How I Wrote My First Novel at 38

Strike One

I gave up writing after meeting a famous screenwriter when I was 22.

I had always loved reading and writing. As early as second grade, I lost myself in Star Wars spin-off novels, Goosebumps and, to the dismay of my librarian, Stephen King. When I was in fourth grade, I bought a book on creative writing from a Scholastic book fair; a few years later, a seminal book on screenwriting by Syd Field. I was possessed by a damn storytelling demon that instilled in me a mysterious compulsion to write, and I had a prolific period in middle school where I was churning out stories and screenplays. Later, I went to film school to focus on screenwriting and directing.

College ended up being a very dark time for me, and the less I think about it, the better.

I suffered an acute affliction of clinical depression and anxiety my last semester of college, right after I returned from a year abroad in China. I call it ‘The Quicksand.’ Once you get caught in it, it’s hard to get out. I hadn’t experienced such a deep depression since middle school. This time, it was so acute that I was consulting doctors about electroconvulsive therapy. Let’s leave it at that.

When I wasn’t sleeping in twelve hour chunks, I was working on a screenplay for my class and hitting a wall every step of the way. I didn’t know what to write. I might as well have been writing gibberish, as my fingers would type but my brain was like a dried-out well. My classmates were frustrated with me. I was frustrated with myself. My life and future aspirations were circling the drain.

One morning during spring break, I was curled up in a ball underneath a fortress of blankets on my bed. A classmate unexpectedly called me on my cell phone and frantically begged me to come to campus, where the university film club had welcomed three important people in the film world for a Q & A….with nobody in the audience. Every iota of my soul commanded me to decline and hang up, but the urgency in their voice was pitiful. Then something in my mind told me, What if this is an opportunity for you? What if one of those people gives you life-changing advice that will help you? Be an optimist for once!

Clinging to that one last sliver of hope, I hustled toward campus despite the slow-motion tempest roaring between my ears and entered the auditorium, where only a handful of students were there listening to the speakers. One was famous in the horror field; most of the discussion and questions revolved around him. I was there for Screenwriter, whose credits were impressive and who belonged to a veritably royal Hollywood family. Nobody was asking anything practical, and I needed to ask Screenwriter for advice about my current situation. They were barely getting any questions as it was, so I thought they’d appreciate the attention. Then they called on me.

‘What do you do when you’re trying to write but nothing is coming out?’ I asked.

Something in their face changed.

‘What do you mean? I don’t understand your question,’ they asked with a hint of annoyance. I was taken aback by their blunt response and tried to reformulate my already muddled thought process.

‘Like if you’re trying to write a screenplay, but you’ve got writer’s block and don’t know how to overcome that?’

They became even more annoyed.

‘I don’t know what you’re trying to ask me. What do you mean? If you’re a writer, you’ll write.’

And that was that. An uncomfortable silence filled the air. Everybody, including Screenwriter and my classmate who begged me to come, was suddenly staring at me like I was an absolute moron. I was gobsmacked. What about my question was so confusing? I didn’t understand how an innocuous prompt for writing advice from a college student could incite such a surly reply.

The speakers quickly and awkwardly moved on to another question. Filled with both embarrassment and simmering rage, my eyeballs surfing over a rising wave of tears, I skulked shamefully across the row of seats to the exit and left. I had already experienced a string of professional and social humiliations that semester; this was the vivid, rotten cherry on top.

In the middle of my walk home, I had an epiphany. I would quit writing. I would quit all of this creative BS. I was happy I went to that stupid talk because it was the bucket of iced water in the face that I needed. My anguish began to subside, and a tremendous wave of relief flowed through me.

It was the only glint of empowerment I could find at rock bottom; a metaphorical middle finger to Screenwriter and to everybody in that auditorium. They were right: I wasn’t a writer. I was nobody, and I was beating them to the punch by abandoning it all. (This was obviously the toxic mindset of someone with major depressive disorder.)

I graduated and, to this day, try not to look back.

Strike Two

Over a year later, when I was unemployed and living with my parents, I kept getting hit with story ideas and the urge to write them down. It was so invasive to the point that I thought, okay, this time I’m going to do this and make something of myself while I’m housebound. I had Robert McKee’s Story practically memorized, and I thought I had a brilliant idea for a book. At the same time, I was corresponding with a former graduate student from my alma mater who had recently started publishing her novels, one of which made it to a certain celebrity’s prestigious reading list. She told me you have to build the habit of writing every day in the same way you have to build a muscle. (She’s nothing short of an angel on earth; I hope she is happy and well, wherever she is.)

The problem was all I could do was outline obsessively until I thought it was perfect. I would work on my outline instead and wait for inspiration to hit me as I went out on walks. I kept telling everybody I was making progress on the novel when I wasn’t. The difficult truth I pushed into the back of my mind was that I was too afraid to do the dirty, arduous work of writing millions of words that were just going to get rewritten anyway. Having ADHD made things even harder. My thoughts are so rapid, fragmented, and fleeting that it’s impossible to think perfectly clearly or even linearly. I started to suspect I didn’t have the intellectual capacity to produce a book despite my natural inclination to write. Worse, another specter of clinical depression was looming on the horizon.

