Ten Suggestions On Making Time To Write

Every writer I’ve ever spoken to—from hopeful to published—agonizes over writing time. There is never enough of it. That lack of time causes a helpless kind of frustration that leaves us feeling like if only—if only I had fewer obligations, fewer friends, fewer kids! Maybe then I’d have finished by now. Maybe then my book would be better. Anxiety builds. Resentment builds.

Yet even when there’s plenty of time—a full weekend, for example, when we’ve got no plans and it’s too cold to go outside anyway—that expanse can feel threatening. We put so much pressure on ourselves to produce work that is perfect because we may never have that chance again, so we hate ourselves when we can’t do it. It’s a lose-lose.

I bet it’s not just writers who feel this way, but anyone with a dream floating alongside their daily life. Always there, haunting, waiting. You want to pay your dream attention but you can’t because someone needs to cook and the house isn’t clean and you’ve got fifty errands to run and dinner plans and a full-time job. And also, you’re terrified to pay your dream attention because what if it turns out that time isn’t the issue? What if you just suck at it?

Okay, I’m projecting. Maybe you have never felt that way, but I have.

Making time—as opposed to finding time, which will never work—is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately because I recently decided to go back to working full-time as a lawyer after five months during which my only job was to write my second novel. I made that decision for practical reasons. I wasn’t earning any money during my five months off, and I don’t know what the future holds, and I want my husband to feel free to pursue his own dreams, so when an opportunity presented itself, I took it. I did so knowing that I would be returning to agony of Never Enough Time.

I try to remind myself I’ve done this once before. I wrote THE LIFESTYLE while working in big law. Still, I feel like I’m asking myself the same questions—and punishing myself with the same self-criticisms—that I was in 2017 when I started trying to write a novel. So today, I forced myself to recall how I got it done, and how you can get it done, too. Maybe it’s writing you want, or maybe not. These suggestions, I hope, apply to any side hustle or hobby, whether it’s starting a business, working out regularly, making a film, starting a blog. Whatever your heart fancies.

1. Tell your friends and family.

   When I started writing, I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. So when friends would ask me about my weekend plans, I’d lie and say I was tired or had to work. My friends thought I was lame, and I agonized over the tension between wanting to see them and have fun versus wanting to pursue my dreams. But the truth was, I preferred to write. I prefer to write over almost any activity. When I finally confessed what I was doing, it became so much easier to protect that time. I’m going to write on Saturday, I’d say, and they respected that. They’d be bad friends if they hadn’t.

2. Decide in advance what you’re willing to let go.

   Time is finite. Unless you already have plenty of free time, which I did not, it is impossible according to the laws of physics to add an additional time-consuming commitment to your plate without letting something else go. Decide in advance what obligations you will release from your life. Otherwise, you will constantly feel torn between everything you want to do and have to do. It will be a cognitive dissonance with no resolution.

   Among many other things, I’ve let go of: an active social life, keeping in touch with people as much as I should, trying to keep my home looking perfect, cooking anything but simple meals, and, frankly, cleaning. There is dog hair everywhere.

   I allow myself four priorities: my job, writing, fertility treatments, and exercise. I am behind on errands and we barely have furniture in our house, let alone a single thing hung on the wall, but that was my choice, and there’s power in that. I don’t take on any other projects, as nice as they may sound.

3. View your time and money as an investment.

   Your time is finite, and it is also a commodity. If you can spend the extra bucks on Instacart to save yourself a two hour trip to the grocery store (this is LA, there is traffic at 2 pm on Saturday), do it. That’s two hours to write. Same for spending money on a Catapult class or freelance editor. If you don’t view that money as an investment in your future, it will never feel worth it. But when you shift to that perspective, that money feels much more well-spent than if you’d bought YET ANOTHER EVERLANE SWEATSUIT LIKE I JUST DID.

4. Go to Airbnbs alone.

   Rent an Airbnb for the weekend and write. But rent it somewhere populated. I once went to the woods alone and did not sleep for two days straight. The people who love you should support you in this.

5. You must want the process, not the result.

   This one is critical. In the 20 Catapult classes I’ve taken, I’ve heard a lot of writers say they are afraid of wasting time working on a novel that never gets published. That’s the wrong way to look at it. You must enjoy the process of writing, of seeing what you can produce, of finding out where a character’s story ends, of getting better.

