August 5, 2025

How To Be A Resilient Writer

First and floormoose,¹ I have a book that comes out in two weeks. It’s called Lessons in Magic and Disaster and it’s about a witch named Jamie who decides to rescue her mother from depression… by teaching her mother how to do magic. It’s also about the story of Jamie’s queer family, going back to the 1990s. And it’s about queer writers of the 1730s and 1740s, whose work has secret clues about magic and how to deal with scandal.

Lessons in Magic and Disaster is available for pre-order everywhere — but if you pre-order from Green Apple Books, I will sign, personalize and do a doodle. (Please be specific in the comments field about personalization!) Submit your pre-order receipt to get some free goodies!

Also! I am going on book tour, visiting SF, Portland, Chicago, L.A., San Diego, Seattle, and Atlanta. Please please RSVP at these links, so the bookstores know to have enough chairs and books.

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17 Secrets of Being a Resilient Writer

Back in 2018, I visited the Willamette Writers Conference and gave a keynote presentation about how to use creative writing to get through scary times. That keynote eventually became my book Never Say You Can’t Survive. Last weekend, I went back to Willamette and gave another keynote, and I’m so happy to share the text of it with y’all here.

I feel like I am a living example of the thesis of Never Say You Can’t Survive, because I'm publishing a book in a couple of weeks that absolutely helped me to survive a very rough time in my life. And it's full of moments and lines that are about surviving and using stories to survive.

Writing really has been helping me to hold myself together for the past several years — it's one of the things that gives me peace and keeps me fulfilled in the face of political horrors and personal setbacks. And yet? I never thought the bad times would last this long or get this bad.

The full title of the writing advice book that came out of that 2018 Willamette keynote is Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories. And… I keep thinking about that word “through” in the subtitle. It assumes that there is such a thing as a “through” — that eventually, we’ll come out the other end. And I'm no longer quite so sure that is the case. Instead, I think we need to talk about the long haul. The wandering in the wilderness without a clear endpoint in sight.

At the same time, I know a ton of people who are feeling frustrated and challenged by their writing careers. The book industry, and the larger culture industry as a whole, are going through some huge issues. There's a whole territory between failure and success where most of us live most of the time, which means the majority of writers never really feel like we’ve arrived, or crashed into a ditch. Instead, it’s easy to feel like you’re forever struggling to break in. (Or break out.)

So I want to talk about being resilient as an author — in terms of how to keep going when the world just keeps getting scarier. But also in terms of how to keep from burning out on your writing when you don't feel as though you're getting anywhere.

1. Have a writing community
I talk about this a lot, but it's really important for authors not to be isolated, something that can easily happen when you are sitting at a table in front of a computer or a blank notebook trying to turn your brainwaves into imaginary people and events.

You need friends. Writing colleagues. A support system. Community. People who are in it with you. Who can share your joys and setbacks. Having a sense of shared struggle can be really healing and excellent. But also, it's good to understand that you're not the only one dealing with challenges — other people are also in the same swamp trying to bail themselves out.

2. Read. A lot.
Back in 2022, I got hired to be the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post, and it was honestly the best thing that's happened to me in the past few years.

I have to keep tabs on what books are coming soon, and I end up sampling a ton of books, especially books by brand new authors. I’ve found over and over again that there's really no better feeling than discovering a new author, or a new book by a favorite author, that blows my mind and reminds me what writing is capable of. My canon of favorite authors has expanded a lot.

I encourage you to read everything. Recharge your creative brain (and try not to get distracted by jealousy!) Read every type of book in every genre: romance, horror, literary fiction, everything. Every genre has something to teach and will help you expand your toolkit.

There was a time when I wasn't reading much, and it definitely contributed to me getting more burned out and having fewer resources. Anytime I start to feel like there's no point in any of what I do, I find that just sitting down and falling in love with someone else's words is the cure.

3. Stay curious.
Lately, reading the Wikipedia pages of random musicians from the 1970s is saving my biscuits. As I’ve said before, curiosity is in many ways the opposite of despair — stress has a way of shrinking the world down into nothing but simple answers, and the only way to combat it is to keep asking questions.

Curiosity also makes me a better writer, because I uncover nuggets of information that find their way into my writing one way or the other, but also because it just activates my story brain in a whole other way, just reminding myself how strange and unpredictable this world can be, and sometimes imagining how historical events could have turned out very differently. I feel like there is a straight line from learning to creating.

4. Be weird.
Be unpredictable. Rebel against expectations. Don’t get boxed in.

Don’t write what everybody is expecting you to write. Don't create the product that makes sense for your personal brand, when you're really dying to write something totally bizarre and out of left field. Keep everyone guessing.

