When I wrote the first book in my forthcoming Feast & Famine series, I was a lot less online than I am now. I had yet to download TikTok on my phone, Substack was barely a thing, and for the most part I posted pretty photos of my morning coffee on Instagram and not much else.
While I had an agent, I hadn’t sold a book yet (the book that got me agented died on submission, something I’m always happy to share because hearing that it happened to other authors who eventually did sell a book is what got me through my first two rounds of sub), and I didn’t feel any pressure to be a capital-A Author on the internet.
So when I was plotting, drafting, and rewriting, I was doing it all in relative privacy. Every once in a while I’d demand that my husband drop everything and read my latest chapter to tell me whether or not it sucked. I’d talk cryptically to my friends about “the thing I’m working on.” I’d send my agent the occasional email reassuring her that a manuscript was, in fact, coming her way. But even she didn’t really know what I was doing. It was just me and the characters I was growing to love more every day, living in our own little world.
Nearly three years later, my life is much more public. I make a lot of food content on TikTok, and food and day-to-day life tend to get inextricably entwined. As a consumer of such content, I am less and less interested in yet another faceless person’s cheese pull. I want to feel like I know the person who’s telling me to make X recipe or try whatever restaurant. “Write the story you want to read,” the saying goes. That’s the approach I take to making food videos.
And so my writing life seeps into my eating and cooking life, and it’s no longer possible to keep them separate. Even if I wanted to, it doesn’t make sense. Because a year from now, when Feast & Famine: The Last Great Heir goes on sale, you’re going to be hard-pressed to get me to stop talking about it—even when my mouth is full of pizza.
When I started drafting book two, I expected the process to feel more or less the same as the first one. I’m a fast writer in general, so I figured I’d just go full speed ahead with my carefully planned outline and write through to the end. But the best stories are full of twists and surprises, and when I started running into them, I wasn’t prepared.
I had this image in my mind of being able to effortlessly balance a full-time editorial job, content creation, and writing a new book. I thought I would be able to make it look fun and easy on the internet. But writing isn’t always fun and easy. The scene that made so much sense in your outline sometimes doesn’t work at all when it gets on the page. New characters show up when you don’t expect them, throwing your flawlessly planned act break into chaos.
And sometimes writing simply cannot be balanced with other things. Sometimes a single paragraph requires an entire day of brooding and glaring at the computer screen and taking long walks while listening to the same song on repeat. There’s a reason why novelists in particular have a reputation for being a strange bunch. In order to create a believable world using nothing but words on a page, you have to break from the one in which everyone else lives. Which is kind of terrifying, when you think about it.
In The Hours (my favorite movie of all time) Vanessa Bell tells her young daughter: “Your aunt is a very lucky woman…She has two lives. The life she is living, and the book she is writing.” If you’ve seen the movie, you know she’s talking about Virginia Woolf, and if you haven’t seen the movie, now you have plans for tonight.
It is lucky. I spent six years writing poetry in college and my MFA program. I write articles and essays and video scripts for work almost every day. I’ve written TV pilots and short stories and just about everything else you can do with the English language, apart from a stand-up routine. Nothing compares to the feeling of writing a book. Nothing is as needy, as disruptive, as unruly as a novel. And doing it with one foot in the public space of the internet adds another layer of strangeness to the whole thing.
So instead of trying to package it up into a 30-second video and make it look effortless, every once in a while, in this forum, you’re going to get this. The real talk. Because when I was struggling through my early exercises in writing long form stories, I was desperate to read missives from people who’d survived the expedition into their own creativity. I was especially interested in hearing about the struggles, the failures, the times things didn’t go as planned.
Snack on this:
If you, like me, are always looking for a window into the process of other writers, you should be subscribed to Soman Chainani’s Diary of a Novel. He’s basically giving a play-by-play of what he’s writing post-School for Good and Evil, which is fascinating on multiple levels. What does a writer do after a big blockbuster franchise? Are they a plotter or a pantser or a plotser? It’s candid, and instructive, and just a good read all around. I look forward to it landing in my inbox every week.
Continuing on this week’s theme of “what even is an novel and why,” I give you: Pride & Prejudice: Oops All Marys. I have actually never read Pride & Prejudice because when I was younger I was a contrarian and didn’t like to enjoy things that other people enjoyed, and then I never got around to it. So this revisionist project is my first exposure to the material. If the original is anywhere near as fun as Tim and Carly’s version, maybe I’ll actually read it one of these days.
My Valentine’s Day date night was seeing Sweeney Todd on Broadway. In case you weren’t aware, Sutton Foster is currently playing Mrs. Lovett in a limited engagement, and her particular brand of physical comedy and whimsy brings something to the role I’ve never seen before. If you’re going to be in NYC these next few months, I strongly urge you to try and see it.
And now, everywhere I ate in last week’s video:
Cafe Lyria
Ji Bei Chuan (Albany)
Touchy Coffe (Troy)
Yesfolk Taproom (Troy)
Aria Kabab (Albany)