What Keeps You Going
You’ve probably noticed that I write a lot about my devotion to certain daily habits: meditation, exercise, fresh air, and so on. I try to get at least a little of each of those things every day. There are days when these boxes don’t get checked, and that’s fine—life happens!—but on those days, I can feel the difference. And if I get several of those days strung together, that’s when I really start to notice it.
The same goes for my daily writing habit. I left my publishing job over three years ago (which is hard to believe), and in those years, I’ve come to discover what works for me. I’ve always been a morning person. I’m one of those people who can’t wait to go to bed because I am genuinely so excited about the cup of coffee that awaits me in the morning. Back when I was working full-time, I typically woke up at 6 a.m. and was at my desk by 6:30 a.m., but these days, blessedly, the mornings are more leisurely. I’m aware of how lucky I am not to be punching a clock, not to have the rhythms of my life dictated by a corporate schedule. That freedom fills me with deep gratitude. And yet too much freedom can drive a person bananas. Or, at least, it can drive this person bananas. And so, at a certain point over the last few years, without really intending for this to happen, I developed a rule for myself: on weekdays between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., I am writing. I am my butt in the chair at the desk, and in doing that, I am erecting a firm barrier between myself and the real world, dropping into the parallel universe of fiction.
There are exceptions to this! Of course. Some days there’s more pressing work that overtakes the writing, fun stuff like filing my 1099s (what’s up, tax season!) and responding to long-neglected emails, but I find this both necessary and weirdly satisfying, like finally getting a stringy piece of food unstuck from your teeth. On Tuesday mornings I work a volunteer shift at a community kitchen, which interrupts those hours, but I treasure that interruption; it fills an important part of my soul. And occasionally I just have to play hooky and have lunch with a friend, because that too fills an important part of my soul. These are all good reasons to miss the writing, and I’ve learned not to feel guilty about them. But if I don’t have a good reason, then I am like a salmon in the springtime, moving instinctively upstream, towards the place where I am genetically programmed to be: at my desk.
As I get ready to sit down circa 11 a.m., I engage in a handful of micro rituals. I don’t consider myself a highly superstitious person. I can point to rational reasons for why I do each of these things, but I also recognize that their value to me has long since transcended rationality. First, I make myself a large pot of tea, which provides me a steady drip of caffeine over the next few hours. Except I don’t actually own a teapot, and besides, teapots don’t keep the tea hot enough, so I brew my tea in a Hydroflask. The insulation in that thing is magical. Too magical, actually, it keeps the tea too hot, so I bring along a small tea cup, which I refill several times over the course of the day. Are you bored yet? Yeah, well, sorry. It took me a long time to perfect these systems and I am determined to share this information with the world!
And then, after I triage any unread emails, I close my email tab. This is probably the most important ritual. If I see a new email come in, I’ll immediately check to see what it is, because I’m a dumb old lab rat like anybody, a junky addicted to that tiny dopamine hit, and if Goop informs me about a sale I will absolutely go read about it and interrupt the flow. And then, lastly, I open a tab with Google maps. I type in the location of whichever scene I’m working on that day, and I stare at the map for several beats, as if those pixels are actually the portal to the parallel universe. I became dependent on this practice when I was writing Our American Friend, where many scenes take place in Paris and Moscow. I needed to constantly remind myself of what a character was near, what route she would take, what view she would have from her window. (I know we so often poo-poo what the internet has wrought, but honestly, without Wikipedia and Google maps, I never could have written this book.) But, weirdly, this practice was also necessary when I was writing scenes set in New York, scenes set in my neighborhood, where I needed no help remembering which street intersects with which avenue. It took on its own meaning, completely detached from necessity.
And then, finally, I’m ready to begin. Some days I’m actually excited to start writing, and I launch right into it, full of energy. But most of the time, I feel a pit of dread in my stomach. I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do it. In that moment I am dangerously aware of the freedom I mentioned above. I could just … not write. No one is holding a gun to my head! No one is making me do this. This, I think, is why I have come to view that allotment of time as sacrosanct, as mostly nonnegotiable. The time matters more, much more, than the word count or page count. Even if I just tinker with what I did the day before; even if I just manage to write one single paragraph, one single sentence; even if I just spend the time making notes to myself, little brainstorms and ideas for future scenes, that’s enough. I show up, and in the act of pressing my finger against the pulse of the manuscript, I insure that the pulse is still there. This is like some voodoo writing version of a watched pot never boils, except in my case, it’s a watched manuscript never dies.
