The unexpected joy of sh*tting on your own work.

I read a first draft of my new YA novel, and it was a humbling and surprisingly exhilarating experience.

You may have seen this publishing announcement almost a year ago for a new YA novel of mine called 16 Forever. I’m really excited about it, but here is a funny secret: at the time this announcement came out, I hadn’t written that much of it yet! I had a solid outline (well, sort of solid, as you’ll see momentarily) and a start on the draft, though nothing close to a finished work. Which made it pretty surreal when I posted the announcement on Instagram and had people congratulating me on something that didn’t exist yet.

(Sidenote: this, I think, is a tiny example of the casual smoke and mirrors that social media lends itself to and encourages, really. Not that the book announcement was something I wasn’t proud of and thrilled about, or that it was a lie, per se, but the presentation of it felt slightly disingenuous. “Can’t wait to read this!” people commented. “Can’t wait to write it!” I thought.)    

I finished a first draft a few months ago. The book hinges on a fun premise: the main character Carter Cohen gets stuck at age sixteen. Every time he’s about to turn seventeen, he wakes up the next morning at the beginning of sixteen, both physically and mentally, with all of the memories of the past year erased. The world around him keeps moving on, but he literally can’t grow up. The book starts on his sixth loop of this, what should technically be his twenty-second birthday.

Turns out it’s a deceivingly tricky concept to execute! There’s lots of time backstory to account for, plus a main character who has no memory of the past six years. It didn’t help that my outline had only been detailed through the first half. I figured I’d have a more specific sense of what should happen once I wrote to the midway point.

This proved to be…incorrect.

So by the time I finished a draft, I knew there was a lot I liked in there, but I also knew it was a mess that would require a massive rewrite.

When my editor on this book, the great Dave Linker at HarperCollins, got in touch in March after reading, enough time had passed that I thought maybe the book was less of a mess than I remembered.

Incorrect again!

His notes boiled down to “I loved so much of this, especially the first 150 pages, but it really falls apart in the second half.”   

Yeesh.

I mean, no writer wants to hear these words, but I was also relieved. If Dave had said, “It’s all working great! Just a few tweaks and we’ll send it off to copy-edits,” I would’ve been terrified. Because, as much as the lazy part of me wanted to hear that it was already awesome, the rest of me knew the book wasn’t working yet.

So I got all his notes, and we talked about everything, and then came the moment I was both dreading and anticipating:

Time to read what I’d written.

One of the many snippets of Stephen King’s terrific On Writing that’s stuck with me for years is when he advises writers to put a first draft away for at least six weeks before reading it; that way, you come back to it with fresh eyes and can read it almost as if it’s been written by someone else entirely.

It had been more time than that for me and 16 Forever, to the point that I didn’t even remember a lot of what happened in the book.

I was about to be reminded.

As I’ve mentioned already, I derive immense comfort from hearing about other people’s artistic struggles. (Hence my interview series, Making Things is Hard.) Creating can be a lonely business, so when it’s not going well, it’s really nice to hear about it also not going well for people who aren’t you!

That’s why part of this substack will be me giving you peeks behind the curtain into my process, especially the hard parts.

Like this one, where I had to read a first draft that I knew would, like the vast majority of first drafts that have ever existed, have lots of stuff that wasn’t good.

Okay, so I started reading.

And Dave was right; the first half of the book was really fun. It had plenty of issues, but I actually liked it more than I was expecting to.

When I got to the halfway point, though: hoo boy!

Like, it has never been so obvious to me in any drafts of any of my previous books that I was floundering to figure out what should happen next. Reading it felt cringey and horrible and deeply humbling. Like: I gave this to my editor to read??? WHY???

Here’s the comment I wrote in my doc at the end of this chapter.

I was trying to be kind to myself by recognizing there were some funny things happening. But I knew it was a shitstorm.

The next chapter was much worse.

Here’s the thing, though:

As I read more, I remembered that being able to identify what wasn’t working meant that I could FIX it. It’s MY book! I could change all of this!

And suddenly, shitting on my own work became joyful. Freeing. EXCITING. 

And when you’re reading something you wrote, you can be harsh in ways you truly can’t with anybody who is not you. You can really go to town.

This was the start of the next chapter, which was an extended flashback that no one should ever be subjected to.

I don’t know what “dop” is. I think I was just letting those keys fly.

You can feel that I-can-make-it-better hope creeping into this comment:

Then, a minute later:

And then, this sequence:

Ok, and then I seem to have stepped away from the draft mid-chapter for an entire day. So maybe the joy slice of my feelings pie chart was smaller than I’m remembering. Here was my final thought when I returned.

It feels strangely vulnerable to share these comments that I didn’t at all write with the intention of sharing. But I think/hope that maybe this can be somewhat helpful to see. I love the idea that reading your in-progress work can be a playfully cathartic part of the creative process in its own right.

And I will also add that, just as you can be as harsh as you want to about your own stuff, you can also boost yourself up as much as you want, in ways that would definitely feel gross publicly. Like, here is a comment from the first half:

See? I hate AND love my work.

So, please, go forth and celebrate what’s working in your work and joyfully tear apart what isn’t. And then make it better. And better. And better. And better. Even as it’s really hard, remember that it’s usually the hard stuff that’s the most fulfilling. (Slow dopamine!)

Thanks as always for reading. If you’re enjoying this, tell your friends about it! I love that I don’t have any algorithms getting all up in my business here, but it means I’m relying on good ol’ word-of-mouth.

Have a great day, take a walk without your phone (shout-out to Greg Andree, who reminded me this is possible), embrace your flaws, and actively listen during at least one conversation. And go Knicks!