The hardest part about writing a book has nothing to do with writing a book

There are many bucket lists that declare that before that person dies, they would like to write a book. Just you wait for the day they have enough time, have enough energy, or when they retire. Writing a book is a capstone project to life for many a person. And it’s no wonder! Writing a book is a fierce undertaking. It’s hundreds of pages, tens of thousands of words. Writing a book is hard work.

But the hardest part about writing a book has nothing to do with writing a book.

It’s a fact (okay, opinion) that sounds absolutely impossible. Writing a book is hard! How is there something harder about writing a book than, you know, writing the dang book? Never mind writing a cohesive story that makes some logical sense, which, by the way, is not what I’m thinking of either. Creating characters is hard. Coming up with an idea is hard. Building a story outline is hard. Dialogue, story arcs, finding the time, these are all very, very hard parts of writing books.

But the hardest thing about writing a book is that in writing a book, you also have to face the emotional moments your characters face.

Maybe that sounds fake. Especially if you’ve never tried writing a book before, or maybe if you’ve written a book with more of an action-orientation. I mean, sure, writing emotional stuff is hard but no harder than writing a novel of 80,000 words, right? Or the world building that goes into a fantasy novel? (If you’ve read Lord of the Rings, you know what I mean.) And I absolutely don’t mean to understate how hard every part of writing a book can be. I wouldn’t say writing a book is easy in any capacity (if it was, everyone would write a book!). I’ve written enough books that I’ve basically lost count and even I will not pretend for so much as an instant that any part of writing those books was easy.

So why do I say that the hardest part of writing a book are the emotional experiences your characters face? It’s because when my characters face emotional turmoil, I have to face it too.

Have you ever screamed at a TV screen when your favorite character died? Cried tears of joy when your OTP FINALLY KISSED ALREADY? Then you are certainly familiar with how a fictional story can throw you straight into an emotional blender and crank that bad boy up to HIGH. The thing is writing those experiences turns the knob up to eleven. And if you’re writing in first person, I’m pretty sure you just go ahead and install the number twelve on that dial.

As you write, you’re doing more than telling a story. You are falling into the head of another person entirely, thinking their thoughts rather than your own. You wake up hours later, back in your own skin, blinking at the fact that there is more than the blue light of your laptop screen in the world. And while you’re in the heads of your characters, you feel what they’re feeling as well. You slip into their skin, try on their clothes, and experience their problems the way they do.

What makes this experience all the more powerful is when you realize that fictional worlds are so often informed by our actual lives. Which means the emotions your characters are facing are sometimes fictionalized versions of emotions you are already facing in your real life. And now the problem you couldn’t solve in your real life?

Well, you’ve got to solve it in your book.

The idea for this blog post came to me when I was actually writing one of my own books. Without going into too much detail, my protagonist was facing an emotionally challenging situation in which she considered her own feelings of imperfection and inferiority. Which only made me think about how I often struggle with the same sorts of feelings.

I had to walk away from the computer for a little bit. My giggle morphed into a groan real quick.

And then there was my undergraduate honors thesis. (Which you can read right here, if you want *hint, hint*) And it’s a HEAVY piece of work. For my thesis, I wrote an alternate universe YA origin story for Peter Pan (no, really). But one of the biggest themes I undertook in the book was mental health in a world in which mental illness was extremely taboo. Therefore, my protagonist battled depression throughout the novel. At a time when I was fairly confident I had an undiagnosed mental illness that I was too afraid to get diagnosed. Which, yup, recipe for COMPLICATED EMOTIONS.

There’s a moment in the story in which the protagonist considers these feelings and what they mean for her life. How tired she is in facing her depression. How she wants a break. How she wants to be someone else for a little while.

And when I wrote the last line of that section, I nearly burst into tears in the middle of the very public basement of the student center at college so I snapped my laptop closed and walked back to my dorm where I could cry in peace.

There was a nugget of truth in those words that I could not bear to say for myself, even though I felt those feelings. Until I put them in my protagonist’s words, I wasn’t brave enough to face those feelings. But in a novel, I was faced with them in a way I could begin to digest.

