Set a goal to write five hundred words a day, three days a week, even if they’re dogshit. Be really good at this for a month. Not the writing itself—again, that’s dogshit. Your word count though. Your word count cooks. You’re at five thousand words, six thousand words, seven thousand words. What is your novel about? Fuck knows! It doesn’t matter. You’re at eight thousand words, and this is just a first draft, and esoteric concepts like “plot” and “character development” are a problem for Future You.
Click on a push notification about congressional Republicans threatening to dismantle lifesaving infrastructure in your line of work. Ghouls! Pitch an essay about this and miss your word count that day, and then the whole week, because you’re too enraged to focus on your novel, and also you have a seven-month-old who still nurses at night, and even though her birth split your brain in half, such that you can generally hold two unrelated thoughts at once, it turns out this only works if one of those thoughts is about her.
During the 4 AM feeds, study momfluencers on Instagram until your eyes feel like hard-boiled eggs. Bookmark videos about two-ingredient infant meals (it’s always egg and banana) and how to get your pelvic floor to forgive you. You will never look at these videos again. Feel more hungover in the mornings than drinking has ever made you feel, such that you couldn’t write your novel even at gunpoint. Think about how congressional Republicans are holding the health of hundreds of millions of people at gunpoint, and spend months going back and forth with an editor interested in running your essay about this. The essay doesn’t run.
Increase your word-count goal to five hundred words a day, five days a week. Check TikTok, where a hot bisexual who takes the same SSRI as you has listed two hundred of her favorite books in your exact sub-sub-subgenre. Your first novel isn’t one of them. Check the platform formerly known as Twitter, where a National Book Award–winning novelist is arguing with a fifteen-year-old over whether free speech is dead. Screenshot and send to your group chat.
Eke out a forty-six-thousand-word novel draft so humiliating you don’t reread it for a full year. It’s 2025, and you’ve stopped breastfeeding, and your pelvic floor has mostly forgiven you. Tell a friend that rereading the draft feels like rawdogging labor. Not that you’d know—you got the epidural as soon as the contractions got moderately uncomfortable, and similarly you can handle about twenty minutes of your draft a day before thinking about the quantum physics video you saw in eighth grade about how, if you try to walk through a wall for an infinite number of years, there’s a non-zero chance you’ll succeed, and maybe you used up that chance with your first novel and will now spend eternity writing dreck.
In college you hosted end-of-semester Everything Must Go parties, in which you and your roommates cooked everything left in the fridge. The pièce de resistance was a fried rice that always came out decent despite its dubious components. In a similar move, dump all the nonsense you can’t stop looking at online into your novel draft. Your online obsessions are your offline obsessions, and sometimes it helps to put the thing that’s stopping you from writing your book into your book. Nothing is too lowbrow (take it from me, someone whose first novel included a character who maybe jerks off to videos of birds hatching). Cover your eyes and edit through the space between your fingers if you have to. Twenty minutes a day, five days a week. It’ll feel both glacial and unrelenting. You can revise a whole novel this way. You can, eventually, share it with some trusted friends. Maybe it’ll be decent; maybe it’ll give them food poisoning. They’re willing to take the risk. Are you?
Ruth Madievsky is the author of the national best-selling novel All-Night Pharmacy (Catapult, 2023), winner of the 2024 California Book Award for First Fiction. Her work appears in the Cut, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere.
Thumbnail credit: Adam F. Phillips