Build The Book First. Structure It Later. Break Everything. Repeat.
How I write forward when I can’t think straight.
Note: This isn’t the essay I meant to write today. But this is the one that grabbed me — and maybe that’s the point. The essay is doing what the book is doing: arriving out of sequence, but not out of order.
Yes, I’ll continue to hold. It’s morning. I’ve been transferred to a litany of agents, negotiating my student loan payment to anything under $600 a month. It’s either you or my cat’s insulin. And my master’s degree doesn’t save lives, I say to the agent who coos over my chubby tabby cat and offers $19 a month for a year but then, at some point, I’ll have to pay the $600. Because debt will slip under your door and slide into your sheets. It’ll lie next to you while you fall asleep and wake. Still here, it says, past due and fanning your face.
Some days I wake in terror. A mailbox stuffed with IRS notices. We’ve missed your taxes. We’ve missed your $1000 monthly payments. We’ve missed you.
My phone pings with an email. Are you taking on new brand projects? I imagine myself sporting a hazmat suit during client calls. Dodging radiation in the form of their cries — why am I not going viral? —searing through me from the inside out. No, I type back, because doing this work takes a piece of me, a piece I never end up getting back.
But then there’s a first line. It’s electric, and while I’m pleading for lower payments, scrolling emails, watching TikToks about how I can legally dodge student loan payments, I type the line in my notes app before I forget it. The line falls beneath all the others I’ve written — the false starts, the never-quite.
A new book begging to be written if only I could just breathe.
This morning I’m on the bus. I’m not supposed to be, I’m supposed to be home, working on a different version of the essay you’re reading now, but I tell myself just one thrift store, just an hour. I board a bus that rides the length of Sunset Boulevard and glance at the man seated across from me. His body seizes. His movements are sharp, jutting; fingers curl, gripping the air. Body in rigor. At first I think he’s one of many odd people who ride the bus because you get all kinds on the L.A. Metro. People who punch the air, punch themselves, punch others.
But this is different. I open my mouth and shout to the bus driver he’s having a seizure. Stop the bus, stop the bus, others shout. While the driver phones an ambulance a circle forms around the man. We hold him down as blood and spit sputter out of his mouth. I give him water. I lay my hand on his heart and let it rest there. I tell him you’re going to be okay. I repeat this like a sermon.
I hold the man on the bus until the ambulance comes. Holding him reminds me of holding my father.
We’re back on the house on Lincoln Avenue. I’m sixteen. He’s wearing blue jeans a Bugle Boy shirt. I’m getting ready for school and he’s nearly out the door, on his way to work when he pauses. The air stills. I touch his shoulder. You okay? He turns to me, face bone white, mouth pressed so shut no air could squeak through. I inch closer. It’s then his body tightens, curves inward, and he falls to the hardwood floor. Outside, a car alarm blares. Inside is the hum of a fan in my mother’s bedroom.
Books tumble out of my book bag as I kneel down beside him. He quakes — 8.4 on the Richter scale — and I don’t know what to do other than hold him. Grab hold of his arms. Draw him in close. Tell him to breathe. Can he hear me?
Ten minutes later, his body once taut and tense, now relaxes. He rises but can’t speak. His hand glides the length of the bookshelf teaming with figurines of circus animals and pale pink angels with flaxen hair. He fiddles with the cheap ones my mother collects. His sneakers squeak while he walks.
I follow him around the room and ease him back to the couch. You have to rest, I say. He shakes his head, defiant, and rises. All he can think of is work. The walk to the car, the key in the ignition, the smooth wheels of his Jeep on the highway. When he finally speaks, it’s soft, and he tells me he’s fine, just fine, and let’s go because we’ll both be late.
I open my mouth and no sound comes out and we ride in a quiet that fills the car, smothering us.
This is how I write. This is how my stories form. I observe. I hawk. I thread needles and weave tapestries and the books I write come not from outlines, but obsession. A story takes hold of me and I can’t shake it, so my books never start with a first line of a first chapter and oh, the places we will go! No, no, it starts with something real that happens right now, right this moment, something that seizes me and sends me back in time. It may start with a line somewhere in the book, and the line becomes a scene, an essay, a chapter, and away we go.
I am not a disciplined writer. I don’t sit in front of a computer every morning and will words on a page. I know of no muses and think it odd to channel one. I only know that every book I’ve written has come from a maelstrom. The moment when I’m breaking but not yet broken. When money worries loom large. I should be focused on getting another job, making more money, but instead I write. Because I’ve learned to write inside the swing between calm and chaos.
My first book evolved over a lifetime of mourning my mother — a woman before the drugs, the craziness, and all that hurt. My second started after I left a job that had been slowly killing me. I emptied my bank account and a week later found myself in Biarritz, France, in the dead winter, palming sharp barnacles on towering rocks. I stood in front of the sea in a coat and a scarf. The writing came like a torrent and I stood back — not having written anything in four years save for Powerpoint presentations and emails — and gasped because this story was dark, different, confident, and filled with rage.
I send my first chapter to a friend. She writes back: I don’t know what this is, but it’s good. Really good. Keep going. And that’s sometimes how a book starts — with the unknowing. With a feeling that a story has to be told even if you don’t yet know what the story is.
I know with my third book I want it to be a sequel of sorts to my first one — twenty years bookending the two. But it has to be different. I don’t write or think in a linear way, so instead of starting with an outline, I loosely consider how many essays I want to include. Even though it’s a futile exercise, it reminds of what Sylvia Plath said about writing a book: just write 12 chapters where something happens in every chapter. It’s easy to start simple and imagine an arc. What twelve things do you think will happen? Start from there.
For my new book, I copied 15–17 essays I’ve written over the past decade and dumped them in a Word document. Knowing I won’t use all of them but it gives me something to work with.