And on a smaller scale, if there’s a scene that you don’t want to write because it’s boring you — don’t write it. If there's a trope that everyone will expect to happen in your story but you're not into it? Subvert it, or just go in a whole other direction.

Lately, some of the most acclaimed and successful books in SFF have been weird as heck. Which brings me to…

5. Embrace unpredictability
I’m fond of saying that writing is acting, because you have to inhabit your characters’ bodies and minds to understand how they’re going to act in a situation. But writing can also be improv! In other words, letting yourself run with something you weren't expecting and aren't particularly ready for.

And that includes throwing random bombshells into your story to keep yourself off balance. Like Nino Cipri said on Bluesky yesterday, if you get stuck, you can always come up with “nonsense ideas” for what can happen next, like a pterodactyl attack or a musical interlude. Keep yourself curious to see how this is going to play out — you can always take it back later, in revision.

Bonus points if the sudden chaos comes from a member of your supporting cast who hasn't gotten to move the story forward enough. I stumbled into some moments like that in Lessons in Magic and Disaster, especially where Jamie's mother Serena takes the magic that Jamie has been teaching her and uses it for purposes that Jamie couldn't possibly have expected.

To me, the heart of resilience is flexibility and coping with the unexpected. This is hard for writers sometimes, because we get a story in our heads and we know how things are supposed to go. But writing an unpredictable story can help you deal with randomness in the real world, where you never know what publishers or readers might throw at you. Don’t be thrown off course by change — be mercurial and ever-changing.

6. Get over yourself
We’re all trying to build our personal brands and find ways to tell the world that we are the absolute greatest and most beautiful (while also appearing suitably humble.) We have to advocate for ourselves and market ourselves, which means being heavily invested in our own identities as writers.

And yet... you will experience ego death. You will experience setbacks and indignities, and you won’t always be able to call the manager and request a different career. So the people I know who survive in this business are the ones who don't take themselves too seriously — the ones who manage to stand up for themselves but don't obsess about petty flights or minor snafus. The ones who can laugh at themselves when life makes a fool of them.

If you love yourself enough to get upset when your glorious plans blow up in your face, you should also love yourself enough to not want to torture yourself over it or go into catastrophizing mode. That's just not a nice way to treat one of your favorite authors.

7. Remember who you are.
It's exhausting trying to be someone else. And yet, it can be tempting sometimes.

In the book world, it can feel like there’s a ton of pressure to be a different kind of writer, or even a different sort of person. You might feel the need to write whatever’s popular at the moment, or reinvent yourself in the mold of some other person who is getting all the love.

This is one of the drivers of burnout: living and writing inauthentically. If you know you're faking it (and not in a fun "fake it till you make it to overcome imposter syndrome" fashion), then you're more likely to start hating what you're doing and losing interest in your own work.

So while I encourage you to experiment and try new things and push the limits of what you can do with your voice and your craft, I also think it's important to remember who you are and what you do, and to believe in that. It's really all you've got.

8. Don't be afraid to get political
Self-censoring is also going to make you burn out and hate your own work.

I get it. Right now, people are being punished for telling the truth, and the machinery is being put in place to do this on a much larger scale and a much more granular level. We are all going to be facing down the gears of the censorship machine soon enough.

But they cannot silence us all. There are too many of us, and we are too eloquent. So if you find yourself writing something that includes positive representations of trans people, immigrants, Palestinians, or other stigmatized groups, and you realize that this is something you might have written in 2020 that now feels risky — do not back down.

Not just because this is the right thing to do, but because surrendering is a direct rout to your writing being worse and less honest, and an end to your enjoyment of writing.

9. Accept that politics will keep rewriting your book.
You don't get to control what your book is about, because your book is filtered through the minds and hearts of everyone who consumes it — and as our political situation changes, your book will transform because the lens people bring to it will be different.

This has been the case with every book I've ever written — and it's absolutely the case for Lessons in Magic and Disaster. There’s a lot of stuff in LiMaD about transphobia and right-wing influencers that hits a bit harder when I first came up with it back in 2022.

But also, you might think a particular character is utterly lovable, only to find that a ton of readers hate him. Or, even more likely, readers might adore the character you want them to loathe. (Ask Mr. Lovelace.) Sometimes, I’ll get a sense from beta readers that a character isn’t landing the way I hoped, and I will make tweaks to try and address this.

But in general, of all the things you need to let go of control of, how readers perceive your book — especially its politics — is one of the biggest.

10. Don't expect your writing to save the world
James Cameron's Avatar movies contain some of the most blatant environmentalist messaging I've ever seen, and it's ludicrously popular with audiences all over the world. Pretty much everyone has seen the Avatar films and absorbed Cameron’s climate parable. And yet, sadly, Cameron has not yet convinced us to stop trashing our own natural habitat.