   I have a friend who loves makeup, and spends hours every day watching makeup tutorials. I hate putting on makeup, but I do it because I’m too self-conscious to go without. I could never be a makeup artist because I don’t love the process. I only want the result. If you want to publish a book, you have to love the process—the equivalent of watching hours of makeup tutorials.

6. Write when the mood strikes.

   Don’t tell my bosses, but I often write between 9 am and 7 pm when I should be working. But if I have an idea or my mind is flowing, I’m devoting that energy into writing no matter what time it is. I’ll make up my work later, whether it is late at night or on the weekend. If you try to compartmentalize your time, you will be forcing creativity when it feels unnatural, and then grow frustrated with yourself when you can’t produce. The trick is to remember that people are not thinking about you as much as you are thinking about you, so it’s likely your boss doesn’t even notice, as long as you get the work done.

7. Small increments matter.

   There is a paragraph in THE LIFESTYLE that I remember writing at 10 pm in bed when I only had five minutes before my husband turned out the lights. Never say to yourself, I only have twenty minutes, so I won’t get anything done anyway. Not true. I actually find small increments are more productive because you’re putting less pressure on yourself to produce. If you’ve got twelve hours to write, you’re likely to procrastinate. If you just have twenty minutes, you dive in. It’s science.

8. You are a student and your subject is your craft.

   You must be on a continuous journey of self-improvement. If you think you’ve got this writing thing nailed, then the investment in your practice won’t feel worth it.

9. Take classes.

   Sign up for writing classes. Deadlines help you stay on track.

10. Moving backwards is moving forwards.

    You’re going to set a lot of deadlines and miss them. You’re going to throw out a lot of crappy pages. You’re going to feel like you’ve accomplished nothing even though it’s been two years. But all writing-adjacent work is still work toward the end goal. Progress is measured not by the quantity of good words, but by the amount of effort you’ve put in. If you keep putting in effort, the writing will get better. The more time you spend working on a project, the more likely it is to get finished. If the words aren’t flowing one day, spend your time doing something adjacent to writing, like outlining, reading, or editing. I’m even considering writing this blog post a step in the right direction :)

These are the rules that I tell myself, but that doesn’t mean my agony days are over. I tell myself these rules because I’m still struggling, still wishing I had more time, still punishing myself for not accomplishing more. I’m even punishing myself for having spent over an hour writing this blog post when I could have been churning out pages. So I’m putting these rules out into the world so that I can support you, and you can support me, by reminding each other that we’re figuring out how to make time for what we love the best way we know how.

You’ve Gotta be Cruel to be Kind, in the Right Measure

One of my less helpful self-editing techniques: being mean to myself.

Revising a novel is a lot like popping a zit. It hurts. It’s gross. You don’t want anyone else to watch you do it. But it’s usually necessary, and everybody has their own method.

Here are a few I’ve tried, some of which have actually worked. Others have severe side effects, like staring out the window for an entire day, filling out several job applications after giving up all of your hopes and dreams of being a writer, and wine spritzers.

The Mean Girls Method

This method involves a red pen, a burn book, and holding your face two inches from the mirror to ask yourself why your pores look like that. You are your own worst bully. You tell yourself you write like a kindergartener, no one will ever want to read this pile of wet mulch, and you might as well bury it in the backyard under all the Old Navy spaghetti straps and platform flip flips you can’t believe you wore in your youth. Pray that no one ever finds it, or you will transfer to a different school, in a different district, in a different state, in a different galaxy.

Every writer knows the Mean Girls Method. I don’t need to teach it to you. You were born with it. And you will never be able to banish the mean girl in your head completely, but—hot take alert—I’m not sure you should.

When I finish a draft, I have a moment of euphoria. It is brief. That’s why I called a moment. That brief moment of euphoria is not the time to send out the draft to every literary agent or magazine in the stratosphere. If it were, no meaningful revision would ever happen. Your euphoric bubble needs to pop so that you have the necessary perspective to do the hard work that comes next—that, no, your draft is not perfect, because no draft is ever perfect. So put a timer on the mean girl and listen to what she has to say for five minutes before uninviting her from your birthday party.

