When I Started To Resent All My Friends
My friends are lovely. I resented them for existing.
To write a novel in your spare time, you might have to say goodbye to everything else.
I decided to go for it—write a novel, for real, no takebacksies—in the fall of 2017. I’d been writing half-heartedly my now-abandoned crime novel with low energy and a quickness to accept any excuse that took me away from that dead-end. But then I had an idea. An idea I was obsessed with. An idea I had to write. So what would it take?
My law firm schedule typically varied from 8 to 15 hours a day at unpredictable intervals. I worked many weekends. I am also human, and enjoy sleep, food, exercise, TV, and drinking wine. In a Center for Fiction workshop, one instructor recommended writing 300 words a day—that’s a thoughtful pace, not too rushed, and you’ll be done with a draft in a year. Great, I thought, I’ll try that. It worked for about a week. The problem with writing 300 words a day is when you wake up the next morning, realize your prior 300 words sucked, delete them, and write 300 more. Then, in the grand scheme of things, you’ve written 0 words. For me, this felt like banging my head against a concrete wall.
I read about an author who woke up at 5 am to write before work. But I had a bad habit of starting long, unnecessary projects at 11 pm, including laundry, reorganizing closets, and decoupage, so 5 am was evil-witch-laughing at me. But for about a month, I did it. I drank milky coffee and watched the sky lighten through a window in my backdoor. I wrote. Not a single word from that early draft is still in my novel, but I dug up the bones.
Still, I faced two problems: one, my job left me little control over what time I went to sleep, which was sometimes two or three in the morning, and the first time I broke my 5 am habit, the rest torpedoed pretty quickly. Second, I was constantly late for work. If the words were flowing, I wasn’t getting out of that chair. Soon I was showering in ten minutes, sprinting to the subway, and showing up to the office drenched in sweat at 10:45.
In the months that followed, there wasn’t a scheme I didn’t try—NaNoWriMo, 1000 words a day, and even a program that makes you donate $5 to a charity you hate if you don’t write that day. I bought journals like Just Write One Thing Today and books like First Draft in 30 Days. I tried everything, and all I got was this lousy t-shirt that said FRUSTRATED with an arrow pointing to my face. That frustration was compounded into anxiety because what I had written was awful, and I wanted to produce a good draft, like, yesterday. There’s a maddening, claustrophobic feeling that comes when you desperately want something that is impossible.
My writing time became so precious that when my friends asked me to have dinner or drinks or go to their birthday party or comfort them through a breakup or literally anything that friends do, I’d get mad. Actually angry. How dare they ask me to have fun! Don’t they know what I’m trying to accomplish? Don’t they understand I could have two glasses of wine with them and laugh my head off or go home and cry onto my keyboard alone? Friends don’t make friends choose.
My growing resentment toward anyone or anything that interfered with my writing time festered in private. I hadn’t told anyone except my husband that I was writing a novel, and even to him, it came out more like I was confessing a curiosity with a fringe sexual fetish. I’m thinking about, possibly, maybe, trying this thing, it’s called, like, I mean, it sounds crazy but…writing a novel?
I went to a one-day Catapult seminar with J. Courtney Sullivan. Someone asked her—it might have been me, but I was starstruck and blacked out—how she managed to write Commencement while working at the New York Times, and she said she committed her weekends to writing, full hermit-style, no social life. I went home and told my husband I was going all-in. No more plans after work or on the weekends. He’s always been supportive, but I feel sorry about how my choice affected him as well. We’re a couple that does everything together, so when I started chaining myself to a desk every weekend, his social life nosedived, too. It was really, really hard. I said no to invitations and stayed inside on beautiful days without telling anyone why. Often, it felt pointless.
Sacrificing a social life to open up every weekend was what it took for me. The first time I told my best friend I could not see her because I was writing, she didn’t laugh. She wished me luck. Eventually, my characters kept me company and the writing process became much more rewarding than a night out. My friends would forgive me, but if I didn’t give writing my best shot, I’d never forgive myself.