unfinished lines

the book that haunts me.

I set some intentions for the new year and bought myself some notebooks and pens to help see them through. One of those notebooks is dedicated to chronicling the writing of what I hope will become my next novel. I want to keep a record, something to return to whenever I embark on a new game of storytelling and wonder how I might have won it before. The notebook’s primary purpose is not to serve word or page counts, but to keep myself present within this small universe my mind and hands are creating. I’ve been augmenting with notes and threads because ‘I want to be more open about what it means to occupy a liminal space, creatively, where I no longer feel I am leading my creative process, but it is leading me.’

I haven’t written off-contract since 2007 and from this vantage point, I see the distorted tilt of that landscape. In my experience, just before you finish a book, or very soon after finishing one, you’re beholden to the next. By the time your current book releases, publishing is already seasons ahead, relegating you to a destabilizing form of silence only broken by producing the next thing you, and they can, sell.¹ The overwhelming feeling is one of either never arriving or ultimately arriving . . . with the next book. The next book. The next book. The work of one novel’s completion becomes the main impediment to your completion of the other.

I think of that, and how those moments when my writing challenged me to dig more deeply felt like an obstacle to progress but not the progress itself. And though I met those challenges, I wish I had relished the gift of them more and what they were actually offering; the opportunity to grow, an education in and broadening perspective of craft, defining and becoming more defined by my art. To enjoy the act that upholds what you feel so especially called to do, and to make room for feeling the wonder of that calling. It’s jarring how much I interpreted my creativity through the lens and demands of industry. I’m grateful for the privilege of its experience, and what I got to learn that way, along the way, and what it might teach me next. But now, I’m learning—unlearning, relearning—another.

There is no next book. There’s only this one, and it’s one that neither of us are guaranteed.

And how is that going. Some of what January’s notebook pages contain is the repeated sentiment of needing an intensive outline to fully and comfortably inhabit the novel’s voice: January will be about situating myself in this novel . . . need to outline . . . overstuffed backstory . . . need [to] simplify. This turned out not to be the way, but I realized why I thought it would be: the last fifteen years, I developed a certain rigidity to my process in the name of the deadlines I (mostly) met, where my methods relied heavily on what I thought I had to know in order to reach the end. It’s not that exploration and discovery was absent—it could never be, that part is always alive—but I was quick to articulate its borders. It also helped that I was writing a type of character—traumatized young women—whose responses and perspectives were so deeply ingrained, the danger of stepping too far off their path was less pronounced.

With this book everything is new, unfamiliar. To hone in on what it is, I have to be more open to discomfort, to fucking it up in a way I once would have perceived as a failure but now have to embrace as integral. The only way to bridge what you think the manuscript is and what it will become is always in the writing, not the idea of it, and so I exited the trap I’d laid for myself and returned to the words. I did this with such a level of trepidation you’d think we lived in a world where stories are permanently carved in stone. But now, as I write this letter to you, I have a scene that has expanded in an interesting and unanticipated way and last night, I discovered the potential of a well placed em-dash. I cannot express that wonderful moment of true and weird delight when the whole emotional center of that point in the manuscript shifted with punctuation a future copy-editor will no doubt tell me I am using wrong.

Will I finish? Will I finish this book that has haunted me for the last five, going on six, years? And when I finish, will it be published?² Neither of those moments is now and as much as I’m optimistic for both possibilities, I can’t let them define my present relationship to its story. And I have this feeling that it’s making me better, that it is allowing me to remember what I love about being a writer, which is not something I forgot, so much as de-prioritized. The end of writing is one reward, yes, but so is the writing itself. I don’t want to overly romanticize it, but I am making the effort to bring a certain amount of reverence back to my work, because it can be so easily undermined by the pressure of outcomes, by the publishing industry’s sometimes painful metrics of success. What I have and haven’t and can and cannot claim in that space can have no bearing on what I currently claim in this one.

It’s hard to describe the mess of impressions your mind becomes when you write, the story’s increasingly tangled threads, its tightening knots, the overwhelming sense of its everything, the sheer magnitude of that lack of definition. But those moments you outrace the chaos just long enough to look back and see it all a little more clearly? The way the ‘worst’ parts of the writing process are always offering you the chance to be answered by its best? There’s nothing like it. You’ll know it when you feel it. Or: you should know it when you feel it.

And, if you are a writer reading this, I think you should buy a notebook and some nice pens and scribble down the times that you do.

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Elsewhere:

Explore I’m the Girl’s final paperback design. [Instagram]

I revisited the first five titles in my backlist in celebration of their e-book refresh. Find out what was really going on the year of my debut, the year I battled the sophomore slump, the year of the book that killed me twice, the year I said zombies and the year I made hardcover. [Instagram]

Nicole Brinkley

invited me to answer questions for this excellent essay interrogating social media landscapes, how we use the algorithm, and how the algorithm uses us. You can find some of my thoughts on publishing’s general approach, and much more to consider over there. (Relatedly, I wrote two threads in response to Vox’s ‘Everyone’s a sellout’ article, which explores the impact of influencer culture on authors. Here is the first and here is the second.)

Things are in the works for I’m the Girl’s April 16th paperback release. I’m seeing out the end of The Girls era with some special offerings—stay tuned.

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Purchase the paperback edition of The Project.
Purchase I’m the Girl.

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1. A feeling I expressed in 2021 in this Instagram short.

2. Is it good or bad newslettering to invite you into the process of a book that has not yet made itself a promise to you or myself? Let’s find out.