HGTV Erin and Ben Napier pose together.
“Home Town” stars Ben and Erin Napier penned the book “Make Something Good Today: A Memoir,” which was published in 2018. During an October 2021 interview on the “LIVE the Outbound Life” podcast, Ben spoke about the process of writing the memoir with his wife.
Ben Napier Discussed Writing ‘Make Something Good Today: A Memoir’ in October 2021
During the “LIVE the Outbound Life” podcast episode, uploaded on October 10, 2021, Ben Napier shared that he and his wife had “a good friend,” who happened to be a literary agent. The famed woodworker explained that she had approached the couple to publish a book soon after “Home Town” premiered in 2016.
“She was like, ‘I think I can sell your story, you know, let’s talk about it.’ So we kind of had an idea of how we wanted to write it and we had written about half of it. It was super warp speed also how quickly we wrote it but it probably took us half a year,” revealed Ben.
He clarified that he and his wife were able to write the book within a short time frame, as Erin had been sharing aspects of their lives on her popular blog “Make Something Good Today” throughout a period of almost a decade. Ben then compared writing the memoir to going to therapy.
“Working with our editor, it was a lot like therapy. I think like because we would work on something and he then would say, ‘Okay but can you dive into that a little deeper,’” recalled the father-of-two. “So we would and then he’d say, ‘Can you dive into it a little more’ and it’s like okay so you kept digging deeper and deeper into these important milestones in our lives and what they meant to us and what about this specific memory was special and important and what else was going on around. So it was incredible.”
The 38-year-old also revealed that working on the book was “one of the hardest things [he and his wife] have ever done,” as “Erin was pregnant” with their eldest daughter, Helen, and they were filming “Home Town” season 2 while they were in the process of writing it.
Erin & Ben Napier Talked About Their Book in 2018
While speaking to Guideposts in 2018, Erin and Ben Napier promoted “Make Something Good Today: A Memoir.” Ben shared that they had “got the title from Erin’s blog that she wrote everyday for eight years.” Erin noted that she “was just documenting the little things that happened everyday but then when you look across eight years every little thing was connected and led to big, big, big things that [they] could never see coming.”
“This book, it’s a memoir that I originally wrote the journal, then Ben was living life right alongside me this whole time, so it’s both of our perspectives on all these little things that added up to very big things and it was about how we bloomed where we planted,” explained the 36-year-old. “And how it takes a shift in your perspective to find the joy in everything around you and in your career and in your town right where you live. This book is super personal for us. It’s kind of more like a scrapbook.”
READ NEXT: FIRST LOOK at HGTV’s New Competition Series With Martha Stewart & Tamera Mowry-Housley