The One Weird Trick (that doesn't exist) For Finishing A Novel
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
A week ago, right at the deadline, I handed in the full manuscript of Book 3 of the Outside series to my publisher. It will need a couple of rounds of revision like any other book, but it is a book with a beginning, middle, and end and it exists, and I'm happy with many of its elements.
This is a book that took forever and had to have its deadline extended a couple of times, and I want to talk about what that process was like.
I've been pretty open about the fact that I burned out after finishing my PhD. In some ways I think the problem may have started earlier, but in the end of 2018, things coalesced in a certain way. For a few months I simply could not write at all. I would stare at a blank page full of horror and dread and the words would not come. On the occasions when I could force myself to write a few words, I would spring away from the page, revolted, a few sentences later.
As I started to get over the most acute phase of burnout, I discovered that I could write - certain things, at least. But only the most absurd, self-indulgent ones. (I wrote a lot of weird fanfic.) When I tried to write something I could actually publish, it was excruciating and hard. My abilities varied, seemingly at random, by the day: some days I could churn some words out and feel reasonably good. Sometimes it was pulling teeth and I hated it. Sometimes - a lot of the time - I couldn't do it at all.
Whenever I had a writing day that felt okay, I wanted to believe that I'd solved it. Whatever I'd done that day to make the words come out, whatever time or place I'd chosen to do the writing in, that was the right thing to do, and if I did it like that from now on, I'd be okay. But of course it didn't work like that, and the next day I'd be back where I started.
This wasn't how writing had used to feel for me, and I was disturbed by it. At one point, I mentioned it (and the fanfic) to my agent.
"It's okay for it to feel like work," said my agent. "Second books are hard. It's normal for writing under contract to feel more difficult than fanfic."
This is true as far as it goes - but I still felt that something was off. This wasn't what writing was supposed to feel like.
For Book 3, it got worse - not because my burnout was worse, but because I spent 2021 using the spoons that I did have to make major life changes. Breaking up with my nesting partner, buying the house, cleaning up the hoarder piles he left behind after he moved out, restructuring my whole life without him. They were good and important changes and in a lot of ways I was psyched to do them, but there wasn't a lot left over for the difficult work of writing a book. Sometimes it took months to get a single chapter out. And meanwhile, I was on a contract!
I tried various strategies to get around this problem. I tried changing the way I made my schedule, putting the writing higher in my priority list, scolding myself into spending more time on it. I tried making intermediate deadlines and being stern with myself about them. I tried weird gimmicks that I'd come up with such as making up imaginary readers who were enthusiastic about what I was doing. I tried taking the time that I would have spent messing around with a fanfic, and doing the novel in that time instead, trying to trick myself into feeling like they were the same thing. None of this worked well. Sometimes I'd have one good day, and I'd be like aha, the trick works, I've got it solved now, and then I'd be back to pulling teeth the day afterwards.
Nothing really changed for good until maybe early December. That's when I started to put out chapters more reliably all of a sudden. It was starting to feel less like pulling teeth - or when it did, it was increasingly the kind of teeth-pulling that I could get around by psyching myself up a little and being clever with my schedule, in ways that hadn't worked before. I still had to work to make time for the writing, but it was work I could do if I focused.
I found myself speeding up to the rate of a chapter every couple of weeks - and then, as the March 1 deadline loomed, more than that. A couple of chapters a week, in that last frantic month, and they weren’t any shoddier than the others for their speed.
Deadlines have a powerful motivating force, but in my prior state, I'd blown through a couple of deadlines already. I don’t think this was just the looming deadline. I think there was a state that I had to get into before I had any ability to focus on the deadline or to give it what it needed.
I suspect that there was a turning point around late November, at the time I had my birthday party. I remember something felt profound about that, having control over my own space and being secure enough to offer that space to share with my community. But I'm not sure. The world isn't any less fucked up now than it was in the fall, and there aren't fewer stressors in my life. It’s just that something changed - or rather, some change was in the works for a long time, and it finally reached a threshold.
In hindsight my agent was only partway right. Yes, it's normal for writing to feel like work. It’s normal to have to put in some effort and to mark out some time to get your butt in the chair and your hands on the keys. But in these past few months, it's felt like work that I mostly enjoy. It's felt like work I am capable of doing, most days. For a long time, I truly didn't have that.
So here you go - here's the one weird trick, which is not really a trick at all, to finishing a novel:
Get to the stage in your healing process where you’re ready to do it.