Some people write books. But I am pioneering a new, miniaturist form of literary production. I write book proposals. Dozens of them.
An idea for a book, which seems brilliant at the time, will pop into my head. I’ll rush to the computer and sketch out my dramatic thesis, which will revolutionize the way we see our world and put me on the bestseller list. Then I’ll start sketching out the chapters.
Now, an actual book chapter takes months to write, but when I’m in book- proposal frenzy I can sketch out several chapters in seconds. I’ll envision the great troves of research I’m going to do to back up my thesis, and the magnificent wisdom I’ll attain. When writing a proposal it’s important to convey the impression that you will, at some future date, come up with brilliant new concepts to flesh out your thesis. Coming up with the actual ideas themselves takes time and effort and has to be put off to the book- writing stage.
It should be emphasized that I don’t actually send these proposals out to a literary agent or to publishers. In the fullness of time I usually find that my 600-page-book idea can barely sustain a 3,000-word article. But that doesn’t make the proposal less valid as an art form. There are plenty of architects who have never actually had a building of their own design constructed but who are considered influential architects nonetheless.
I’ve written a book proposal called “The Triumph of Belgian Cultural Hegemony,” on all the things that make modern life boring. I wrote one on ” The Over-the class” two years before Newsweek put the concept on its cover. I dashed off another on “Nadaphrenia,” profiles of prominent people who, unlike schizophrenics with their multiple personalities, have no personality whatsoever. I’ve done a proposal for a self-help book, “The Fine Art of False Modesty,” and an expos, “Multilateral Man,” a savage look at life inside multilateral organizations.
A few months ago I drafted a proposal for a book called “Empires: History’s Golden Ages and Our Own.” It would be a comparison of four nations in their primes. I figured I’d start the book by reviewing the classic literature on what makes nations great. Gibbon thought it was a sudden increase in liberty. Machiavelli thought artistic genius followed military might.
Then there would be four essays on specific nations. Contemporary America would be one, since the idea is to compare our Golden Age with the others. And then, I pondered, I’d throw in Renaissance Florence, the Dutch Republic, and Victorian England. But maybe, I reconsidered, I should toss out the Dutch Republic and do a chapter on Imperial Rome. Or perhaps Rome is too distant and I should focus on France during the time of Louis XIV.
As I’m tossing empires in and out of my book, it may occur to you that in order to write about these empires I would actually have to possess immense knowledge about them. Me tossing empires in and out of a book is like the manager of the San Diego Padres tossing Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey around in his batting order, even though they are not really on his team. But that is the beauty of the book proposal. Lack of in-depth knowledge is no bar to conceptualization.
The book-proposal genre I’m developing is not the same as the book-proposal genre publishers like. They prefer proposals featuring a sample chapter and a table of contents. Like Raphael, I am playing much more radically with perspective. My proposals do not feature deep perspectives; they are more in the nature of overviews, and thus are characterized more by breadth.
As a journalist, I write mainly on topics pegged to the here and now.
But my book concepts tend to escape temporal bonds and narrow specialization. A colleague had a professor who wrote a promising book while he was a young man. Then decades passed, and his next book never appeared. When asked what was the subject of this long delayed work, he would say, “The World in All Its Aspects.” That’s about the breadth I’m looking for in my book proposals.
Reinhold Neibuhr wrote a book called The Nature and Destiny of Man. Denis de Rougement wrote a book called Love in the Western World. William Barrett wrote a book called The Death of the Soul. These are the kind of monster topics that are perfect for my proposals.
Perhaps I could just take the many proposals I’ve done and put them together in an anthology. In fact, I’ve got a few ideas about how to organize them, how to frame the collection with a brilliant introduction. I’m convinced it would make a great book.
DAVID BROOKS