The Save the Cat Method

A look at my Amazon history will reveal that I have ordered an embarrassing number of books about how to write a novel. The 90-Day Novel, The Anatomy of Story, First Draft in 30 Days. I bought books on voice, books on character, books on suspense. I never finished a draft in 30 days, or 90 days, or any amount of days, really. It took years. None of these books are quick fixes that will solve all your writing woes and turn you into Zadie Smith or Alice Munro, but they are not useless either. Every one of these how-to guides provoked a new thought, a new idea, a new strategy, or a new angle that I hadn’t thought of before. But where you really get your money’s worth is on revision.

By far the best one of these how-to-write-a-novel bibles is Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. It describes each stage of the novel—or beat on the beat sheet—in a way that makes sense to everyone who has ever read a book or seen a movie, no MFA required. After I read this book, I wrote down every scene in my book on a notecard. I had nowhere to eat for a week:

Then I organized these cards into each beat on the Save the Cat! beat sheet. For example, there’s a big party in my novel where tensions between friends come to a head and relationships start to unravel. I labeled this scene “the fundraiser” and I was able to put it in the ‘midpoint’ beat of the beat sheet (which you can find if you google it). This strategy revealed that the flow of my second half did not fit into the traditional beat sheet at all. I had way too many scenes, and then a rushed resolution with a neat little bow. Several days of staring at myself forlornly in the mirror and shaking my head at the heavens followed. Eventually I picked out the notecards containing the scenes that did not fit anywhere, thanked them for their service, and put them down the garbage disposal. In other words, I cut them from the draft, and huzzah! They were not missed.

The point is that Save the Cat! will provide you a lens through which to examine your completed project to make sure you hit the right notes and cut the extra stuff. But a strongly worded word of caution: taking the beat sheet too literally will cause you to feel like ants have crawled into your pants, up your neck, and into your hair. You will then want to rip your skin off. Save the Cat! and it’s associated worksheets provide actual word counts, e.g., the Catalyst should happen at word 9,828 in a 90,000 word novel. Like speed limits, this is a suggestion. Okay, not like speed limits. Like the expiration dates on Tylenol. Every novel is different, and if you try to force yours exactly into the prescribed word counts or beats, you will never succeed, and the uniqueness of your novel will suffer.

The Rewrite Method

Open your draft. Move it to the left side of your screen. Open a blank word document, and move it to the right side of your screen. In the blank document, type ‘Chapter 1.’

Now start over.

I am only 10% kidding.

This method is a slow burn. The goal is not to transcribe your draft, the goal is to reexamine it, and when you’re simply re-reading a page that you’ve read a hundred times before, your brain switches into proof-reading mode. It will read a paragraph, and only the most extreme mistakes will jump out at you. But when you are rewriting your entire draft, every word is a choice. Every word must pass a test to make it onto the new page. If that word is not 100% perfect for the action or feeling you’re trying to convey, it’s not worth the energy required to move your fingers across the keyboard to write it down. For me, the test is this hiccup I get in my gut that something is not right. It’s like tripping over an uneven sidewalk that interrupts the auto-pilot of walking just enough that I’m forced to look down. I have trained myself to listen to this feeling. I will not move on to the next sentence until I’ve addressed it. In earlier drafts, my mantra was often ‘it’s fine for now,’ but eventually you run out of ‘nows’ and now is the very last now. If you publish your novel, there will come a time when you can’t make any more changes, so it’s now or never, baby. You might as well have fixed it while you had the chance. I am loathe to admit the number of times that, when I was working in big law, I would see a mistake in a brief and think, I’ll fix it when I’m proofreading. Fast forward to 11:59 pm when I’m trying to file that brief on time and never fixed the period that was trailing after a close paren instead of inside it.

The Rewrite Method is the antithesis of rushing. I know the hunger to finish a draft, the eagerness to be done. Let that feeling motivate you to finish your first draft, but not your second or third or fourth. Those drafts are slow burns. You’ve already hooked up with your first draft in a crashing-down-the-hallway kind of way. This time, enjoy the process and get it right.

Unfortunately, these methods are not for picking and choosing. You gotta hit em all, and then a few others, and then some more after that.

The Book That Distorts Reality

A real query from someone who thinks they’re as special as Shari Lapena.

Not to be dramatic, but The Couple Next Door ruined me.

I mentioned in a previous post that I went through a horror phase not-so-coincidentally timed with the 2016 election. The Couple Next Door, a 2016 international bestseller by Shari Lapena, was on the list. It’s a fast-paced, plot-driven novel of twists and turns. When I finished it, as I usually do, I googled the author. I found this article, and read the following. Disclaimer: Read at your own extreme peril. You will receive reality-bending information that may cause you to question all of your life choices.

