Dear I Have Notes,
I appreciated your post “The Second-Book Problem,” as it describes (more accurately than I care to admit) the situation I’m in. My first book was published in September 2020. It was nonfiction. There was a bit of imposter syndrome. But I had a contract, wrote the book, and the reviews and sales have been good. My publisher wants to know what my next book will be. I don’t want to write another nonfiction book right now; I want to see if I can write fiction for a general audience. However, I have no idea if the story I’m working on is credible, I don’t have a contract or agent, my publisher isn’t interested in fiction, and there are days when my motivation disappears.
I remember reading a Robert Benchley story in which he describes a day in his life as a writer: sitting down at the typewriter in the morning and starting out by typing “The,” staring at the paper, getting up and pouring a cup of coffee, scanning the morning newspaper, staring out the window. He then went to lunch, came back, typed “The hell with it,” and gave up for the day. Do you have days like that? How do you motivate yourself?
— Unmotivated
Dear Unmotivated,
I do have days like that. Sometimes I stick with it; sometimes I need rest, or time to think, and so I walk away. Today I worked for a few hours, but I’ll probably wind up deleting most of what I wrote.
In my case, flagging motivation can be a sign of doubt. What often helps, in those moments, is reminding myself that writing is a practice, one that I maintain in session after session, week after week, and in this way it is not dependent on how I may feel about it. Of course there are ups and downs—on any given day, I might wish that I had, say, 50 percent more inspiration or 75 percent more talent, or wonder whether anyone else will care about the project I’m working on. These feelings are understandable, and I don’t discount them. But writing is, above all, a commitment I’ve made to myself. While the parameters may change, the commitment doesn’t.
You mentioned that you’re trying to write fiction, implying that it’s a departure for you. The fact that you wanted to do this, take this risk in the first place, seems telling. Why are you excited to try it? Why this story? What questions do you have about it, and why are they important to you? Hold on to these things; feed off of your curiosity. You likely won’t know if your story works until you finish it. Can that be something that motivates you? Can you find the wherewithal to keep going when you don’t know if others will ever see promise or value in it? I’m not saying it’s easy—the weight of that question can crush a writer. But it’s a question we all have to face, not just once but over and over.
I’d never suggest that the necessary work and habit forming is all interior, a matter of sheer will—I can trace plenty of the opportunities I’ve had to chance, to privilege. Nor am I dismissing external motivation—sometimes my drive to work does come from a deadline, a contract, the fact that other people rely on me for food and shelter and I need to get paid. Sometimes it’s because I want to have something to share with my writing-accountability group. And sometimes—I won’t lie—it comes from a little treat I’ve promised myself. But my best, most consistent motivation for writing is simply that I want to keep writing. I want to be able to do this for a long time. I know the work won’t sustain me unless I sustain it.
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Dear I Have Notes,
At this point, I accept that the fantasy of a full-time writing life isn’t necessarily a situation where I’d thrive in practice, though I do still dream. But, as someone who works full-time, I’ve started feeling increasingly hesitant about pursuing forms—mostly fiction, especially the longtime dream of a novel—that seem like they’d be best served by the attention, focus, and time permitted by that writer’s-life fantasy. Fiction used to be the primary form I worked in, but now I gravitate toward pitching and writing shorter-form nonfiction—personal essays, book reviews—because they’re easier to finish and fit into the margins of a working life. They allow me to still feel connected to my writing in a way that, I worry, a larger project wouldn’t. Am I just being seduced and distracted by the lure of feeling like I’ve “achieved” something? Is this idea, that some forms require more creative juice than others, a fallacy (and a convenient form of procrastination)? Do you have any advice for carving out space for projects that seem to demand more focus?
— Still Dreaming of That Novel
Dear Still Dreaming,
You’re the only one who can definitively say whether writing nonfiction is more of a distraction or a boon for you. Perhaps it’s not always a clear-cut case, one or the other—your feelings about how you want to divide and devote your energies may shift from day to day, depending on what you’re working on and what you’re most excited about. You sound like a very thoughtful writer, and I assume you aren’t just chasing bylines without purpose or discretion—you’re probably already considering your own process and your immediate and long-term creative goals, and weighing pros and cons before you pitch or take on an assignment. As you know, working on shorter pieces allows you to learn from a range of editors, helps you hone your research and reporting skills, and can often lead to new opportunities. Knowing how much labor goes into freelancing, and how difficult it is to cram into the few hours remaining outside of a separate full-time job, I somehow doubt that you’re publishing essays and literary criticism just to feel as though you’re accomplishing something.
I hope you won’t give up on your dream of writing a novel if that is still important to you. Carving out time in the form of a residency or even just a brief writing leave could help you get started—or maybe you’ll find much-needed encouragement and community in a fiction workshop or class. If you do start working on a novel, for an hour a day or a few hours a week, you may find that sustaining such a project over the long term is actually possible for you. Maybe you will decide to be a bit choosier about the freelance work you undertake, leaving you with more time to focus on a larger work. Maybe, in the future, if not immediately, a more flexible work arrangement will allow you to work longer or more efficiently on your own projects.
I hear that you have limited time for writing outside of working hours, but I’m not sure you need to think about your creative life as a zero-sum game: fiction versus nonfiction, short-term achievement versus long-term fulfillment. Perhaps one genre does require more of your time and “creative juice” than the other. In the end, what matters is that you’re spending the resources you have on the writing that is important to you. Think about what you may need in terms of space, goal setting, conservation of energy, a new routine, etc., in order to work on the projects that matter most to you, and pursue those goals in whatever ways you can. If there’s even one thing you can change, one thing you can do that will bolster or benefit your writing life, do it. Be patient with yourself, and try to trust that you’re capable of focus and growth in whatever time you can find.
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Do you have a question about writing or creative work that you’d like me to answer? You can send it to ihavenotes@theatlantic.com. You can also let me know if there’s anything you’d especially like to see covered in I Have Notes—I would love to hear from you.
And speaking of second books, my next, A Living Remedy, is out on April 4, 2023. I would be so grateful if you wanted to order it (the sooner, the better—preorders are incredibly important!). If you’d like a signed copy, you can preorder one from Loyalty Bookstores, one of my favorite indie bookstores.