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Suddenly my solo trailer project had become a new way in which I’d potentially set myself up for more rejection. Suddenly I was waiting to see if I’d be accepted into another competitive world where people I’d never met would have opinions about my work. Why didn’t I pick up knitting? Why didn’t I take a sailing class instead? Pottery? Why was I torturing myself? I felt nervous and neurotic. Would I be accepted? Maybe we should call the monkey doodle people? After all, an entire cookbook of nut recipes wasn’t a terrible idea. And maybe my split ends would be healed if only they had the chance to speak out!

Writers: how therapists buy summer homes.

I don’t remember if all three editors were interested. (Two were. I think three? Let’s say they all were. Who can stop me? It’s my book—I’m drunk with power!) But the proposal letter sent by my current editor, Jennifer E. Smith, jumped out at me, and made her the clear choice.

Jen is a talented YA author. She’s from Chicago. She talks very fast. When Jen and I first met in person, I told her the story of writing my senior thesis as an English major in college. I confessed that I turned it in late after writing it directly in a word processor and correcting my typos and mistakes with Wite-Out. I just barely scraped by, deadline-wise. Jen—who was also an English major—laughed but looked slightly spooked by this information. She admitted to me that she was so well organized in college that she finished her senior thesis two weeks early, but she lied about it and pretended to still be working up to the deadline because she didn’t want her friends to feel bad or think she was too much of a geek.

She may have been concerned about my deadline issues, but I thought this made us the perfect match. Ever see a buddy movie where one guy is the ne’er-do-well loose cannon and the other guy is too? No? Exactly. What’s the fun of the ne’er-do-well loose cannon without the buttoned-up friend/brother/other cop who’s trying to ensure he stays within the law? I was the Eddie Murphy to her Nick Nolte! The Bruce Willis to her Sam Jackson! The Hooch to her Turner! Sorry—it seems I stopped going to the movies in 1989.

The good news was that I’d been paired with an ideal partner. The bad news was that the minute I sold the book and it became an assignment with a deadline and people counting on me, I sort of froze up. This resulted in writing sessions where I stared at the blank computer screen with my heart thumping and a metallic taste in my mouth—my new definition of the boots of time marching all over me. To cope, I went down Google rabbit holes involving outdoor patio furniture and artisanal Korean pepper sauces. I’d write three lines, erase four, and look up which fish sauce to use when making nuoc cham. (Red Boat 40°N, 50°N if you can find it. Nuoc cham is a Vietnamese dipping sauce that calls for sambal oelek, an Indonesian chili paste, but I also sometimes use the Korean chili paste gochujang, and I find if you chop the ginger very fine you can—NOW DO YOU SEE WHY MY BOOK TOOK SO LONG? Also, the best time to buy patio furniture on sale is at the end of the summer or early fall. Spring is when they get you!)

Jen has become a friend as well as an invaluable person in my work life. Sometimes she tells me I need to throw something out. Sometimes she tells me I need to dig deeper. But early on, the main challenge was simply getting me to fill up more pages. “Just give me something,” she’d say. “Don’t worry too much. If you hit a rough patch, skip over it. You can go back and make it perfect later, but first you need a draft. I can’t edit a blank page.” Eventually I learned that, in the beginning at least, it was better for me to be finished than to try to be perfect. I had to get out of my own way. It wasn’t that the voice in my head—the one telling me my pages weren’t good enough—went away, exactly. I just didn’t let it stop me. An important tool against self-doubt is just to ignore it. Forge ahead anyway. Just keep going, keep going, keep going.

I gave myself the goal of writing one thousand words a day. Sometimes I hit it, sometimes not. I had no routine—I wrote at work between scenes, at the kitchen table, on airplanes. My process was nonlinear and often chaotic. If I hit a scene or a plot point that stumped me, I’d put the missing scene in bold so I would remember to come back to it later: Dan wedding scene to come. Sometimes I didn’t even know what the missing scene might be: Franny says blah blah something here. Talk about medical, medical!

I was filling every free minute, working harder than I had in years. So it was surprising that when I told people I was writing a novel, the two questions I got most often were “Is anyone helping you?” and “Are you doing that all by yourself?” You know, the same questions male authors get asked! I guess there is a tradition of memoirs sometimes being ghostwritten. (Chuck—make sure this part really seems like I wrote it. And remind me to delete this note!) But fiction? There seemed to be some bias I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

The book was far from perfect, but eventually it was done. Letting go of it was the strangest thing. I’d feel happy with a passage one week, but a week later I’d find things about it I wanted to change. I realized that the practice of writing the book had actually, slowly and over time, made me a better writer. So I’d see parts that I’d done months back and realize I could now do better. Which meant I wanted to keep revising. But when does the revising end? I’d committed to a publishing date, for one thing, but even if I hadn’t, at some point you have to let it go or it isn’t a book for sale, it’s a pile of papers on your desk. The actor equivalent of this would be to film a scene, then watch it and think, why’d I do that with my hands? That shirt isn’t flattering, I’m not as connected as I could be—let’s go back and do it again. You could keep improving that one scene over and over, but the movie would never get made. “I’m going to pull this out of your hands now,” Jen finally said.