How to be F---ing Patient

How I've learned the hard way that writing a book is no time to be in a hurry.

The universe, fate, god, whatever you want to call it has spent the last—oh, almost three years teaching me to be fucking patient.

So, you think you know how to write a novel now? You think you’re going to just dash off the first thing you think of, and it’s going to be a book. Haha. No. And not that one either. Or that one. Nope. Nope. Nope-ity nope. Try again. Oh, not bad, but now you need to rewrite half of it… and hurray! It’s a book! Only… my agent more or less says she can’t sell it. She is gentle and kind and supportive and encouraging and everything, but it’s too in-between, neither fish nor fowl, can’t pick a lane, whatever your metaphor is for won’t sell. Haha. Start over.

Finally—finally—I decided to listen to what the universe was trying to tell me.

Slow the fuck down.

And you know what? It’s kind of amazing. I’ve spent two solid months thinking, taking notes, conceptualizing, working through ideas—working a long way through ideas and then trying out other ones—and I want to share a few things that have finally gotten through my thick head.

First: a couple of months is not that long, especially when, for me anyway, a novel takes at least a year to write.

One can be convinced enough that an idea is The One that she spends an entire 4-day, solo writing retreat working out a beat sheet, character studies, and thirty handwritten pages, sure that this is going to be the next book. And one can come home from that writing retreat and realize, no. I can’t write that book. I just don’t want to live in that world for the next year.

And one can again start over. In order for this to be okay, one needs to be patient. Just like you can’t rush bread to rise, you can’t rush an idea to maturity.

My first successful loaf of homemade sourdough. My very enthusiastic starter’s name is Homeslice.

Second: given time, I actually can work through stuck places. For so long, when I hit a place where something wasn’t working, I’d get frustrated, throw the baby out with the bath water, blame myself, start over. I figured, if I’m getting stopped in my progress, it must mean something is wrong with the whole thing, right? Wrong. (Bear with me, all of y’all who are like, Um, Sara? What is wrong with you?) What I’ve realized is, if I just fucking give it time, give myself time to think and ponder and let the pieces rearrange themselves, I can work through that stuck place without giving up all the good stuff.

I’m learning to trust the “this isn’t working” feeling instead of fighting it. This isn’t working? That’s okay. Let’s look at it, think about it, write out some ideas, pace around the kitchen gnawing on cheese sticks with a faraway look in my eyes (or so I imagine; I can’t see them). And you know what happen when I do that? I figure out a way through which leads somewhere even better.

How long is the “time”in “give it time,” you might ask.

For me it’s usually about three days. Sometimes four. Again, not actually very long. Enough time to get over the initial emotional response to new information.

New idea? Yay! Wow! This is genius, amazing, I love it, it’s going to be so good! Three days or so to let that simmer down and things get a lot clearer. Likewise, this isn’t working? Fuck. I suck. This idea sucks. I’m never going to be able to write a book again. I don’t know what I’m doing. I need to start over on something totally different. Three or four days, that settles out too.

And really amazing things happen when you have a few weeks—even a month or two. I wrote about 8K of an idea which I then shelved to do revisions of another manuscript. Then I had another idea, and that first 8K sat there like Sabrina before her makeover and French cooking school (dating myself here). But eventually I came back to it, and was like, Oh. This is good. I could see it with fresh eyes, and yes, that’s what I’m working on now. I’m up to 20K now with a solid synopsis and feeling good about it.

This has all been a stretch, as evidenced by the fact that only now, after ten years of serious writing, have I fully grasped the power of patience. The power is simply that if I give myself time, I give my own abilities a chance to work.

Here are some of my notes-to-self going forward.

Please feel free to think of yourself as “you” if this seems useful.

• When you are starting a new project, give yourself a solid month before you even think about committing to what it’s going to be. The project you start out with might be the one. If you’re excited about an idea, go ahead and work on it, develop it, start writing, act as if it’s the one. But withhold judgment. Keep an open mind. Don’t grab on too hard to any one thing.

• If you hit a place where something isn’t working or the idea suddenly falls flat, sit with it for a while. A few days at least. Step back, reread, write out your thoughts. Just hang out in that uncomfortable uncertainty. Trust that you have the skill and the insight to find the way forward. It might be that there’s something global that’s wrong, and you have to start over. It might be something as small as a rearrangement of scenes, or a different character taking action. You won’t know unless you give yourself time to know.

• If you don’t want to write something, don’t. Instead of forcing yourself forward, trust that your resistance might be telling you something. Again, step back. Allow the thing to emerge that makes you go, Oh yes! That’s exactly what I want to write. Besides, life is too short not to write exactly what you want to write.

• Don’t grab on too hard in the beginning. In fact, don’t grab on too hard ever. Anything can change at any point. Characters can be made older or younger, setting can change, scenes can move around in time, etc. etc. Sure, it’s more efficient if you can work most of this stuff out and not have to go back and change it. But you can always change it. The more you allow the parts of the whole to move freely, the more you will find their optimal relationship to one another.

Shit takes time. You’ve got this. Now go write.

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If you’re looking for a very chill, dedicated group of people to write with

—like, actually put it on the calendar to put your butt in the chair and do the work— try out my other Substack project, No Time to Write Club. Introvert-friendly writing sessions for creatives of all kinds. Real time on Zoom, twice a week, every week, plus some other fun stuff.

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I’ve got two published novels out in the world :)

You can learn more at my LinkTree.