How to write a book

Writing "for everyone" is how prose goes flat. When you try to speak to a crowd you smooth away the specifics, and specifics are exactly what make readers feel seen.

Pick one person. A real one, ideally — a friend, a younger version of yourself, someone who wrote to you once. Put their name at the top of your draft. Write the way you would explain this to them across a table.

The paradox is that the more precisely you write to one person, the more universal it feels. Readers do not connect with "audiences". They connect with the sense that a real human is talking directly to them.

Before you write a chapter, answer three questions about your one reader: What do they already believe? What are they afraid of? What do they need to hear that no one is telling them? Write to those, and the chapter will almost draft itself.