Writing a book is more than words on a page, more than a wild adventure in which your greatest dreams and darkest nightmares come true. They’re not all ghosts and hauntings or grand balls and love affairs or coming of age and awkward first dates. Sometimes, they are the tiniest whispers slipping through your mind until you accidentally allow them to spill out on the page.

And those tiny, inconspicuous thoughts that your writing forces you to face, that’s harder than the writing of hundreds of thousands of words on a page.

How to take a day off (actually, can you tell me? I’m bad at it)

Vacation…ah, vacation. A magical word. Whether we’re talking Summer Vacation or Spring Break or just dropping a vacation on a random Tuesday in September, vacation days are often the most anticipated days on the calendar. We exchange stories of where we last traveled second only to how often we talk about the weather (well…maybe. This isn’t a scientific study.). The moment you say you’re taking a vacation, the response is often a a groan of jealously. A day off? Sounds like heaven.

For me, that sensation is still just a theory.

Now, no don’t get me wrong. I still look forward to vacation days. In fact, at the time of drafting this post, I have a handful coming up. I’ve paid for additional vacation days in the past. The moment I say I’m taking vacation days, though, the first question I get asked, “Got any fun plans?”

Oh.

Hm.

I think I forgot that step.

Admittedly, this was exacerbated by the pandemic, but I had this issue prior to 2020. I am terrible at taking days off. Not that I don’t use all my vacation days. I absolutely do! I mean, I’m not going to miss out on that opportunity, if only because it means a day when I can sleep in. If only it means I have some extra time to get chores around my home done (why is there always another pile of laundry to fold?). Even if it only means I finally have time to take my car to the shop to get a recall finally figured out (I need to live closer to a dealership…).

Okay, I think I just made myself sad.

The truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever learned how to take a day off. At the beginning of my career, I definitely think it was partially influenced by the desire to save every dollar possible to pay off student debt. Once that because less of a pressing issue, even then I used my vacation days to focus on writing. It’s kind of hard to come home from work only to have to work on a side-hustle (as I’m sure MANY people can relate to). But this meant that I used to only write on vacation time or weekends.

But what happens when I also take off a day from my side hustle? Not even because I want to but because I don’t have some writing I’m actively working on? Well…then…that’s another issue entirely. And an issue that goes beyond my ability to take a day off. At that point, I also have to address how hard it is for me to take a night off.

Memories of school. Plain and simple.

Quite frankly, the reason I struggle to take as much as a night off is because I was trained by my schooling, since middle school at least, that every moment of my day is not my own. In high school, there were days when I stayed up past 1 am to finish homework. Weekends I spent in the performing arts center at my high school working on props. There were dress rehearsals for musicals where I sat in the dressing room crying over AP Physics homework (cut me some slack; it was AP PHYSICS). If I had so much as an hour to rest, I would slump over in front of the TV because my brain was so exhausted by that point that all I could do was just survive.

Basically, from the time since even before I was a teenager, I was taught that every minute of my life should be spent doing something productive or else it was wasted. And what’s wild is that it is entirely because of the amount of homework given to students.

“Sure,” you say, “we can all agree that homework is ridiculous and too much. But aren’t you an adult who’s been out of school for years?”

I mean, yeah. But here’s the thing about spending your formative years spending every waking moment on school: you spend basically zero time learning about what makes you happy.

What do I do to relax? The same things I did when I was a kid when I was too tired to do anything else. At least, until sitting still fills me with the anxiety that I must be missing some assignment I’m responsible for, even though I’m years away from school. So instead of spending time relaxing, I spend my time off convinced I’m forgetting something.

Maybe I’m alone in this. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m more conscientious than is good for me. But I doubt I’m the only one who is filled with some constant low-level anxiety when they run out of items on their to-do list. Why do you think I’m writing a blog?

SO! When I take a day off, that low-level anxiety I feel in the evenings after work buzzes beneath my skin all day. I should be writing, I should be working on an assignment, I should be being productive and adding some value to the world or adding something to my resume or…

So how do you take time to rest when your brain feels like it’s on fire but the one attacking your thoughts is you?

