On Starting Over

You don’t have to know what a story means to know it needs telling

I don’t know how many times I’ve printed it out, but I’d guess at least half a dozen: the manuscript I’ve been “writing” since 2020. (Scare quotes around the verb are warranted when the file’s last modified date is always a month or more past.)

But in November, I printed it out again—or rather, I put in the online order for it to be printed. I paid my $32.68 (noticing the steep inflation in the per-page price, which totaled to closer to $20 two years ago) and drove the seven minutes to FedEx where it was waiting for me.

I pried open the lid of yet another sharp-edged cardboard box, the all-caps title and my full name freshly slashed there across the cover page like an insult.

The book—or what I’d come to think of as the goddamn book. A cursory flip through its pages confirmed that, yep! I still absolutely hated it. So I let it marinate on my desk, its open-faced box a punishment.

How could I call myself a writer?

People look at you funny sometimes when you introduce yourself that way. More than once I’ve stood on the other side of a firm handshake and a confused look.

A writer, how cool! But how do you actually, you know, make money? my new acquaintance will ask.

Honestly: fair enough.

The reality of the answer is a pastiche that doesn’t fit well into small talk. Most of my paid work is actually in copy—um, content marketing? Are you familiar?

They are often not familiar. I spend the next five minutes hand-waving the work I do to pay my rent and playing up the creative writing that probably never will—which is the work I actually identify with.

A book is one of the main ways to make the word writer sound like a career rather than a hobby. (An article in a major outlet can also work, and I am lucky enough to have a couple of those—though many writers pen such articles in part to fish for an agent, i.e., to build a pathway to publish a book.)

It’s really not about money. Every author knows book-writing is more gamble than reliably gainful. Your manuscript might sell for $50,000—or $5,000, depending on who agrees to publish it. In other words, it can pay the rent (or even the down payment), but you might not want to bet on it.

But still: the appearance of your name on the local bookstore shelves makes your status as a writer serious. And my name was just on this piece of printer paper from FedEx, the cheapest stock they had available.

I let it sit there and torture me for a week. Then two, then three.

In the meantime, I ended—again—a relationship that had begun three years before. I’d met him only days before I’d finished this now-stagnant version of the manuscript.

This is a starting place, I told him. We’d tried and failed to disentangle so many times already.

Sometimes it’s not the right thing, starting over. Sometimes you need to learn when it’s time to table something for good, to grope toward something you can’t yet imagine.

I was thinking about that—what I might grope for, and how—when I got the email. Pushcart Nomination, read the subject line. I assumed the body would hold a list of other writers’ names.

Instead, it was news of my own nomination—specifically for the essay that served as the first chapter of the now-stagnant manuscript.

There’s a decent amount of talk these days, at least in my well-therapized circles, of the dangers of over-relying on external validation. Of course we all want to be recognized and praised, but the real magic happens when we can provide our own affirmation.

It sounds nice, to be able to produce my own internal validation the way a plant photosynthesizes its food, no input but water and light needed. At this point I’ve been in therapy for damn near five solid years, with plenty of shorter forays before that.

I’ve gotten better. But writing is such a weird, lonely art form. You could spend thousands of hours, whole years, wrestling with a manuscript—even an essay. Until someone else reads it, it’s just you scattered across the page, a convoluted mirror.

In such an isolating practice, external validation can be more than a nice bonus. Sometimes, it’s the fuel required to push a stalled train back to rolling.

A few days later, I sat in the co-working space I share with a dozen brilliant women writers—many of whom are on their second or third book. (One thing I’ve learned in their presence, though I can’t quite tell yet if it’s a comfort: the trepidation around book-writing doesn’t pass just because you’ve had one published.)

I looked into the blank face of a new document I’d opened on my laptop. At the top, I typed, What is [book title] about?

I scrawled a few circuitous paragraphs—it made sense I didn’t have a simple answer. If I did, there wouldn’t be a book to write.

Still, I felt I was onto something. I opened another new document.

What could a new outline look like? Simply using the conditional tense, I learned, somehow made the whole thing less scary.

You don’t have to know what a story means, exactly, to know it needs telling.

The next day, I opened another new document. I simply started.

In the weeks since then, I’ve worked on the book almost every day. My goal is 500 words each morning, which some days feels a struggle. Others, I find I’ve poured out double that number before my coffee has cooled. The now-stagnant manuscript? I tipped it into the recycling bin, bidding adieu to my thirty-two dollars.

It’s like driving a car on a darkened highway or building a house: scene by scene, mile by mile, brick by brick. You don’t have to see the whole thing, yet, to know its shape is in you.

It is daunting to be back at the beginning of a project I began before I turned 30. And it is daunting to be single—again—at 35.

And also, it took every word of writing and relating I’ve experienced to get me to here and now. Nothing we try whole-heartedly can be a failure.

Perhaps it’s an obvious choice for a January newsletter: the relief of the fresh beginning. But the best part is, you don’t have to wait for the New Year. You can just open a new draft and start over, any old day you want.