Then I saw Blue Jasmine in a movie theater and watched unemployed, catastrophically unwell Cate Blanchett’s life fall apart at the seams. While the rest of the audience laughed, I sat frozen in shame and fear because I saw myself and my future in that story. I had to make a radical change before I slipped into that fate. I accepted once again that it wasn’t my calling to be a writer and I needed to get my act together quickly.

I sold my fiction and writing books and went to graduate school with a concrete plan to become a teacher. After years of toiling and teacher training, I finally got my first full-time teaching job during the first year of the Covid pandemic.

Students of mine died. Their parents died. My colleagues disappeared. I watched vulnerable humans fall through the cracks into a bottomless pit.

Additionally, the system of education I had grown up with had become something else entirely in the time since I left high school. I realized that educators were cogs in a relentless, unfeeling machine and that our society now set teachers up to fail, then practically flogged them for failing. An entire group of people with big hearts who wanted to do good for society just thrown to the sharks. My boyfriend saw me turn into a husk of my former self and asked me if I really wanted this for myself. I genuinely loved teaching Chinese and spent years and thousands of dollars of my own money in the pursuit of becoming the best teacher I could be and having the best classroom ever, which was all in vain. Even older teachers warned me to get out while I could. My mother had warned me against becoming a teacher, and it pained me to admit she was right. You’d think a career as unlofty as teaching wouldn’t be so difficult to break into; instead, it felt like I was a Squid Game contestant, except the reward was a meager salary, no control, and no respect.

I left the profession at the end of the school year with a giant hole in my heart.

I tried to learn coding, to get translating jobs, to find another open path in my meandering life journey. All this time, I felt a lack of spark in me. Many of my friends and acquaintances have creative hobbies, and their eyes sparkle with such passion when I watch them at work. The envy I often felt stung. I decided to entertain myself one night by opening up MS Word and giving myself stupid writing prompts like ‘climate change erotica’. Ridiculous as it was, it had been a while since I laughed so hard. More importantly, I had fun. I felt that spark come back.

Then I found pages and notes from the novel I had scrapped last decade. To my great surprise, it was better than I remembered. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but the feeling that I always ended up quitting anyway made me back down.

Around the same time, I saw this big truck driving around my neighborhood, promoting a book series on Amazon. The ‘books’ were twenty pages long and terrible. I’m talking so-bad-it’s-good. I was genuinely embarrassed for the guy — he thought this story was good enough to not only publish for sale, but also plaster ads for it on his vehicle.

It hit me right then and there: Who am I to judge this person? If they can write their crap and shamelessly advertise it, then why don’t I also shamelessly write my crap without worrying about what others think? Especially if I enjoy it?

That’s when I resolved to write and complete my first novel before I turned 40.

Third Time’s a Charm?

I recalled Sweet Grad Student’s advice and acknowledged that if I was going to do this for real this time, I needed to go nuclear on my bad habits.

My first bad habit was the outlining procrastination. I still needed to tinker with my novel’s outline in order to create a solid foundation for the story, but I couldn’t let an obsession with outlining prevent me from writing the story unless I wanted to be stuck in limbo forever. I made a compromise: I would start writing while I also worked on the outline. Outlining is important, particularly for those of us who are neurodivergent, but using it as a way to procrastinate and avoid the dirty, difficult work of writing prose is dangerous.

My second bad habit was not writing every day regardless of whether or not I was ‘feeling it.’ Progress doesn’t care whether you are ‘feeling it’ or not. I picked a time after work every day and on weekend afternoons to get to work.

I started with writing 250 words a day, then 500, then 1000, and gradually I could muster 1500. The first 10-30 minutes of writing were terrifying and agonizing (and still are). But when I persisted and I was 30-40 minutes in, my brain got into the zone (‘Show up for the muse,’ Callie Khouri once said). If I was burned out or too tired, I free wrote a potential synopsis of a scene, beat by beat, or just the dialogue for the scene. Once I did that, it made it easier to write the scene in full the next day, or it even helped me think of a better idea for that scene. That forced me to confront a fear of mine: putting in hours of work on writing a scene, only to trash it anyway. Now I’ve learned I wouldn’t have thought of the better idea without writing the original scene in the first place.

If I was absolutely stuck on a scene and didn’t know what to write, I skipped that point and moved to a later scene I was in the mindset to write. I didn’t read what I wrote. Once a scene was written, I sealed it shut in my mind. If I had thoughts about ways to make it better, I kept a journal of notes for the second draft. I kept trudging forward, no matter what, until I reached the end of my manuscript, which totaled 40,000 words. A 40,000 word manuscript with as many holes as Swiss cheese is still a finished product. A terrible, completed manuscript in your hands is worth more than a thousand good ideas in your head.

I did this on top of a full-time job, the traumatizing hospitalization of my mother, medical problems of my own, a natural disaster that messed up my roof, housework, family obligations, and chronic fatigue. Some writing days were a joy; most were awful. Waking up in the morning and immediately remembering that you are stuck on a problem or hole in your story that you didn’t resolve before you slept and the whole thing basically sucks is a horrible feeling. (The cure for that, I’ve learned, is time….even long stretches of time).