I’m still learning to forgive myself for taking time to rest. For not beating myself up for spending a day sitting on the couch watching YouTube while a cat sleeps in my lap. Or bringing a book to a coffee shop and chilling there for hours. But it’s not a simple flip of the switch. You can’t so easily turn off the anxiety that is the quiet soundtrack to your existence. Because our lives aren’t meant to be wholly productive all the time, or at least I don’t think so. In a life where there are glorious sunsets and needy snuggly kittens and steep cliff sides and music, how can we be nothing more than machines made for production?

So if you have any tips on how to vanquish that guilt and focus in on the beauty that is the life before us, I’m listening. And if you don’t, then you’re not alone.

The wondrousness of nerdy joy (an open letter to the bullies who tried to break it in me)

When I was ten, I had no concept of “fandom.” But I did know what it felt like to be so excited about a story that I cosplayed as its characters or wrote my own stories about the stories I watched on TV. I knew what it felt like to be so excited about a story that I spent my afternoons after school on the family computer falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes because I was so hungry for more information, no matter how small that nugget might be. I knew what it felt like to spend a week waiting for Sunday morning to see what the preview on the previous Sunday morning meant after spending hours rewatching the preview online and looking for any tiny hint I could find.

I remember being filled with so much joy that I could absolutely burst. I remember trying to spread that joy to anyone who would listen just so I could stave off that coming explosion. And then, I remember that joy being weaponized as the punchline to a joke that crushed me flat under its weight.

One thing I know about myself is that when I find something I love, I fall hard. If its a TV show that turns out to also have books, you better believe that I buy the books. A clever T-shirt quoting a line in the book series I love so much? Don’t mind if I do. And the thing about joy is that it is such a wonderfully pure emotion that you want nothing more than to spill over into every person around you so that they reflect your joy back at you so that the world glows brighter and brighter, little by little.

Which makes me wonder why there are so many people in the world who wish to do nothing more than take that beautiful gift of someone’s joy, offered up to them for free, and crush it under foot.

I have always been a nerd. One of my earliest memories from childhood is back when we still lived in my family’s first home and, sitting at the tiny little kids table while I was under the age of five, I ate breakfast while an episode of Star Trek played on in the background. Another memory, a few years later but while I was still in single digits of age, my brother and I woke up before our parents and were deciding what to do. Our ultimate decision? Watch the Star Wars movie with the Ewoks. Family TV nights were spent watching Stargate SG-1. Later, we also added shows like Eureka and Dead Like Me and Doctor Who into the mix. Shows that asked big questions and invited the audience to consider the answers for themselves. A staple of a nerd’s repertoire.

I adored these shows. I loved the questions they asked about what made us human, what made us good, what made us hurt in such a way that we couldn’t be healed and how to heal anyway. Even before I had the words to describe this feeling, I noticed how much my heart grew with anticipation as I experienced these intriguing shows.

And then, Sonic the Hedgehog arrived on the scene.

I’d always enjoyed content with the blue blur. I remember being very young watching episodes of The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog when they showed up on Toon Disney. I remember playing the old Sega Genesis games as a friend’s house, since he was my only friend who had a Sega system. When Sonic X stared airing, I was incredibly excited, but I was terrible about catching episodes and actually missed many of them in the first two seasons.

But it was the game Sonic Adventure 2 Battle that struck my nerdy heart.

I only got my hands on a copy because my brother’s friend from down the street was playing it and allowed us to borrow the game, as was pretty typical in that friendship. But there was something about that game that filled me so full with joy that I couldn’t keep that joy isolated inside me. Maybe it was how the game opens up to the ever-popular song City Escape as Sonic slides through the city streets on a piece of metal as if he’s a snowboarder on fresh powder. Maybe it was the story of mistaken identity and all the different ways a Chaos Emerald could be used. Maybe it was the stakes where Eggman threatened the lives of Sonic’s friends…only to end up (spoiler) tricking Sonic in such a way that it led to his apparent death (he was fine, but Tails didn’t know that!).

