The First Look at my Novel-Writing Process
Three years ago, I’d just completed the most difficult project of my life: Writing a short story every single day for an entire year.
This project forced me to look deep into myself and discover what I really wanted. But the most important thing I discovered wasn’t about myself — it was about the impact a project like this can have on you: I experienced firsthand how a daily practice can rewire your brain to think in a different way. Even greater than that, it set me up for my next project, a novel, which I’ve been working on for the past two and a half years.
Three months after I completed A Story Each Day, I found myself working at a startup: a company my best friend and I co-founded, along with a few other friends of ours. We were all under the age of twenty-five, and I’m not going to waste any time telling you how young, naive, and inexperienced we were. But for all our lack of experience, we were fearless, and we believed we couldn’t fail. We tackled every day with an insane optimism, thinking we could do anything.
However, for all of our optimism, we were still inexperienced, and to make things worse, our eager young identities were wedded to our success. Three months after A Story Each Day, I made a small mistake, and shattered my notions of my ability.
In hindsight, the mistake itself (a small text error in a company newsletter) wasn’t really damaging to our company, and I’m now far enough removed from it that I — along with everyone else in the company — can laugh at it. But with our naive exuberance, our identities were tied to the success of our company: my co-founder snapped at me: “Never do that again.”
But that mistake was the beginning of something bigger: because I’d just spent the last year steeped in the practice of developing a narrative from anything and everything, I immediately turned my feelings of this experience into a narrative. This mistake grew in my mind until I could do nothing else but create a character and let the character deal with this dangerous depth of perfectionism. After work that day, I went home and wrote a half-page of notes with an idea for a story. That story became my next novel, which has gone through three revisions, and is now complete.
Since that day two and a half years ago, I’ve been through an extensive process of researching, writing, collecting feedback, revising, and preparing my novel for submission to literary agents. The process itself has been the most thrilling and exciting project I’ve worked on; given me the opportunity to interview mathematicians, daredevils, and professional stuntmen; and taken me to the heights of a hot air balloon, and a 12-story tower crane. (Pictured below).
This novel never would’ve happened if I hadn’t trained myself to think in narratives. The act of writing a short story every single day for a year prepared a way for me to write this novel. Because you shared with me in the journey of A Story Each Day, I want to invite you to share with me in the journey of bringing my first novel to life.
Over the next four months, I’ll be sharing stories about the development of my novel, and sharing updates as I begin taking my manuscript to literary agents.
I hope you’ll stay tuned.
