes locked onto her target, tail flicking with excitement. Then she leapt.
For the next two hours, my house became a battleground.
The lizard was small and fast. It darted under furniture, squeezed into cracks, and weaved through shadows like it had rehearsed escape routes for weeks. My cat pounced again and again, and each time the lizard was one step ahead. She’d get close, commit fully to the lunge, and come up empty. Papers scattered. A chair tipped over.
The living room looked like a crime scene by the time it was done. For more, see why persistence beats talent.
She never caught the lizard. It disappeared into a crack in the wall around 2 AM, and she sat there staring at the crack for another twenty minutes before she gave up and curled into a ball on the couch.
I sat there watching all of it, and all I could think was: that’s exactly what writing a book feels like.
The Chase Nobody Warns You About
The story you thought was your strongest material turns out to be a sidebar.Share on X
Every client I work with goes through a version of this. They come into our first interview with a clear vision of their book. They know what they want to say, they know their audience, they know the stories they want to tell. It feels like the lizard is right there, sitting in the middle of the floor, easy to grab. For more, see how a $3,000 scam became my best storytelling lesson and best AI assistants.
Then we start writing.
The structure that seemed obvious falls apart when you try to put it on paper. Chapter three needs to come before chapter one. The story you thought was your strongest material turns out to be a sidebar.
The voice you had in your head doesn’t sound right in print. Characters in a memoir don’t behave the way you remember them behaving. Plot points in a business book contradict each other when you lay them out in sequence.
I’ve seen this happen across 54+ ghostwriting projects and 113+ books. The pattern never changes. The book you think you’re writing is never the book you end up writing. The real book is hiding in a crack in the wall, and you have to chase it there. I don’t trust anybody who promises a client the book will come out exactly as outlined. Either they haven’t written many books, or they plan to write the outline and call it done.
Why the Pouncing Fails
My cat had effort to spare. She committed fully to every single lunge, and she kept using the same approach. Straight-line pounce, miss, reset, straight-line pounce again. The lizard learned her pattern faster than she learned its escape routes.
Writers do the same thing. They sit down, write the chapter the way they see it in their head, realize it doesn’t work, delete it, and write it the same way again with slightly different words. I’ve watched clients rewrite the same opening chapter six times without changing the fundamental approach. They’re pouncing in a straight line at a target that keeps moving.
What fixes it is changing the angle. In ghostwriting, that usually means I ask the client to stop telling me what they think the chapter should be and instead just talk. Tell me about the time you almost lost the company. Tell me about the decision that still keeps you up at night. The real material surfaces when you stop aiming for it directly.
The Crack in the Wall
The lizard escaped into a crack my cat couldn’t reach.
That moment of defeat was also the most useful moment of the entire chase. She now knows where lizards go. She knows the speed, the movement patterns, the hiding spots. See also the cats who taught me to cry. Next time a lizard shows up in my living room, that cat is going to be significantly more dangerous.
Writing works the same way. The first draft that doesn’t work teaches you more about your book than any outline ever could. You learn what your voice sounds like on paper versus what you thought it sounded like. You discover which stories carry emotional weight and which ones you only included because they seemed important on a whiteboard. You find out where your argument has gaps you didn’t know existed.
I tell clients all the time that a first draft is the chase that shows you where the book is hiding. Every wrong turn narrows the possibilities until the real structure shows itself, and that’s the process working the way it’s supposed to. It annoys me when writing teachers treat a failed first draft as proof somebody can’t write, because that’s how a lot of good books get abandoned in chapter three.
What Does a Cat Chasing a Lizard Teach About Writing a Book?
She never stopped. Two hours of failed lunges and she was still in it, still tracking, still adjusting. When the lizard disappeared into the wall, she didn’t walk away immediately. She sat there, watching, processing. Even in defeat she was gathering information.
That’s the mindset that finishes books: persistence through the part where every attempt feels like a miss. Talent and inspiration get far more credit than they deserve, and the myth of the magic moment when the words just flow has talked more people out of their books than any bad review. The willingness to put up with the frustration, learn from it, and come back with a better angle.
I’ve worked with brilliant people who quit their books after three chapters because the chase got hard.
I know how dangerous a cat can get. Once I was playing with a cat, and she hit an artery in my hand. Blood everywhere. I went to the hospital and got 15 stitches. There’s a point where a cat decides you’re playing rough, and after that, forget it. Stupid cat.
I’ve also worked with people who had no writing background at all but finished powerful manuscripts because they refused to stop. Every single time, the persistent ones produced better books, because they stayed in the chase long enough for the full story to come out. Writing skill barely entered into it.
By the end of the night, my cat was asleep on the couch, exhausted. The living room was destroyed. And somewhere inside that wall, a lizard was probably feeling pretty good about itself.
But I know my cat. The next lizard that walks into this house doesn’t stand a chance.
Got a book idea that keeps eluding you? Schedule a Book Discovery call and let’s chase it down together.