On Oct. 27, 2015, at exactly 9 o'clock in the evening, Shari Lapena sent an e-mail to the literary agent Helen Heller. Attached was a .doc file and PDF of a thriller called The Couple Next Door. Along with the manuscript, Lapena included three short paragraphs describing the novel, as well as her bio. "Thank you very much for your consideration," she wrote, "and I look forward to hearing from you."

She didn't have to wait long; Heller wrote back at 11:33 the next morning with a very brief response: "Is there a number I can call you at?"

Heller, the Toronto-based agent for several best-selling suspense writers, including Linwood Barclay and Kelley Armstrong, had read the first third of the novel that morning. "I always look at everything immediately, because it'll take me about a minute to work out if I want to read on or not," explains Heller, who estimates that she turns down 499 out of every 500 submissions she receives. In the case of The Couple Next Door, she says, "I didn't put it down."

On Nov. 1, Heller flew to New York, bringing along the novel's first half-dozen chapters to distribute to publishers. By the time she returned to Toronto on Nov. 6, she says, "every [publishing] house in town was after this book."

IN 14.5 HOURS, LAPENA GOT A TOP AGENT. TEN DAYS LATER, SHE’D SOLD HER NOVEL. IN TWO WEEKS, SHE’D SOLD THE RIGHTS TO 25 COUNTRIES.

Was this how it worked?! If an agent didn’t snap up my novel by the time I woke up the next day, was it garbage? Why have I been working on a pile of garbage for three years!? WHY have I written down all my “ideas” on these stupid notecards?! WHY WAS I EVEN BORN.

Of course, this is every writer’s dream. Helen Heller smelled the money-scented waft of Lapena’s manuscript through the computer and ordered it off the fast food menu. When I finally started querying in February 2020, the moment I clicked Send, I fantasized about receiving my own one-line response: “I love it” or “It’s gonna be a hit!” or “When we can we talk?”

Shari Lapena, you destroyed me. But congratulations on all of your success.

Shari Lapena’s story is not reality. Do not hold yourself to this standard. Many, many famous authors struggled to find representation or sell their first novel. Emily Giffin’s first novel did not sell, and she’s since sold eleven million books worldwide. Harry Potter is the quintessential rejection story. And sixty agents passed on Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa before Hillary Jacobson and a seven-figure deal. These are the stories we need to tell ourselves to prevent tail-spinning into a tequila bottle.

From my writer friends and my obsessive googling of authors I admire, I’ve learned that every writer’s journey to an agent is different. My own journey took five months and twenty-one query letters, some of which I re-read now with extreme eye-rolling. (Whenever an agent used to be a lawyer, I’d write, “We’re both attorneys!” as if never had two lawyers crossed paths before.) And within those five months, I made important revisions based on feedback from agents and the brilliant Chelsea Bieker. So if you queried ten minutes ago and your inbox is still empty, have a shot of tequila and remind yourself that the world only has room for one Shari Lapena.

The Wizard Behind the Curtain

My notebook from a Center for Fiction workshop with the genius Stefan Merrill Block, which I subsequently dropped in water and blow-dried. He later reviewed my manuscript.

It’s a freelance editor!

I assume there is a stigma around freelance editing. I don’t know this for certain, but the secrecy around which authors use freelance editors implies it must be shameful. Authors don’t explicitly thank their freelance editors in the Acknowledgements page of their books. They don’t admit their manuscript has been edited in their query letters. But I refuse to believe that’s because authors don’t use them. I know freelance editors, and someone is paying them.

When a lawyer is applying for a job at a new law firm, they are usually asked to submit a writing sample—a brief they’ve written in a prior case to show off their skill. The reality is that no junior lawyer is filing briefs without edits from a more senior attorney, and when the junior lawyer submits his or her writing sample for a new job, it probably incorporates those edits. This process is not discussed, but it is understood. Freelance editing must be similar.

Sure, there are writers who don’t need it. They were born with novels bursting out of them like sneezes—a little bit of build up and then, ACHOO, brilliance. There are also writers who have studied for years, whether in undergraduate, MFA, PhD, or all of the above, and they’ve learned how to write a novel. But then there’s me, and maybe you, and definitely that guy over there. We have no clue what we’re doing. We’ve got ideas, imagination, desire, and good grades in English. Enter freelance editor.