Then, I read through the essays and map out recurring themes. What do I keep circling? What’s missing? What have I done and what have I learned? I write a lot about loss and grief through a mixture of lyrical writing and dry humor.
I conceived of this new book through a working title: Here Comes the Sun, a marked contrast to my first two books, The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here and Follow Me Into the Dark. This new book is me writing my way out of the dark.
When I step back from the mess of my manuscript, I notice patterns. Fixations, really. They’re not a structure exactly, but they’re the gravitational pulls shaping the book this will become:
Complicated Love: Parents (especially my mother/pop), friends turned family, chosen love that fails to hold. Love, here, is often conditional or painful, but also essential.
Not Belonging and Becoming: I’ve moved through institutions (Fordham, Columbia, work), cities (Brooklyn as a child and adult, Long Island, Los Angeles), families (biological, chosen, abandoned). Always with the tension of wanting to belong and needing to escape.
Memory, Shame, and Voice: I’m building a life back from personal ruin. My work circles trauma — not for spectacle, but for pathos, meaning. I remember what others try to forget. I say the things people don’t want to say.
Survival & Reinvention: Addiction, assault, grief, depression, and collapse as formative essays, followed by relocations, reinventions, and crawling my way out of the dark.
I slot the essays (loosely) under each theme while also considering a larger arc of loss/grief, rebuilding, becoming — a movement from dark to light. This is not an outline, more like building a blueprint for book where dark to light is my north star, on which I’ll later implement a formal structure. Although my brain can’t think or write in a linear way, a book still begs to exist, so I create a process that accommodates who I am as a person and the work I create as a writer.
In the periphery, I’m preparing for structure. By now, you’ve probably realized structure is my Achilles so I do the dirty work of backing into it because structure, especially when I’m starting something new and am not sure where it’s headed, feels stifling. I like to go wherever I please and I can butcher down the road.
I prepare for the cruel process that is structuring a book by reading books by writers better than me. Influential works that hover around similar themes but vary in construction, voice and style. I’ve been at this for so long that now I feel called toward certain books. In this go around, I’m focusing on W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, Joan Didion’s Notes to John, and Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy.
Why Sebald:
Memory as palimpsest: architecture, images, digressions, accumulation. Sebald reminds me of how I think in layers, how grief creeps sideways.
Why Didion:
Didion is a master of repetition and revisiting old memories and linking them to present day moments. Using a direct address as an anchor (the book is structured as a series of journal entries to her husband regarding themes of loss, trauma, addiction, and her daughter Quintana). Pairing how Didion revisits memory and how Sebald views its metamorphosis resonates.
Why Cusk:
Cusk is masterful at autofiction — a memoir that behaves like a novel but takes liberties with the storytelling. I’m exploring autofiction for this new book because it gives me the freedom narrative non-fiction doesn’t.
All three teach me how to shape and shift memory. And from their margins, I begin to shape my own.
Then I begin the essay-by-essay revision. Each piece — essay or chapter — has to be self-contained and fully realized. Grounded in setting, mood, and time. I start with an event, an image, a line. The seizure story triggered a memory, a feeling — the desire to connect this man on a bus to my father on a floor in Long Island. The revisions lead me closer to a structure and more revisions and more days of butchering and breaking and building a new.
That’s the joy of writing a book. It’s riding in a car with the windows down and the stereo turned up. It’s you veering off the road and down a ditch and how you cry and laugh your way out. It’s you being alive and sometimes it’s you allowing yourself to sleep while someone else drives. Writing a book is the ride and the mess and the adventure along the way.
While writing, I have a soundtrack on repeat. It’s a series of songs moving me back and forth in time. How I felt standing on a subway platform listening to The Low End Theory for the first time while on my way to a house that isn’t a home. Or how James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” always, forever, brings me back to a time when my pop’s voice was the loudest and most beautiful sound. Now he’s a hurt that I never saw coming.
I will never think straight. But I can still write forward. Maybe that’s all a book is: writing forward through the mess until it rises up and announces itself, fully fleshed and real. I’m here.
But the money. The bills. The anxiety. They’re always there, specters hovering out of the frame. I could take on new marketing projects. Build brands and studies no one uses or reads. Watch clients set them aside for TikTok influencer campaigns and viral videos that are hollow, empty, devoid of human feeling and connection.
But I could also gouge out my eyes with a fork.
I want the work that pays me to live and breathe alongside my writing. The work needs to feel tactile, human, real. It needs to burrow under the skin. Or, at the very least, it shouldn’t break me. So, I sell clothes on the internet from the quiet of my home. That keeps the bill collectors at bay but the anxiety quietly persists. What if no one’s buying maxi dresses this month? Will I resort to hocking non-vital organs on eBay?
I write personal and craft essays here to pay for my cat’s insulin — a tiny bottle that costs a tidy sum. But money isn’t the only motive. Medium is a place for experimentation and play. I weave the personal and the craft so writers can be in the car with me and dive under the hood.
These essays? They work. They reach people. Even with the craft essay, my book is leaking through. While my readers learn something, they also feel something and they can see the connective tissue between how to build a story and how one is built.
I’m not viral or famous (cue the Greek chorus: But you have 132,000 followers! Oh, if only you knew how few eyes my stories reach without a boost). But I’m alive. I’m in the car with room for one more. Bring the snacks and the songs and I’ll bring the compass, a map. And we’ll all figure out our stories along the way. Break everything. Repeat.
This was originally published on Medium.
"I’m in the car with room for one more. Bring the snacks and the songs and I’ll bring the compass, a map. And we’ll all figure out our stories along the way. Break everything. Repeat."
oh, I AM CALLING SHOTTIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :D