02. Time + Surrender
On trusting the work to meet you if you just continue to show up for it.
There’s an adage for starting business that I’ve repeated to myself a lot: “just don’t die”. Whatever you do, keep swimming. Maybe it’s that the biggest indicator of success is the length of time you can sustain action. I don’t know, but, I think it’s also pretty apt advice for writing a book.
The very first draft of the book I’m working on now started in a Google Doc exaclty seven years ago today. I made a lot of progress, and then I got stuck, frustrated that I couldn’t write it the way I wanted to, feeling confined by the writing software available to me.
So, being a product designer, and lover of shiny new things, I began a side quest to create my dream writing app: First Draft Pro.
It was Covid, everyone else was either making bread or babies. I made a writing app.
I worried for a long time that it was a distraction, that I should have put that energy into writing. But through the process of designing it, building it, and writing resources to market it, I studied writing methodologies and story structure — and I cobbled together an understanding of why my novel wasn’t working.
I tried again. Each time I got closer, but not to the thing I felt I wanted it to be. I’d get stuck after the first act, feeling like I hadn’t set up the right thing, or stuck at the midpoint with too much complexity to knit the second half together.
In a fit of “fuck this” I switched to a different project, but I kept coming back to the skeleton of the book that was haunting me.
High on an annual Buffy-rewatch, I finally decided that slaying is a team sport, and reached out to a book coach. There’s nothing quite like the external pressure of trying to impress a complete stranger!
Today, I reached the mid-point of the current redraft of this project, and I’m so pleased with the shape it’s currently taking. It feels much cleaner, more cohesive and I know what the shape of the next bit of it looks like. I don’t think it’s because this outline was the one, necessarily. This version of the book is still quite different from what I had in my mind originally, but I have learned to be more rigorous about process and less rigorous about output.
Perhaps this would have all been faster if I’d just worked with a coach from the beginning, but also I think that the current iteration of the book was only possible because of the six years of writing and thinking and studying structure that nourished the soil that story is now growing in.
I’m trying to surrender myself to the time that it takes to create from scratch, fighting not to get too caught up in my own ambition to find ways to work more productively, trusting myself to get there if I let go of control. Just showing up on the page, and not letting the novel die.
Credits: Credits: Sentences, illustration & photos by me.