We’re Writing a Book

My friend Andrea and I announced some big news last week: We’ve signed a book contract with Bethany House, a division of Baker Publishing Group.

This means that for the next year or so, we’ll be up to our eyeballs in the writing process, where every sentence begins as a dream and ends covered in comments from three editors.

Thankfully, we’ll be working with the incomparable Jennifer Dukes Lee, an accomplished author and acquisitions editor who will help keep us on track—or gently redirect us when Chapter Six becomes a 900-word meditation on elementary school pickup lines.

Andrea and I are both published authors, but neither of us has ever written a book with another person.

This is the ultimate group project.

There will be shared documents.

There will be deadlines.

There will almost certainly be a moment when one of us says, “I thought you were doing that part,” and the other one quietly closes her laptop and walks into the sea.

We invite you to come along.

Bring snacks.

What’s the book about?

I’m so glad you asked, because otherwise this would be a very confusing announcement.

We’re writing the book we wish someone had handed us years ago: a witty, practical guide to making and keeping friends in a world where no one has time and everyone is tired.

We know what it’s like to feel deeply lonely and wonder what friendship is supposed to look like in the middle of busy motherhood.

Because making friends as an adult is hard.

Making friends as a mother can feel like coordinating a NATO summit, except everyone has volleyball practice and someone needs to be picked up from orthodontics.

We want to talk honestly about why friendship matters, why it gets so complicated and how women can pursue it without adding “build meaningful community” to the list of things they’re already failing to accomplish, right beneath “find the smell in the car.”

We’ll have much more to share in the coming months. But first, a few questions I often get about writing books.

Question #1: Where do you get your ideas?

I used to assume professional writers sat down at a desk and immediately began typing like caffeinated, NASA-trained chimpanzees.

Their fingers flew. Their thoughts emerged fully formed. Occasionally, they paused to stare into the middle distance while wearing expensive linen.

Now I know writing involves a tremendous amount of sitting perfectly still while producing almost nothing.

Sometimes the sitting becomes staring.

Sometimes the staring becomes gazing out the window while holding a mug, which makes it look less like procrastination and more like you’re developing themes.

Then you notice your neighbor still hasn’t brought in the trash cans.

A bird lands on the trash can, reminding you of a family vacation, which reminds you of an argument you had in 2009.

You briefly wonder whether you were the problem.

You reject this possibility.

Eventually, you turn back to the computer, newly inspired, only to discover you’ve been pondering the cosmos for 47 minutes.

And would you look at that? It’s lunchtime.

Better make a sandwich, followed by a quick, restorative two-hour scroll on your phone.

This is what people mean when they say writing is a discipline.

Question #2: Do you submit the manuscript all at once?

An excellent question for anyone interested in the careful management of emotional collapse.

Another way to ask it would be: “Do you prefer your crippling feedback in small doses or dumped over your head from a front-end loader?”

Personally, I like to keep my existential crises bite-sized.

I prefer to submit a chapter or two at a time so I only have to process a dozen comments like:

“I’m not sure this means what you think it means.”

“Could you explain this further?”

“I’m confused.”

“You’ve already said this.”

“You’ve already said this.”

Or the editor’s most devastating weapon:

“Is this necessary?”

Nothing makes a writer question her place in the universe like someone highlighting a paragraph she worked on for six hours and writing, “Do we need this?”

Need it? Ma’am, it took me longer to write that paragraph than some of my high school relationships. Yes, we do.

Question #3: Does telling stories about your life ever get weird?

Absolutely.

It’s one thing to have a memory. It’s another thing to turn it into a story with dialogue, characters and, ideally, some semblance of a plot.

The longer you write, the harder it becomes to turn off the narrator voice. In the movie Stranger Than Fiction, Will Ferrell discovers his entire life is being narrated by Emma Thompson.

During the thickest days of writing my last book, I experienced something similar.

Except instead of Emma Thompson’s elegant British voice, I heard my own internal narrator droning on like an unwelcome travel companion with a bullhorn.

One night in the shower, I reached for the shampoo and heard a voice in my head say:

“She squeezed a dime-sized amount into her palm. Except it was far larger than a dime. More like a half-dollar. What a ridiculous over-user of shampoo.”

I decided it was time to take a few days off.

The glamorous writing life

Does any of this shatter your image of gentle writers tap-tap-typing in pastel-colored she-sheds?

In reality, a writer is hunched over a laptop in yesterday’s leggings, whispering, “What is another word for ‘helpful’?” while surrounded by six mugs she is not emotionally prepared to return to the kitchen.

Writing involves awkward vulnerability, painful self-reflection and repeatedly discovering that the brilliant sentence you wrote yesterday is actually three mediocre thoughts in a trench coat.

It is opening a document called FINAL, followed by FINAL 2, FINAL ACTUAL, FINAL NEW, FINAL USE THIS ONE and FINAL REALLY PLEASE GOD.

But it is also an enormous privilege.

Andrea and I get to spend the next several months thinking deeply about friendship: about the people who walk beside us, the loneliness so many women carry quietly and the small, ordinary ways we can make room for one another.

We hope to create something honest, useful and funny.

Something that helps tired women feel less alone without handing them twelve new friendship habits to begin before sunrise. Something that acknowledges women can genuinely want deeper friendships while also wanting everyone to stop texting after 8:30 p.m.

We also hope to avoid drinking heavily, moving to Key West and adopting 300 cats while muttering about a great white whale.

But no promises.

Because if you’re going to spiral into a literary crisis, it’s best to do it with a friend.