Yet, when I followed Sweet Grad Student’s advice, it changed everything. I had never made it past 5,000 words in my life. 40,000 was monumental for me. Using the same method two and a half years later, I had a manuscript that was 90,000 words and not perfect, but not terrible. I started when I was 35, and now I’m 38. It’s a lonely victory. There’s nobody to throw you a congratulatory party for your incremental achievements in writing. Nobody cares, and why should they? The comfort was in writing itself because, for whatever mysterious reason, my whole life I have felt a need to write, no matter how much I try to resist the urge.

I’m not trying to act like I wrote War and Peace or a Dan Brown bestseller here. I just made a personal dream come true. Also, the calculus of how much money I can make selling this novel vs. how hard I worked on it and how much money I spent on editing and cover art is sobering. It won’t break even. Maybe only five people will read it. Whether people like it or hate it is out of my control. But I did it because my soul needed it, not because I expect a substantial financial return or praise and validation. And that’s the most important thing to know about writing: If you are doing it because you think you’re going to make money or it’s going to give you some kind of social capital to build your self-worth, I would like to direct you to the nearest therapist.

I understand Screenwriter’s answer now. I still hate them with the trembling fury of a stratovolcano, but I’d be remiss if I said they didn’t have a point. If you’re a writer, then write. There is no cure to writer’s block except to move forward in spite of it.

But how did I figure out ‘what’ to write? I confess it is easier to write in my late thirties since my values and beliefs have solidified and I’ve acquired clarity about life itself — a kind of chaotic circus that works in cycles. Inspiration also comes from horrible stuff I see that makes me furious. When I was younger, I was too afraid to write what I really should have been writing because certain things were taboo then. I am no longer afraid. I know what I hate in stories and what I like. I’ve traveled across the world and studied multiple languages. This all helps. Studying Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Persian, and all the Romance languages showed me how language works in different and similar ways across the linguistic and cultural spectrum. Above all, I think the most important thing is to read. Extensively.

Which brings me to my third bad habit: I was never reading enough. I love books, but I am slow at reading, and starting in college I dedicated more time to learning Mandarin and focusing on that for over a decade. My reading skills fell into desuetude, and the fact that I was getting older caught up to me in my thirties and gave me a sort of whiplash illiteracy that weakened my writing and speaking abilities in English. I’ve practically had to reteach myself English. Now I know you’ve got to constantly feed your brain by reading as it begins its slow decline through adulthood.

It is possible to write a novel if you really put your mind to it. Even if you have ADHD and think non-linearly, or you’re a working parent, or you’re seventy years old. And this doesn’t just apply to writing; this can apply to any creative or intellectual hobby. A British translator named Mary Hobson didn’t start learning Russian until she got her Bachelor’s degree when she was sixty, and then got her PhD in the language when she was 74. I’ve heard of people going to medical school in their sixties. I can’t even imagine doing either of those things at my current age. But you are really never too old to do anything.

My sincere hope is that whoever reads this, if anybody reads it at all, may find solace in the certainty of possibility, no matter how much time we have left in our lives.

— — —

GETTING TO THE FINISH LINE OF YOUR FIRST NOVEL

For those of you who don’t want to torture your eyes through my entire tome of a post, here is my playbook for writing my first novel:

1. Outline, but don’t use it as an excuse to avoid writing the story. It’s important that the major plot points of your story adhere to the principles of good dramatic structure and that the wants vs. needs of your characters are established in order to have a smoother writing process. But you can’t let it keep you from getting started. I changed the outline multiple times as I wrote my novel, so it’s okay if it changes while you progress. If you’re a pantser and you want to discover everything by getting straight to the prose, it might take you longer to write and you could get lost.

2. Work every day, even if you’re not feeling it. Like Callie Khouri said, ‘Show up for the muse.’ Obviously, time off is warranted to give your brain a break if you’re truly burned out. Some people don’t have but five or ten minutes in a given day. That’s okay. Use that time anyway. It will take you longer in the end, but set smaller goals for yourself.

3. Don’t stop for obstacles. If you just really can’t get words on paper for a scene, then skip to a part of the scene you feel ready to write, or free write a synopsis of a scene, or just write the dialogue, then expand it the next day. Or move on to a different scene that you feel ready to write. Then go back to the other scene later when you are ready to expand it. A solution will manifest eventually when your subconscious decides. Just don’t kill your own momentum. It was truly liberating to realize that this doesn’t have to be a strictly linear process, which is fantastic given that I’m not a linear-thinking person.

4. Don’t read or edit what you wrote. No matter how much you like it or want to fix it. Seal it in the Disney Vault and move your ass right on down the road. If you come up with ideas to fix or improve what you wrote, make a note of it and revisit it in the second draft.

5. Read, read, read. I know, I know — this advice is old hat. But you don’t realize how quickly things you knew like the back of your hand start to disappear from your mind as you leave your twenties behind. Reading is cerebral maintenance.