Write, Delete, Rewrite, Repeat

From Zero Words to Published Novel, Part 2

In the long winter of 2020-2021, I wrote the book that became my debut novel, The Slowest Burn. Here’s how I did it:

How to write a good book: get in a room with other writers.

By March 2020, I’d written a whole book on my own and begun another, but now it was time to try writing with other people.

The Northern California Writers’ Retreat was the first time I had spent time with other writers since attending the UVA Young Writers’ Workshop as a teenager. Writing is generally just you in a room with pen and paper or a keyboard, tending to the work each day like a gardener with a new potted plant, watering and checking for bugs, picking off any suckers. Going to the retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains and becoming part of a group of creators was like adding plant food to my watering can - it made things grow that much faster and stronger and healthier. I could bounce ideas for Lark Ascending off my new friends instead of just scribbling them in my notebook, read their work and learn new tricks and techniques for expressing myself.

But as we were tucked up in the mountains, the outside world was screeching to a halt, a car crash of dire newspaper headlines and surreal, nightmarish images. By the time I drove away from the retreat, I was thinking more about stocking up on toilet paper than what I was going to write next.

How to write a good book: Keep pushing, even if it feels like you’re barely moving.

I am writing about my pandemic experience knowing that I was and am extraordinarily privileged - I didn’t have children to supervise, or a full-time job to work at remotely, and I was physically healthy the whole time (I only caught COVID for the first time in May 2022). But in 2020, the world shrunk down to just my house and the streets I walked every afternoon for my stupid mental health, and every time I looked at the news, the world was figuratively and then literally on fire. (I still get unhappy flashbacks about Orange Skies Day.) Suffice to say, it was harder than usual to concentrate.

Eventually I got back to scratching and poking away at Lark Ascending, but the drive to create that had fueled my first book just wasn’t there. The book lacked tension, a driving reason to bring my hero and heroine together in the first place.

But I did another online writing course, which kept me putting words on the page, and it introduced me to an agent. In a repeat of what had happened with I’ll Be Seeing You, she said that I was a great writer, but that my idea wasn’t high-concept enough. (High-concept is creative industry jargon that means that it’s something you can sum up in one or two detailed, action packed sentences.) But then she asked if I had other ideas, and I said the idea that had been itching in my brain for a few months:

“Newly minted celebrity chef and a ghostwriter fall in love while writing a cookbook together?”

And she said, “That one.”

How to write a good book: write a bad book first.

Armed with my shiny new idea and the agent’s encouragement, I signed up for National Novel Writing Month, committing to writing 50,000 words in thirty days. Weekends had no meaning when I couldn’t go outside because of wildfire smoke and COVID, so there wasn’t anything stopping me from writing 1700 words every single day.

The key to making that 1700 goal? The words didn’t need to be perfect words. No, I couldn’t just sit there and write “All work and no play,” etc, but this was not the moment to be worrying about meticulously crafted sentences.

Think of it this way: if a novel is like a huge marble statue, the first draft isn’t the stage where you carve the whole thing from start to finish. The first draft is hiking into the mountains and drilling out the massive block of stone that you are gradually going to carve into something beautiful.

So I drilled and cut and hauled, writing whatever part of the story I felt like that day. And at the end of November, I had the first 60% of a book called Nourish.

It looked more like a screenplay than a novel, with lots of dialogue and not much in the way of interiority or context. The continuity was a disaster because I’d written scenes drastically out of order. But it was something to work with. I kept writing until I finished the whole story in April, then re-read and edited it twice by myself.

How to write a good book: let people you trust read and criticize your bad book, and then rip it up and stitch it back together.

Through high school, college, and grad school, I was a pretty consistent A- student. Here’s what would happen: I’d put off writing the essay or studying for the exam, busy reading for pleasure or hanging out with my friends or messing around on the Internet. Then, at the last possible second, I’d stay up really late or get up appallingly early in the morning to write like a fiend, turn in the work at the last possible second…and get an A-.

This sounds like a brag, but it’s really not. It was good for my GPA, but it was a terrible lesson in developing any kind of discipline long-term, and it made it much harder for me to take any kind of constructive criticism. My work was good enough, wasn’t it? Why did it need to be better?

But to get published, I couldn’t aim for an A- anymore. An agent needed to see 90,000 words of 100%, A+++ work. I needed to edit the hell of it, but more than that, I needed other sets of eyes on it.

I’d previously given Nourish to two friends to read, and they’d cheerled me to finishing the fraft. But now I handed over the book to an experienced author and a professional editor to read and critique. Between the two of them…well, there’s no gentler way to say it: I got my butt kicked. Every weakness, every gap in characterization, every plot hole, it all got pushed under a brutal spotlight. It was so much constructive criticism to take on board that I genuinely couldn’t work on the book for three months. The first few weeks, even looking at their editorial letters made me cringe.

But you know what? Those three months were the breathing room I needed. I had to get through the “how dare you” and “I suck” phases of receiving feedback before I even touched my words. Once I did, I could look at Nourish so much more clearly, and see that it was time to give my manuscript some tough love.

One more metaphor: a major edit can feel like you’ve woven this beautiful tapestry, but something’s not quite right in one section. It’s blurry, not tight enough. But when you pull the thread in that section, something else unravels, and you find yourself pulling out more and more threads, hoping and praying you’re not going to have to start the whole thing over, until you finally reach the point where you can tie off the original problem and work forward again.

So I unraveled it, and studied it, and unraveled some more, started and stopped and restarted…until in February 2022, I had a novel where I was proud of every single word. No holes, no babbling, just Kieran and Ellie fighting, flirting, and falling in love over nine months in the Bay.

Now all I had to do was get an agent…

Stay tuned for Part Three: meeting and signing with my literary agent, then a publisher, and learning how a book goes from a pile of printer paper to something worthy of sitting on a shelf in a store.

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Thank you for reading all the way to the end! Your reward is my current obsession, this brilliant roots/country jam session version of “Deep Elem Blues” by The Grateful Dead.

Some more tidbits:

-Even if you’re not on Instagram, you should sneak a look at my author profile; there are some fun little previews of the book and more thoughts about the publishing process.

-I am still reading, even if I’m not posting reviews! Some of my recent favorites have been the deep-dive Chinese food history Invitation to a Banquet by Fuchsia Dunlop, a delicious compilation of poetic essays, Bite by Bite, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and the superb rivals-to-lovers college basketball romance One on One by Jamie Harrow. (Jamie is also my September 24 publication day twin; please buy our books and fight back against the Sally Rooney publishing-industrial complex!)