writing a book

hm... so why would anybody want to write a book? there are, as always, several answers, none of which excluding the others.

well, fame is one of them. people write books because they want to be famous. fame with or without money? preferably with, of course, but I assume there are people that are rich anyway, and the fame arriving from a book would somehow re-equilibrate their profile, the way they are perceived by the others. politicians, actors, businessmen, all of them are rich already, but their character is sometimes not very well embraced by the public. so let's write a book, to show them that I, the businessman, am not that soulless creature only looking for money, I have dreams, I am sensible, there is quite a lot of "humanness" in me. whether it works or not, can't really know, I never read a book written by berlusconi, for instance.

Certainly, fame and money is probably the biggest slice of people writing a book... or at least that's what I believe. fame feeds the soul, I'd like to be recognized at that person that wrote that book, that said that thing...

unexpressed thoughts? ideas that you feel otherwise that don't have anybody to talk to about? also, and that's probably the best recipe for a good book. it has to represent something, to fit well in reader's system of values. I wouldn't like "robinson crusoe" should I not appreciate the story, the fight for survival, the ingeniosity, and on the other hand the way Defoe narates the story. so in fact a book has two things, the substance and the form. wow, sounds like philosophy, exactly like the old greeks would say about the essence of the world. but that's reassuring, it means I can't be wrong.
so the substance needs to be compatible with the reader, to be appetible (from appetite), to somehow correspond to the empty wholes that the bricks of his knowledge have formed, or otherwise to reinforce what is already build there. if substance is too different from what the reader is able to absorb, if building blocks to which to link it are missing, then the substance is useless. not in general, but to that particular reader. there's no sense to expect a book about carbon isotopes to be accepted by someone unless it somehow links to some other substance already present: either a chemist (has enough background on carbon isotopes), an archaeologist (something to help him identify age of things is rather intriguing, and he will low his ear to listen), an environmentalist (no idea what those isotopes are, but maybe they will affect the global warming). the form, as the other component of the book, comes to reduce the distance the substance might have from the reader's background. obviously, the nicer things are put, the more examples and analogies are made, the more absorbable an information is.