The game was compelling in such a way that I had never seen in my ten years of life. Suddenly, I couldn’t get enough. I started drawing the characters. I spent my afternoons digging into every story of the characters I could find on the Internet. I started researching the history of video games with books I obtained from the library. I started telling myself stories featuring the characters and when the stories finally got too long to be held only in my head, I started writing them down (it was still another year before I learned about the concept of fan fiction and this instinct wasn’t isolated within me alone).

The story filled me with a joy like I had never before experienced. I grew obsessed especially with the values Sonic held, his desire to never look back and simply focus on the present moment. As impatient as he was and as obsessed with fun and free as he ran, he was also usually found perching on a tree branch, mid-nap, unhappy to be disturbed by anything less than a brand new adventure. It was the sort of freedom and joy a preteen just didn’t have but wanted with such a passion that they didn’t have the words to describe.

And so Sonic firmly became the source of my nerdy joy. And that joy encouraged me to find nerdy joy in other places as well. I watched every episode of new Doctor Who (and a bunch of the old ones from before I was born). I learned more and more about the popular canon of nerdy fantasy novels and read a few. I used a day off work to go see Detective Pikachu in theaters. I have studied enough of the lore of Five Nights at Freddy’s that I even read one of the novelizations. One of my favorite hobbies is watching video game streamers, for crying out loud! And at work, I have (somewhat accidentally) spent far too much time gushing about RWBY so that my coworkers have actually spent the time to send my a birthday card featuring the character of Ruby Rose!

My nerdy joy has never been without its detractors, however. In fact, it was the main source of the bullying I faced growing up, especially on the Sonic front. When I decided to explode with some piece of Sonic news or a fact I knew, I was sometimes met with rolled eyes and a cruel joke at my expense. I found out about gossip being circulated about me. Which inch by inch, crushed that nerdy joy inside me.

Until, finally, my happy, often extroverted-acting heart, closed off.

For years, I pushed down my nerdy joy into a little box that I held tight to my heart all for myself. No more did I gush about the things that brought me joy. But I also grew afraid of making new friends because I was used to being the butt of jokes. I refused to give up my nerdy joy but I grew so careful about sharing that joy with others. To this day, I still feel the effects of this time period in my life.

But I refuse to give up my nerdy joy. I refuse.

Here’s the thing about nerdy joy: I have a theory that nerds who embrace their joy are in general the happiest of people. They allow themselves to be fully themselves. I watch shows like Dropout’s Um Actually and I am overwhelmed by the joy the show’s contestants have for all things nerdy as they offer the most pedantic of corrections. I even sent my own in (nope, Mewtwo doesn’t technically talk in Pokemon: The First Movie; he speaks through telepathy!). There is such joy in actually embracing what brings you joy.

As of the drafting of this blog, I spent yesterday going to see the second Sonic the Hedgehog movie. I went by myself and sat in a theater mostly populated with small children and their moms. But I also made a point of telling my coworkers where I was going. Because I refuse to apologize for what brings me joy. What fills my heart. After I saw the movie (at the mall, FYI), I found a little stand selling a plushie of Amy Rose’s (character from Sonic universe) classic design from back in Sonic CD. When the person servicing the stand asked if I wanted a bag for my purchase, I hesitated a moment before I said no. I wondered if I should say yes and hide the nerdy joy that I had been so often taught to feel ashamed of. But I will not be ashamed of what brings me joy, certainly not when it’s something so small as a fun little plush toy.

Nerdy joy is a part of me. I am not myself if I don’t embrace this part of myself. And so, I refuse to change for those voices that tried to crush me down into a tiny little box. And if you have a source of nerdy joy, I beg you to do the same. Your nerdiest of joys is worth embracing. There is no shame in feeling joy.

Nerds are wonderful. As we go on in this world, I hope more people embrace their nerdy wonder. Imagine how much better this world would be if we all embraced those little things that filled our hearts so full that all we could do was share that joy with all those around us.