A freelance editor does not write your book for you. You can pay someone to do that for you, too, but that’s not what I’m talking about. A freelance editor will read your work and provide comments, much like a classmate in a workshop or your friend in a writers’ group, but instead of jotting down some notes on the subway ride there, they will invest as much time as you are willing to pay for. And they are experienced authors and editors whose feedback you should be able to trust (otherwise, why did you hire them?).

I had no idea that freelance editing was a thing I should know about until I took a Center for Fiction workshop, and our teacher said that famous authors (who I will not name because see first paragraph) use them, paying thousands of dollars for the best editors in the biz. They view this as an investment. Write a better book, get paid more money for your book. A year or so later, I reached out to him to ask for more information on freelance editing generally and how it worked. He connected me with his editor-friend at The Finished Thought because he thought she would be a good fit for the novel I was writing. For me, this turned into a life-changing partnership.

At the time, my novel told a story through three different voices. I had been unsuccessfully writing and rewriting the first fifty pages for a year and half, with only an outline of the rest. Once my new friend read the first three chapters, she told me—politely—that one voice was compelling but the other two were not. Ditch them, she said. Go with the one that works. When I started writing only through the voice that I clicked with, the pages flowed. It was like I had this really ugly piece of art my grandmother had given me, and whatever room I hung it in became the ugly room. But then I read Marie Kondo, and finally had a reason to throw it in the garbage. Without her perspective, I don’t know when, or even if, I would have reached that epiphany.

Later, my novel veered into a strange direction. My novel is about marriage, and one day the main character woke up and decided to get divorced. In one paragraph, she got a lawyer, a new apartment, and a new outlook. The first line said something like, “Getting married is all about sex. Getting divorced is all about money.” Not a very good line. You’ve lost the tension, my new friend said. I realized that trading in for a fresh start is good in real life, but it’s not good in fiction. Anytime a character is running away from something, it’s probably a narrative misstep—unless the character is being chased by a murderer, a pack of wolves, or an FBI agent.

Finally, I reached the end, which for me is the hardest part of the novel. If my first draft were a mountain range, it had many peaks and valleys. The main characters fought, then made up and had a nice dinner, then went home and fought again before climbing into a cozy bed and getting a good night’s rest. “No comfortable chair,” my new best friend said. By this she meant that toward the end of the novel, the tension must rise to the height of the stakes you’ve established, and you don’t want to break this tension by giving your character a comfortable chair to sit in and mull their choices over until the very end. (In my second draft, I took this advice far beyond its logical conclusion and wrote an ending involving smashing a shark tank and breaking into Gracie Mansion.)

The point is, the book is still yours, and receiving targeted feedback throughout the process is nothing to be ashamed of.

Here are some amazing writers and teachers I’ve had at Catapult, Sackett Street, and Center for Fiction who offer editing services (hire them!):

https://chelseabieker.com/

https://www.stefanmerrillblock.com/

http://lynnstegerstrong.com/

https://www.heatheraimeeoneill.com/

Catapult also connects writers with freelance editors here: https://catapult.co/c/consultations

Should I Give Up?

Snapshot of the first draft of The Milkman’s Widow, my abandoned crime novel.

If you’re wondering whether to give up on an idea, the answer is probably yes.

I was in a dark place. Could have been the 2016 election, the electrifying fury of Lemonade, or the very existence of Pokemon Go. Or, because I’d just joined the Brooklyn Library and blown through Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, and Ruth Ware. The first line of Dark Places—”I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ”—gutted me. My desire to write something so terrifying and beautiful was indeed as real as an organ. Pour a mug of thunderclouds, steam up the windows, froth the blood, sprinkle a few fingernails, and—yum!—murder latte. I got this in the bag!

Running alone off the main path in Prospect Park one day, I thought, could I get kidnapped right now? Okay, okay, that’s something. Girl gets hit over head and taken! By who? A sister! Why? She’s jealous! But why? Her father likes the other sister better!

This resulted in fifty pages of a lonely sister drinking in bars, pondering her loneliness.

Needs a more interesting setting…1950s! Small town!

And so on and so forth until I was writing a novel about a 1950s schoolteacher named Binnie, searching for her missing daughter named Abigail, who’d snuck out of town to get an illegal abortion and never returned. Quite a detour from my jog in the park, but welcome to my brain.

I wrote and workshopped this novel through two Sackett Street workshops with the talented Lynn Steger Strong and Heather Aimee O’Neill, and then with a writers’ group born out of Heather’s class. I let my husband read it, and he was kind enough to lie. I let my grandma read it, and she sent me a newspaper clipping from 1955 to show me what the 50s were really like.

Was it time to give up on this idea?

If you’re asking this question, the answer is yes. The story that you choose to write into a novel must be one that needs to be told. Asking whether to give up on your idea means you are questioning the point. Writing a novel should feel exhausting, humbling, and terrifying, but never pointless.

Stories need to be told for different reasons. Maybe you need to shine a light on injustice and hypocrisy, maybe your grandfather’s life needs to be memorialized, or maybe your idea is so funny you die laughing thinking about it and need to tell your friends. Whatever the reason, if you’re not compelled to the point of obsession, you won’t survive hundreds if not thousands of hours at the computer, punching out 90,000 words letter by letter. (And unless you’re Zadie Smith, 90,000 words is really 200,000 words or more because you’ve cut and rewritten.)

During a Catapult seminar called Turning Real Life Into Fiction, J. Courtney Sullivan framed her novels as obsessions. (Also here.) She’d visited an abbey where cloistered nuns lived, and became obsessed with them. She couldn’t stop thinking about nuns. She needed to write about them. Her nuns were not tools manufactured for the sake of writing a novel—they were the novel.

So I gave up on Binnie and Abigail, and what a relief. It was an awful novel, and writing had become a joyless, uninspiring slog. I wasn’t obsessed enough with Abigail to kidnap her from Prospect Park, transport her to the 1950s, and keep her locked in a cage in my bedroom while I studied her behavior. Turns out I’m not much of a murder latte gal. But I realized that all great novels are, in a way, crime novels. They are the aftermath of a writer’s insatiable desire to slice open and examine her true obsessions.

Should I Quit My Job?

My office.

Every person with a dream and a day job has at one point considered quitting their job to pursue their passion full time. I wonder whether to take the plunge at least twelve times a day. “Quitting fantasy,” to me, is not cursing out my boss, chucking a printer through a window, and setting my computer on fire. It is calmly walking into his office and saying, “Exciting news! I have written a book that will be published, so I shall not be coming in tomorrow.” And then everyone in the office promises to buy it. As far as fantasies go, it’s G-rated, but it still turns me on.

I have known writers at both ends of the spectrum—those who scribble their novels one sentence at a time during lunch and those who leave their non-writing careers to pursue an MFA or novel idea—and those who land somewhere in the middle with part-time work. If you have saved enough money, or perhaps you have a partner or parent willing to support you, go for it. Life is short. For me, it would not have been a responsible decision, and I am responsible with a capital R. My husband and I both had enough law school debt between us to sink a ship, and he had dreams of his own. And, contrary to what I believed in high school, writers are not rich, magical people who live in cloud castles. (Suzanne Collins and Nora Roberts probably live in cloud castles). They are regular people who don’t make much money. Most writers I know supplement their income with freelance editing, ghost writing, and teaching. Even if my dream became my reality—I sold a novel—I’d probably still be broke. But happy. Happy and broke.

So, I had to find a way to balance my job with my writing. Along the way, two pieces of advice stuck with me:

Treat your job like your benefactor

Renaissance painters needed benefactors and so do you. Unless you are Jo March, you can’t write without a computer, and unless you are Edward Cullen, you need food to function. Treating your job like your benefactor turns resentment into appreciation. You’re spending the majority of your waking hours earning money so that you can spend your weekends and evenings doing what you really love without the electricity shutting off.

Caveat: I do not have children. Writers with full-time jobs and children don’t have the luxury of weekends or evenings. Their job is their benefactor so they can feed their kids and write at 3 o’clock in the morning like Rumaan Alam, who I once heard say during an author talk at Books are Magic that he wrote his first novel while his family slept.

The attitude shift from resentment to appreciation is not easy if, like me, you have a hot and cold relationship with your job. I am a lawyer and I work at a firm. My life was never as extreme as Lindsay Cameron’s novel BIGLAW, but it had its moments. Thankfully, no one treated me like shit and I met great friends, but I did once spend 48 hours straight in the office without sleeping, then drove home (bad idea—do not recommend), thought my dog had purple fur, then hallucinated in the shower. Tricking myself into appreciating a “benefactor” that kept me doped up on unhealthy levels of stress, anxiety, and adrenaline while leaving me little to no time to write felt like a cruel joke. I routinely cried over takeout at my desk.

