Writing A Book: What do you think?

Writing a Book

My Uncle, who just reviewed Delta’s transcontinental 767 BusinessElite product from LAX to JFK, emailed me today asking my thoughts on writing a book. My Uncle, who is a very accomplished and well-known Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan, travels often, and would have a really unique prospective writing about this with me.

Here’s his thoughts:

I’m sitting in the Delta club now waiting for my 9:10 to DTW, and I had an idea for a book. The title would be “What’s Your Story?”. It would consist of vignettes culled from interviews of passengers waiting in the lounge for their planes. People have time to kill in these lounges. Suppose I interviewed people with the foundational question being where are they going and why? This could then lead into an interview about their current lives and where they are situated in life.

Is this odd? Or might there be something here that people might find interesting enough to read? I’m not sure I can do this sort of writing because it’s very different from the scientific writing that I ordinarily do, but perhaps I could do an interview and then try to write it up to see how it turned out. The hard thing is going to be asking people to tell their stories. And figuring out who might be the interesting people to ask. But, of course, if a chosen person’s story turned out to be dull, or not very detailed, or mundane, I wouldn’t have to include that one.

Actually, it occurs to me that Jamie must spend nearly half his waking life in airport clubs, so maybe he and I could share the task. He could do the interviews, and I could write them up. But I think I’d have to do an interview first to see how it goes.

So…what do you think? Would you read a book about this? Is this something that intrigues you, or is this just another travel diary and monologue? Does anyone know how do you get a book published?