I do believe that the world is made of stories, and a good story can help move the world in a more positive direction. It's also true that nobody can make this happen on purpose. So one form of resilience involves letting go of the expectation that you're going to be able to tell a powerful enough story to make people want to be less shitty.

This will allow you to have more fun and stress yourself out less — which ironically will increase the likelihood that your story really will make a difference.

11. Cheat on your current project
This is how I got Lessons in Magic and Disaster. I was frantically writing the third book of my young adult trilogy, but at night I worked on a secret project about a young woman who teaches her mother how to be a witch. It felt like a guilty pleasure, like I was getting away with something. It recharged my batteries.

The weird thing is, when I cheat on a project I’m trying to finish, I’ll often find that I get that project done faster. Nothing makes it harder to finish writing a book than feeling like you have to keep pounding away at it no matter what and you're not allowed to take a break and write something just for fun. I feel like more writers who are up against steep deadlines should try playing hooky and working on something completely different, so they can come back to the time-crunch project with more energy and excitement.

12. Let yourself mourn the setbacks
Listen, I believe in keeping a positive attitude at all times — and I just told you a moment ago not to get to bent out of shape when stuff goes up the spout.

But you have to let yourself mourn. When things go wrong, when your book gets a bad review or you get yet another rejection, you have to let yourself feel it. You can't just bottle it up or pretend that nothing is wrong, because that will drastically reduce your ability to keep going and to feel okay in the long run. Denial and repression are just not healthy, and sometimes it's okay to need a hug or a good cry. You don't have to wallow, but it's important to feel the bad feelings when they arrive.

13. Make fun of it
I already talked about not taking yourself too seriously as a way to roll with shitty times. But also? You don’t always have to take your writing super seriously, especially when you’re writing a first draft. You can get loose and goofy, and always reel it in when you revise.

I always end up adjusting the tone of my fiction after I'm done with a draft or two. I give myself permission to get pretty silly in my first drafts and to revel in how ludicrous and bonkers everything is, because I want to keep laughing as I go through the long slug of writing down a first draft and I know none of this is going to stay anyway. Oftentimes when I revise I will keep whatever fits the tone I've landed on, but also if I have three silly bits and I only have room for one, then I will pick whichever one of the three is funniest or cutest or serves the story best.

14. Don't beat yourself up about productivity
Sometimes it's great to spend a lot of time writing on a regular basis, whether daily or a few times a week, so you can really get absorbed into your story and keep it alive in your mind. It can be fun to make a challenge out of it — sometimes you can push yourself to keep writing a bit more and it's like just biking up that extra hill.

And yet, there is nothing more counterproductive tying your self esteem or your worth as a human being to how many words you put on the page today. And if it gets to a point where you’re mad at yourself, full of tears and recriminations about how much you have gotten done today, then you might actually be hindering your work and bringing yourself closer to burnout.

So if you're enjoying pushing yourself, great — but don't self-flagellate unless you agree in advance to a safeword with yourself.

15. Build nice things into your writing routine
Drink nice tea. Take a long walk. Have a dance break. Eat copious quantities of chocolate. Talk to your cat, or even read some of your work in progress to your cat. Have a writing date with a friend. I find it easier to keep writing when I have a routine, and it's even better if that routine includes fun things that make me happy and put me in a good frame of mind.

16. don't be afraid to poke the wound
It can feel scary and overwhelming to try to write about heavy personal stuff in your own life, or intense things in the world at large. You might feel like nobody wants to deal with anything too emotional or challenging right now because we're all freaked out. But I have to tell you, in writing Lessons in Magic and Disaster I grabbed hold of some live wires to do with family and clearness and healing from trauma and grief, and I found it utterly rewarding to write about. Writing that book saved me in so many ways. And the early response from people who’ve read it so far makes me feel like this paid off — I've heard from so many people that felt better after reading Lessons. I think I ended up with a book that feels joyful and kind. A book about healing.

I feel like sometimes when there's unspeakable darkness that you are afraid to write about, that refusal to face it can lead to more burnout and exhaustion, whereas being alive to it can make you feel alive in other ways. And then you have space for joy!

17. Go ahead, get smutty
This came up while I was working on Lessons in Magic and Disaster. I wrote some extremely cute moments of queer sexuality and extremely consensual BDSM. This made me feel more connected to my characters, and helped me understand a different side of them. I also just had so much fun — I used to write erotica and I missed writing sex into my fiction. And I feel as though the kind of libido that makes a good sexy moment in a story is deeply connected at many levels to the lust for new worlds and new characters that keeps me writing in general. So as much as lot of the advice here has been about not self-censoring or trying to be someone else, I want to extend that to sexytimes writing — if you feel like you want to write some dirty moments, don’t let fear of other people’s hangups stop you.