Showing up: this, I have discovered, is the bare minimum, which also means it’s the most important part. It doesn’t have to be elegant or graceful. When I’m finishing a really hard power zone interval on Peloton, sometimes Matt Wilpers tells me to “put a stamp of approval on it” and to “make it look good.” (Matt! I love you! But after seven minutes in zone four, really? Really?) Right now, though, I am telling you the opposite. It doesn’t matter! No one is watching you. No one cares what it looks like. Drag yourself across that finish line if you must. This is both the curse and the blessing of writing a novel. It takes such an absurdly long time, and yet the world is really only going to pay attention to it for a microscopic moment at the very, very, very end of the process. But you see what this means, don’t you? It means that, 99 percent of the time, no one is paying attention to you. No one, except you, gives a shit.
**
The other day, I had a phone call with a girl who is currently a sophomore at my old boarding school on Vancouver Island, part of a career mentorship program that connects students with alumni. She wants to be a writer someday. In the course of our conversation, she asked me what I thought mattered more in a writing career: talent, or luck.
My response was that the thing that matters most, far more than either talent or luck, is hard work. In second place I would rank luck, and in third (quite a distant third, actually) I would rank talent. I don’t mean to underplay the role luck plays, because it plays an enormous role, especially when you consider the structural luck of being born into a certain demographic, a certain family, certain educational opportunities. But I think readers tend to be pretty smart. They can sniff out a fake. So even if you luck your way into your first book being published, if you waste that opportunity, if you don’t sit your butt in that chair and make the most of it, your luck isn’t really going to last.
When I was still at Random House, and I was on that 6 a.m. grind, people sometimes asked me how I motivated myself to get up that early. I had a few answers to this. One was that I knew plenty of people who had it way harder than me, people who got up far earlier for things far more demanding than writing: friends with sleepless infants, friends who worked as doctors or teachers. The other was that, quite simply, I had to. When my alarm went off, and I heaved myself out of bed, the same phrase popped into my head every morning: Time to go milk the cows.
It must be in my blood. My dad grew up on a dairy farm, and I grew up with stories about the farm. One thing I know about cows is that they have to be milked. If you don’t, their udders swell, and this causes them pain. If you decide to sleep in, that decision has consequences. You are causing pain to another living creature. That may be not be your intention, but it’s a consequence nonetheless. Some mornings you slip up. You’re so exhausted you don’t even hear the alarm. It’s okay. It happens. None of us can get it right all of the time. I look back at the books I have written and I know that I could have done a better job. I could have gone deeper. I could have pushed the language past cliche. Sometimes I was frustrated and impatient and I blamed the book for this unhappiness. But it was never, at the root of it, actually the book’s fault. This idea didn’t bust down the barricades of my life, pressing a gun to my head, demanding to be written. I invited the idea inside. I gave it shelter. This wasn’t inevitable; this was a decision, my decision. And when I made that decision, I became responsible for it.
My days may be structured with routine and discipline, and sometimes the routine is so predictable that I almost feel like a robot, a tea-drinking, word-typing, Instagram-scrolling, podcast-listening, walk-taking, email-sending robot—but when I am feeling extra-robotic, and a bit sad about that robotic-ness, that’s when I have to remind myself of the freedom that lies at the core of this whole endeavor. I have chosen this. I don’t have to be doing this. If I ever want to stop, I can just … stop. I don’t mean this to sound negative, or doom-and-gloom. Rather, it’s the potential of change, the potential of loss, which reinvigorates the fierceness of the love I have for this unlikely thing.
In December 2019, in that last holiday season before Covid, my family took a trip to Mass MoCA. In the Jenny Holzer installation, there was this poster. Two years later and I still think about it all the time. The words have burned themselves into my mind. I leave you with this:
