once more into the breach

I'm writing a couple of book proposals right now, and it's always more surprising than it should be just how great a leap of faith it is.  Book proposals — like dissertation proposals, for those who are more familiar with that process — require you to do some but not all of your research and planning ahead of time, so you can explain to other people what it is that you intend to write and why they should endorse you to do so and write you a contract and give you money so you can buy the cat food while you're working on it and all that.

Except of course that you haven't actually done all the research and planning.  So you don't really know all of what the book is likely to involve or contain.

Since you've done relatively little writing on the topic, you also haven't necessarily found the approach or the voice you will want to use when you write the actual book.  There is additionally the highly functional temptation to write the proposal in a somewhat breezier and more engaging (see also seduction mode) tone than that in which the book is likely to be written.  This is facilitated by not having done all the research and planning and not knowing all of what the book is likely to involve or contain, naturally, as anyone who has ever made 20 minutes of cocktail conversation out of a headline and three sentences of the lede of a newspaper article can tell you.  Knowing very little is an asset if you wish to remain free to be insanely entertaining.

This makes for treacherous going.  How do you map out, for example, a prospective table of contents for a book when you don't actually know all that it will need to encompass?  This is the task in which I am currently embroiled, and I do not mind admitting that it gives me stage fright.  I do not get stage fright when it comes to actual performance, I never have.  But this wakes up the butterflies in my stomach.

Handwaving is, to some extent, appropriate to the task.  But at the same time you know — or at least you do if you've been through this process before — that no matter how many times you include the words "provisional" and "projected" in a proposal, any editor who is willing to buy your book will have found something in your proposal to which sie has become a little bit attached.   You will not necessarily know what this is, but you will find out, sure enough, if it ends up not being part of the final manuscript… or even if it is just substantially different from the way in which it was originally described in the proposal.  Killing your own darlings is difficult.  Killing someone else's can be… sticky.

So you try to be careful, but there can at this stage be no guarantees. You try to be conservative in your scope, but at this stage, you know that it doesn't matter what lines you draw now, you'll be coloring outside of them shortly after the ink is dry on the contract.  You try to be moderate in your tone, even though you want to catch people's attention, to make them think the book is a wonderful idea, knowing that you don't actually know whether the book will sound like you're making it sound right now.  All you can do is make educated guesses and speak calmly and clearly while you smile and try not to look too confused.

You do all that and you know you are simultaneously a) telling the most fair and transparent version of the truth about your proposed book that you have to tell right now and b) making things up as you go along and lying through your teeth.   As nervewracking as I find it, it's all part of the job.  Being a writer means writing proposals while simultaneously accepting that the process of writing a book changes both the author and the book.

If it doesn't, I daresay you're doing it wrong.