First, trick yourself into believing you’re not writing a book at all. If there’s no book, there’s no disaster. Set aside your collection of random notes, diary entries, word vomit. Look out the window and notice a stone-gray pigeon shitting on a stoop. Wish you were that pigeon, with a walnut-sized brain, satisfied with pecking stale breadcrumbs thrown to the wind by lonely human strangers.
Remember that you are in fact a lonely human, a stranger to yourself as evidenced by these paltry pages. Books are your only friends. Survey your shelves, lined with your favorite authors, and feel the hot heat of embarrassment at what you’ve written, how your garbage-words could never stand next to those of your beloveds in literature’s long hall of memory. Berate yourself: Why did you decide to become a writer? When you were in college, your parents suggested guaranteed professions: lawyer, doctor, accountant. Oh, but the unspeakable dread of such drudgery! “Without writing, I would die!” twentysomething you had screamed. You always had a penchant for the dramatic. Perhaps you could have been an actor, another unstable field that relies on an alchemy of luck, talent, and connection.
The next morning, in the diaphanous dawn, open your notebook or turn on your laptop or lug your typewriter to the kitchen table. Resign yourself to your fate: You are, in fact, writing a book, even if it is currently a ruin of misshapen metaphors. Bribe yourself to continue past your self-doubt. Pick your pleasure poison: tropical gummy candies, a lowball of whiskey, a tightly rolled joint, thirty-second clips of ridiculous and fluffy cats. Gorge on your indulgences. Squint at your manuscript and decide: You’ve made enough progress to call it a day.
On Monday, read your work aloud in your most theatrical of voices. On Tuesday, set a goal of writing five hundred words a day. On Wednesday, start an e-mail accountability group with friends. You are used to disappointing yourself, but you refuse to disappoint (or lose face to) others. On Thursday, switch your go-to font or pen to shake loose your visual field. On Friday, figure out a regimen to finish a draft by New Year’s Eve.
All writers, a workshop teacher once said, are made up of equal parts grandiose self-delusion and crippling insecurity. You imagine your body as boneless and bloodless. Rather, you are a human-shaped sack composed of dueling forms: glittery starbursts who lovingly whisper, “You’re a genius!” straight into your brain, and spiky blue-orbed killjoys that scream, “Your writing sucks!” straight into your heart.
In spite of (or perhaps because of) the starbursts and killjoys, you return to the page every day or every week or every month or sporadically in between jobs, until miraculously, you have a first draft.
“The first draft is supposed to be unbearable,” you chant as you read through your work. You mark moments of weak characterization, confusing dialogue, shoddy structure. With each sentence, the spiky blue orbs scream louder. Reach that last period and groan. What have you done?
Spiral with anxiety. You will never finish this book! You will never be a published author! If you are already a published author, you will ruin your standing as a writer of any literary merit! You will never have a good book idea again! Pull up Goodreads reviews of lauded books to make yourself feel better. “Holden Caulfield’s problem is that he’s the biggest phony he knows.” “Co-dependent tree needs to set some f***ing boundaries.” Stop. Realize you started hate-scrolling to find comfort in the folly of others’ opinions about literature, but if these heralded texts can be so handily skewered, how does your manuscript ever stand a chance?
Abandon your notebook or laptop. Take a walk in the nearest park. Count four breaths in, four breaths out. Complain to your therapist. Go to an art gallery, a midnight movie. Eat some buttery, salty popcorn and realize that half your anxiety stems from low blood sugar. Drink some water. You are never hydrated enough. Remind yourself there is more to life than writing. You have a dog/partner/child/parakeet, for goodness’ sake!
Spend time with your beloved dog/partner/child/parakeet. Notice its green-bright feathers rippling in the wind, the elegant curve of its crimson beak. Linger on the pure joy in your child’s face as they blow bubbles in a meadow studded with dandelions. Feel an electric prickling at the base of your neck as you witness such beauty, the hidden humanity around you. Overhear a drop of delicious gossip, spy on a tender moment of touch between two lovers, taste a fresh oyster juiced with lemon. Starbursts, inside your ears, mind, tongue, shouting, “Write this feeling down!”
On your knees, return to the page. Remember that writing is how you process the world, is what feeds you. Return to your disaster of a manuscript, and line by line make it better. Keep going, despite the doubt (and blue-orbed killjoys) telling you to stop.
Crystal Hana Kim is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Stone Home (William Morrow, 2024), which was a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Award, and If You Leave Me (William Morrow, 2018), which was named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications.
Thumbnail credit: Nina Subin