Treat your writing like your illicit lover

In a one-day workshop with Min Jin Lee at the Center for Fiction, she gave this advice to a room full of mothers, teachers, retirees, scientists, students—all hopeful writers trying to figure out how to live while dreaming. She gave the same advice in a pep talk here. I emailed it to Stefan Merrill Block, an amazing writer and teacher, who said, “Yes, meet your novel in hotel rooms in the middle of the afternoon, in stolen minutes on your coffee break, whatever you need to do to see it to fruition.” My husband would probably agree I’m having an affair with my novel. I send secret emails with ideas, hide my computer screen so he can’t read what I’m typing, and spend every weekend ignoring him while I type like I’m trying to deactivate a bomb. These hours of writing feel precious to me. All week I can’t wait to have them. That sacred feeling also adds an urgency to my writing—every word must count. I wonder whether, if writing was my job instead of my hobby, it would become a slog. Hopefully, I’ll get to find out someday.

Other tidbits:

Read this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/20/late-bloomers-malcolm-gladwell

Join a writing space like this: http://thehatcherypress.com/

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.

Querying Too Early

A real query from someone who didn’t read this blog post!

Guilty as charged.

I queried too early.

In October 2019, I was working on an insane case that ate my soul, my sleep, and all the hours in my day. After the close of fact discovery—a big landmark in litigation—I took off four days to go to a house in Williams, AZ by myself and write with the goal of finishing my first draft. I punched out that last word with gusto and celebrated by drinking wine and running around the living room with my hair on fire.

I know what you’re thinking, and no, I didn’t start querying the next day. But I did send out my first query on February 13, 2020, and it was still too soon. After my first draft was completed, I sent the manuscript to two writer friends and a prior teacher for feedback. I also gave it to my husband. One of these people loves me (I won’t say who) so his feedback was congratulations! and there’s a typo on page 199! I spent the next few months revising based on their edits, but I never forced myself to take a step back and spend some meaningful time away from the story and the characters so that I could come back and examine it with a critical eye. Every writer I have ever spoken to about editing recommends taking at least six weeks away from your manuscript before returning to it for a revision. In On Writing, Stephen King suggests writing with the windows closed (meaning don’t let anyone else see your work until it is finished so that you are writing only for yourself), then putting it in a drawer for six weeks. I heard the advice, I understood the benefit, and still I didn’t do it. I was eager and ready to move forward.

Once I sent out a round of eight queries, I figured there was no point in further revising my manuscript, which caused me to take that six week break I really needed to come back to my manuscript not as its writer, but as its reader. When I did, I was shocked to see how much work it needed. My characters felt blurry, the structure was out of order, and the beginning was a DISASTER. A prologue?! Was I drunk!?

I was humiliated. I pictured the agents laughing mercilessly at my ten page sample. (To be clear, all the agents I have ever spoken to were extremely respectful human beings who would not laugh mercilessly, but I was tailspinning.) So, I wrote off those eight agents and signed up for two Catapult classes (one that, thanks to kismet, focused on fixing those critical first 30 pages.) A couple of times in the months that followed, impatience got the best of me and I queried two agents, telling myself that since it would take them two or three months to review my query, I’d be ready by the time they’d potentially ask to see the full. Of course, this backfired—one of them got back to me within a week asking for the full, and I wasn’t ready. I’m thankful for the harsh wakeup call I got from querying too early, but there are much safer ways to swallow a dose of that particular pill.

You can only query an agent once, and most writers query their top agents first. So, if you query too early, chances are the agent will reject it, and you’ve blown your only shot. How do you know when you’re ready?

Here are my lessons from the school of hard knocks:

It’s been at least six weeks since your last round of edits. And between every round of edits before that, you’ve taken a six-week break.

After those six weeks, you read it again and couldn’t think of a single thing you’d change.

You’ve printed it it out on REAL paper and read it like a book, preferably on a bench in a public park while pretending you bought it at your local bookshop.

You’ve taken a Catapult class on how to write a query letter.

