Reprinted from a Medium post, originally published in September 2021
Last week, I reached a milestone that I’ve been dreaming about my whole life. I finished my first novel.
It’s not really time to celebrate yet — I’m still nowhere close to being done. I completed a third draft, getting the novel to the point where I was happy enough with it to send it off to a developmental editor. She is a former writing teacher who I trust implicitly to treat my precious creation with respect and care, and to tell me objectively what I need to do next.
However, two years ago it was inconceivable that I’d ever reach this point at all. So I’m feeling reflective about how I got here.
I like to tell people that I’ve been working on this novel for 11 years. Which technically is accurate. I had the initial idea, and started the first draft, in 2010. I wrote a few chapters and threw most of the work away. In 2013 I traveled to the location where most of the novel is set, with the intention of researching the place and writing in a house by a lake. The weekend contributed greatly to the story — I got to visit the pearl farm that inspired the book and the nearby small town on which my fictional town is partially based. But the weekend itself ended up being more of a detox from work than a productive retreat. I wrote a couple of chapters, but mostly I napped and watched movies, because that’s what I needed at the time.
The truth is that I spent 11 years putting off starting this novel — because of fear. Unpacking it, the fear was made up of many things. Imposter syndrome. Anxiety. Impatience. Self-criticism. Every time I sat down at the computer to work on the project, I instantly rejected everything that came out of me. It would never be poignant enough, clever enough, rich enough. I would never be Richard Russo or Alice Munro, my writing idols. I would never be worthy of calling myself a novelist.
So instead I filled my time with obligations that took me away from what I genuinely wanted to be doing — writing fiction. I thought about it constantly; I made pacts with myself to sit down and work on my book every weekend; I took long hikes and planned out plot points and character sketches in my head. But instead I devoted my time to other pursuits: big freelance projects, work obligations, volunteer commitments to my daughter’s school.
If I did happen to finally open my long-neglected document and write a page or two, I was so mortified by the results that I would quickly close the doc in shame, without reading the rest of it, and refuse to open it again for months. I deleted old drafts and kept starting over from the beginning.
The novel found a way
In late February 2020, I was in New York for yet another business trip. Since starting my job at Google in 2019, I’d been flying to NYC practically every month. I loved these trips, full of new co-workers, a “home-away-from-home” hotel and routine, and dinners and coffees with friends and family. But I was exhausted, stretched thin, and farther away from my dream of writing a novel than I’d perhaps ever been.
While on that trip, dire news emerged about the spreading COVID-19 virus. The CDC announced coronavirus was becoming a pandemic. My plane ride home was eerie: half the plane was empty, for the first time since I could remember. Within days, everything shut down, and Google put the kibosh on travel. Suddenly, we were working and schooling from home, we were reluctant to go out, and the weeks and months stretched before us with no plans, business travel, or vacations.
Like most people, the sudden stillness and quiet, the long stretch of days that lay ahead of me, tossed me into a sea of anxiety. What was I, without my obligations? Without constant movement and deadlines, the daily stress of commuting, the months stacked around flight arrangements?
I don’t like to say that COVID was the reason I finally wrote my novel — that would give this horrible pandemic, which has wrecked so many lives around the world, too much credit. But as those first weeks played out and we realized the moratorium on life-as-usual wouldn’t end soon, I needed to channel my pent-up energy into something new. In the newly quiet space, my novel, which had been lurking and patiently waiting for this moment, gently reached out and tapped me on the shoulder.
It’s time.
Writing to get better at writing
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron talks about art and creativity as something spiritual. We are merely the channels through which art happens. Our only jobs are to make space to let it come, and to be open and receptive to it when it finally does.
When I decided to finally write my novel, I immediately felt daunted and impatient with myself. How is it that I put this off for so many years? Writing even one page took forever; how would I write three hundred of them? I was so far behind. I would never be able to create a multilayered story that anyone would want to read. It was too much work. I would never be good enough.
Through much trial and error, I found that the only way to make progress was to write every day and stay open to whatever happened. I set half-hour blocks for myself and sat down at the computer; sometimes I wrote a paragraph, and sometimes I wrote two pages. My friend Jen, a prolific novelist, told me: “If you write one page today, it’s one more page than you had yesterday.” Instead of procrastinating, I started to think of the process as incremental. As I got faster, I committed to writing three pages a day.
It took more than a year to finish my first draft. Sitting down to write got easier, because the closer I got to the end, the more I was invested in working on it. I wanted to see what happened.
When I finished the first draft, I privately celebrated, printed the whole thing at FedEx Office (400 pages!), and stuffed it in a drawer for three weeks like a dirty secret. I wanted to read it with fresh eyes, and I dreaded finding out how bad it was. But when I pulled it out, I realized it wasn’t bad at all. It was messy, bloated, and in places a little stream-of-consciousness. It had some plot challenges. But I also noticed that as the book went on, my writing changed. It got tighter, more self-assured. Clearer about where I was going.
This shouldn’t have been an epiphany. With practice, humans improve. Learning an instrument, baking bread, yoga — if I was terrible at it at first, I got better at it with practice. Who would have guessed? The act of writing made me a better writer.
Some things I’ve learned
Once I finally got started, a whole world opened up in front of me. I have stories I want to write, a detective series I want to start, an idea for another contemporary fiction novel already unraveling in my head. But my first creation, The Pearl Farmers, is still in the oven. I can’t walk away from it until it’s fully baked.
I’ve begun to think of writing as a practice, similar to a practice of meditation or exercise. Difficult as it is, even though the novel is off in the editor’s hands now, I’m still trying to get up at 6:00 to write, to keep the momentum going. And I’m putting in place some of the following a-ha’s, knowing I have much more to learn.
I give myself permission to suck.
I learned not to worry about making the writing good. That’s what editing is for. I’ll fix that shit later. I need to be present and let the writing come, staying open to whatever rolls out of me, even if it’s whacko.
This is how I overcame imposter syndrome: by wallowing in my writing’s suckiness. I set out to write the shittiest first draft ever.
I discovered my process.
The writing community talks a lot about “pantsing” and “the snowflake method,” which are two models of writing novels from some popular how-to books. I had no idea what “my way” was, and decided to just sit down with a Google Doc and write the thing from beginning to end. I learned eventually that it was helpful to have a loose structure — basically an outline of what I thought was going to happen — but to stay loose and open to revelations or new directions if they happen. As writers, we’re not entirely in charge of the story. We’re just channeling it.
Learning my personal process removed a lot of the anxiety from writing, because I no longer needed to face down a blank page with endless possibilities. I had a scaffolding to build onto.
I treat the first draft as a mining expedition.
I think of diamonds (appropriate given that my novel is about the jewelry industry) — so much dirt, digging, hard labor, patience, and investment goes into finding a few rocks that may or may not be high-quality enough to turn into anything of value. It’s slow-going, and there’s not always a big payoff, but eventually you can polish the treasures you find into something exquisite.
Thinking this way helped me be less impatient with myself and the writing process. Because I learned I needed to move a lot of earth to reach the payoff.
Find a community (or two or three!).
This was the piece I wasn’t prepared for. I took creative writing classes in college and remember how excruciating the critique process was. But it turns out, it’s really vital. Not only that, but in a community with other writers, I started learning how others are getting published, saw feedback other people were getting from editors and agents, and detected patterns in my own writing that I can eliminate (or accentuate!). I’ve tried a lot of things, including a group of fiction writers at work, the Beta Readers & Critique Partners group on Facebook, and Foster, a community of different kinds of writers committed to giving feedback to each other (which incidentally helped me write this piece!).
I’ve grown so much as a writer, and much of it is through discussion and sharing with other writers. This also helped me escape the cycle of self-criticism — because other writers are there to hold me up and provide constructive (not destructive) feedback.
If it gets hard, take a break.
After so many years of procrastinating and playing mind games with myself about writing, sometimes it’s still a mental challenge. I get down on myself, I hate everything I write, I start to panic that what I’m doing is worthless. I’ve learned that the best way to get through these periods is to walk away for a little while. Get some rest. Watch a TV show. Take a long walk.
Usually within a day or two I find that the book is calling to me, I have renewed energy, and I’m excited to keep going.
The permission to take a break has actually kept me moving forward. Every time I gifted myself a respite from the book, I recharged enough to get back to it with fresh ideas and new enthusiasm.
I’m hoping to keep documenting this journey here — and would love to hear from other writers who are interested in sharing what they’ve learned along the way.
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