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A Writing Life You Can Actually Live

A Writing Life You Can Actually Live

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I believe in writing every day. Sometimes that means a hundred words. Sometimes 2500. Did you hear me say good or great words? No, I didn’t say that. Today, let’s talk about the actual writing life we should achieve.A Writing Life You Can Actually LiveThree proposals, a Vermont retreat, and figuring out the writer I want to become.Before I get started, this week’s download, the writing goals calculator, is available in my resource shop for free. Get the link at Substack or my website. I just turned in three book proposals. One new idea. Two reimagined, tires kicked, engines inspected.And absolutely no pages of an actual story.I need my agents buy-in and I don’t know those people yet. We’re still being introduced. I’ve just stocked piled articles in Newspapers.com, Wikipedia and YouTube Rabbit holes, and the occasional ancient tome on my shelves.But in Vermont—the writers who shared that retreat with me—gave me space to think about what I want my writing life to look like over the next three years. The answer kept coming back to multigenerational stories that tie our present to a vibrant, often hidden past. I want to focus on sisterhoods carrying love, ambition, secrets, and unfinished business across time.Apparently, even after all these 31 books, I’m still asking: Who do I want to be when my writing life grows up?Truthfully, that’s a question that all of us need to ask and keep asking. Heck, it’s the secret to staying young.Everyone’s trying to figure themselves out. Writers do it on the page and in front of an audience.As we figure ourselves out, we ask:What do we want to do?Whom do we want to become?All while balancing the real world: Those other occupations that pay bills. And what about our relationships? Do we have them? Are we keeping them: Family, friendships, peers, romantic and platonic coexistence—all of this makes up our complicated and gloriously messy thing called our lives.Did I mention the money? Most of us need it—unless we’re nepo babies, but sometimes that gift doesn’t work out. We all do need the money.But I digress.I’m not a writer who can sit still. You may have figured that out already. Yet every time I commit to a book idea, I need it to do more than sound interesting. It has to stir something inside me. It has to give me a reason to say: Yes. These are the people, the questions, the history I want to spend the next year or two researching, writing, revising, promoting, and talking about.A proposal can be a few pages. The commitment behind it is considerably larger.As authors, we spend a lot of time worrying about our brands. Some of us are still trying to figure out what that word means when applied to a human being who occasionally writes in pajamas and tiaras.My slightly Type A personality has helped me think about the direction of my work from the beginning. I knew I wanted to tell historical stories. My first avenue was Christian fiction. Then came Regency romances. My work expanded into historical fiction that brings the Caribbean diaspora into view—a history my very Southern American education too often skipped or downplayed. Or obliterated—thanks to United Daughters of Confederacy.What I like to write or read changes as my curiosity grows. Each book has helped me see more clearly what I want to explore in the next.Vermont gave me time to listen to that curiosity without immediately demanding a word count from it.Which brings me to this week’s lesson: Get comfortable in your own writing skin.It’s tempting to want to be the writer who sits down and produces a 80,000-word book in three or four weeks. Sounds enviable, but often we miss the preparation that it took to get there. Some writers I know who work at the speed of light have already spent months deeply studying their subject, developing their characters, and figuring out the story—before sitting and writing.We as voyeurs see the words arriving. We miss the months of work that made it possible.My friends call me a fast writer. We’ll sort of. I can produce a lot of words when I’m sufficiently caffeinated, the research is done, the characters are clear, and I know where the story needs to go.There have also been times when my Type A personality took the wheel and I checked myself into a hotel with room service to crank out ten or twenty thousand words in a day.That habit can get expensive in more ways than hotel bills.Sleep deprivation. Health. Family time. Isolation. Everything leaning out of alignment with that elusive word: balance.Even if I can do this pace, I must consider what it costs me.This week’s writing tool is the word-count chart. Download it. Keep it displayed. It shows how steady effort adds up and gives you a realistic sense of how long a draft might take at your current, realistic pace.A hundred words a day.A thousand words a week. Whatever fits the life you actually have—these numbers help you make a commitment and understand how long it will take ...
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