The Conditions Are Always Impossible
On Finishing Books
“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” – Doris Lessing
For the past two or three months I’ve resisted writing about my ongoing struggle with chronic illness that doesn’t resolve or get better. I wrote a book about illness. And the jury is still out on whether that was good for my actual body. Lately, I’ve wanted to garden what I actually love which is not “my struggle” (winking at my poor anorexic academia-addled 2014 Sophie reading Knausgaard and thinking it was good medicine) but “my stories”.
The thing that saves my life are stories: writing them and reading them. I have to trust that if writing a book saved my life a little, it may someday save someone else’s. I’m not writing for a market. I’m not writing for accolades. I’m writing myself a ladder out of a lit fire. That lit fire is usually my own increasingly sick body.
This past March after the publication of The Body Is a Doorway I was confronting extremely terrifying health updates. Update on the update: I am still very much in the “ongoing-ness” of health crisis albeit with a much better team of doctors working on helping me strategize how to access a little more nourishment, a little more resilience. And I knew that the best way to keep my spirits and thus my immune system in good shape was to fall in love with a story. So, I started the next book on my list. Yes, I have a list of projects about ten books long! I’m working through it as fast as I can.
On one hand, the conditions were impossible. I was very ill and had trouble navigating screens given my ongoing visual and neurological issues. There were really only two hours in the early morning where I had enough clarity to do anything at all. The rest of each day was a slow slide into physical collapse.
On the other hand, the conditions are always impossible. Living with chronic illness means that one day you have to decide if you will collaborate with limitations that are never going away. I decided to author myself out of a tight corner. Writing has always been a way of creating my white knight, my savior, my soul mate, when I realize, they are never going to arrive in real life.
I started a new romantasy book inspired by Joan of Arc at the beginning of April and put final touches on it this past weekend, with the full moon.
Every day people ask me for writing advice. The most important and simplest advice is this. Just finish it. Make it messy and quick. But get to the finish line. So many people flounder in endless revisions and rewrites of books they never finish. But a rough draft, even if it is terrible, can always be made better. The beloved fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson says something to the effect of “You are probably not a good enough writer to be writing so slowly. You’ll only learn what you do badly if you keep writing and finishing books.” I really agree with this. We learn by writing. I wrote three failed versions of a fantasy novel somewhere between sixth and seventh grade and it taught me so much. There is no writing class as good as the one you can give yourself and it costs no money.
Read. And write. Think about what you like to read. Then try to write something you’d like to read. And finish it.
There are a hundred different ways to write a book. As author V.E. Schwab quips in her great craft podcast, there’s no Write Way! But I thought I’d share some of the things that help me to finish manuscripts.