You’ve let at least three other people read it. One of them can be the person who sleeps in your bed, but not all three!

Your manuscript won’t be perfect when you send it out. I bet most writers even read their published books (after six weeks) and find at least a phrase they’d change. But if there’s a little voice in your head telling you more work can be done, listen. It’s probably your main character whispering in your ear. And it’s annoying because you’re excited! I get it. But if she’s not ready, either are you.

Celebrate Your Successes!

Celebrating the night I got an offer of rep with a bottle of champagne and three pastas for myself. And yes, that is my parking ticket. Ya win some, ya lose some.

Success is not the final result, it is every step along the way.

So you want to be a writer. Maybe you dream of writing the #1 New York Times Bestseller, of Idris Elba starring as your lead in the HBO series (so you can fall madly in love), of winning the National Book Award. If you get there, I hope you swim in a pool of champagne and dance with a hundred puppies. But chances are—and I hate to say it—you won’t, because almost nobody does, and that’s okay. There’s so much else to be proud of, and you owe it to yourself to celebrate.

I was always shy—bordering on ashamed—of my desire to write. Blame my Catholic school, which only allowed students to dress out of uniform on career day as a doctor or a lawyer. “What if I wanted to be a starving artist?” I asked a teacher. I don’t remember her answer, but I think it sounded a lot like ‘Saturday detention.’ Because I buried my dreams for so many years, people only knew a non-creative version of me. I was in law school. I studied hard. I argued about Torts. I told my colleagues I wanted to work for the US Attorney and become a law firm partner. So for me, taking that first step toward owning what I really wanted was terrifying and huge. Even my own husband was surprised when I told him I had signed up for a creative writing class. No, I haven’t been hit over the head, I’m not having a crisis, and this isn’t out of the blue, I felt like screaming, this has always been me! THE REAL ME! Admitting to yourself that you want to write, and eventually telling other people, is a therapeutic breakthrough. I did not celebrate this first step, but I wish I had.

The next major hurdle that deserves a bottle of champagne for one is finishing that shitty first draft. No one says it better than Anne Lamott:

“The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, ‘Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?, you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you're supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go -- but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.”

I remember distinctly the moment I finished my first draft. It was October 2019. I was sitting on a couch in a house in Williams, Arizona, where I’d gone for four days by myself to write. I was working on a scene in what I expected to be the last chapter, but I wasn’t sure how the story would end. I typed a line that said, Her friends didn’t need her as much as she needed them, and my head exploded. That was it. I finished! I opened a bottle of wine and called my dearest friend, favorite person, and beautiful writer Crystal Hana Kim. If you ever need someone to cheer you on, call Crystal. She made me feel like I had truly accomplished something miraculous, and I’m so grateful. That night, I drank wine and didn’t worry about how much work remained on the second, third, fourth, fifth, and infinite drafts. It didn’t even matter when I trashed the last three chapters and wrote a new ending because I’d celebrated that blissful moment of completeness.

So began rewrites. For me, these are two-month stretches of intense focus where I open a blank document beside my prior draft and retype every single word, with some new, some deleted. I forget to brush my teeth, don’t change out of my pajamas, drink too much coffee, and stay inside all weekend. I pay my husband, family, and job little attention. Rewrites require humility, acceptance of hard work to come, and acknowledgement that nothing is perfect. Each one feels ceremonial, and I try to mark the occasion with an affirmation, a little prayer to the universe, or a really good glass of wine (you might be sensing a theme with me and wine). Maybe next time, I’ll buy myself a new pair of sweatpants.

Before reaching the more obvious moments to celebrate—getting an offer of representation, selling your novel, and pub day—there’s another huge moment that deserves a party in your honor: sending your first query. If you structured your querying like I did, this is probably your #1 agent, and you are secretly hoping to receive an instant response like Shari Lapena. News flash: you won’t. But this is still huge. You’ve just confessed your love to the kid at school who doesn’t know your name, auditioned for American Idol, taken a naked selfie! You put yourself out there in a terrifying, potentially humiliating, potentially rewarding way. Dance in your kitchen! Or call Crystal! You deserve it after years of hard work to reach that moment.

Writing is about the process. Just like writing a book to get rich or famous will never work, feeling like a failure unless you win the National Book Award will send you to an early grave. Write because you love to write, write for an audience of yourself, and celebrate every word. If anything, it will give you 90,000 excuses to drink wine.