How to Write a Book When You Have Dyslexia
“Please write down the words as I say them” the educational psychologist instructed.
“OK,” I said nodding, pen in hand. I was 21 years old and a first-year in Harvard’s sociology PhD program.
“We’re going to start far down the word list as I’m sure you can spell most of the easier ones at the beginning,” she said. “So let’s start with onomatopoeia.”
“I can’t spell that.”
“Try.”
“But, I’m telling you, I have no idea.”
“You have to write something.”
“But it’s going to be wrong.”
“You have to write something.”
“Even if it’s going to be wrong?”
“It’s a test.”
“Um, OK.” I wrote down a jumble of ‘o’s and ‘m’s and ‘p’s in a straight line. After five impossible words, she took the pad away from me.
“Right,” she said. “Let’s start again. Can you spell - because?”
Dyslexia is always something I feel like I’m on the verge of conquering. In some ways I have. In February my first book, Price Wars, was published, but I can’t remember reading a book from cover to cover. I have received degrees from Cambridge and Harvard Universities and yet I was often teaching myself—through accident and intention—when my learning habits left me outside the standard syllabus. I knew how much I had struggled, the years of lectures and classes and papers, and didn’t think that such arduous work was necessary. Anyone can understand society because we’re all social animals. But to successfully bring these ideas down to earth, I felt I needed to write a book that belonged outside the classroom and I had a problem. As my Harvard educational diagnostician explained, trying her best to sound reassuring: “You are really bright, you just can't read or write.”
It wasn’t until I was in my early teens that I reached the basic literacy my classmates had achieved years earlier. When I was finally able to read beyond the required texts of my high-school economics class, I became captivated by the social sciences. I still can’t tell you the difference between thee and thou, but as a 13-year-old my difficulty reading Shakespeare’s plays helped me see how important they were as a marker of class, of social status, at my elite school. When I encountered the social sciences I gained a toolbox that helped me make connections I knew were there. Social science concepts came naturally to me and won me a place at Cambridge University. I thought if I had gotten this far, I must have defeated my dyslexia. I quickly found out that I was wrong.
In university, I struggled so badly to translate my thoughts into coherent sentences that I nearly failed my first year exams. A professor staged an intervention and I was assigned a specialist tutor. In our first meeting, the tutor asked me to read out loud my most recent essay. I only made it through the first few sentences when I realized it made no sense. It was a jumble of disconnected thoughts scattered on a page. I was embarrassed. I felt bad. I was wasting everyone’s time. Then she asked me what I meant to say. That was easy. The ideas had always come naturally. Thinking as a sociologist was, for me, the default. I rattled off the arguments one after the other. “If you had written that,” she said, “I would have given you the top grade. But what you wrote was a fail.” She advised me to buy a voice recorder and speak my essays into it. These tips helped, as did some other tactics I learned along the way. And audiobooks were, like spellcheck, another divine intervention.
These tactics got me through three degrees in Sociology. I learned how to extract information from articles, and how to express my thoughts simply. Sociology is a social science that rewards original and rigorous ideas, not penmanship, and I still cared deeply about sociological theory. Learning to write papers got me over the academic hurdles, but not the one I really wanted: to write a book that would reach people. But, a career in writing, I reasoned, would be a constant sprint up an escalator moving in the opposite direction. I was sure the simple writing I’d finally mastered wouldn’t be compelling enough for a whole book and I would never be able to manage the verbal acrobatics of other writers. So, I went into documentary film instead. I’ve always had a photographer’s eye and love of all things weird and beautiful. With film, it felt like I could, for the first time, excel in the medium rather than constantly be fighting against it.
I am proud of my documentary work, but my last subject was far bigger than the 90-minute runtime the broadcaster allotted. I was investigating the connections between human catastrophes—from the 2014 Ukrainian war to the economic collapse in Venezuela to the war against ISIS in Iraq. I found that each of these real-life horrors was triggered by sudden changes in the price of food and oil which, in turn, had been driven by financial speculators in New York and London. I called these conflicts ‘price wars’. The documentary would only scratch the surface of this global story. Everyone involved said I should write a book. But how?
I wrote a book by realizing that writing isn’t about writing at all. Empiricism is an important idea in sociology, it roughly means that what we know about the world is what we can experience. I had always dismissed the sentiment “write what you know” as naive. But I had misunderstood. It meant that it is easier to write about situations or characters or even ideas that you’ve experienced up close. It is also easier to write if you do it honestly. I finally learned to shut out other voices: naysayers and even writers I wished to imitate. If you try to create some kind of artifice—copying another’s style or guessing what the reader wants to hear—the process only becomes harder.
In other words, write what you know not what you think you should. I finally did. Writing is really about knowing, and knowledge of the world we live in is something that we all have: Harvard PhD or high school dropout, dyslexic or not.
Rupert Russell is a writer, director, and author. His first book, Price Wars, was published in February 2022.
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