About writing a novel (and that time my laptop died)

if you're not backing up your writing, do it now

For the last year, I’ve been writing a novel. I’ve written (and even published) short stories before and started and abandoned a handful of longer projects. But it’s been a long time since I wrote fiction. Over the last decade, I considered myself a journalist more than a writer. Lately that’s flipped. From the beginning, something was different about this idea. I felt so deeply in my bones that if I ever finished a novel, I wanted it to be this one.

When I started thinking about getting divorced, I wasn’t sure about so many things. I didn’t know where I would live. I didn’t know if I could find a good home for my beloved chickens. I didn’t know what would happen to the dogs. I didn’t know how I would make a living on my own.

We broke up and I applied to jobs, full-time and part-time alike, anything really. I heard back from a few and got crickets on other applications. I dreamed about the security that would come from a “real job”—one with benefits and a salary and paid time off.

Then I thought about the novel.

I thought about how my favorite time to be alone with myself was during the day. I thought about the fact that I did my best writing—my best thinking—in the middle of the afternoon. I thought about how I would give that up if I kept office hours. But the security seemed so comforting. Other people made writing work with a 9-to-5 job. It wasn’t impossible. I began moving in that direction until I woke up one morning and my laptop wouldn’t start.

“Catastrophic failure” was the phrase the Apple Genius used when I brought the computer in. Sometimes it just happened. I’d left the house where I used to live with my husband, packed all my things in boxes, and went to stay with a friend until my new apartment was ready. I’d turned my computer on, intending to work on the novel. The screen was a blank. Of course this was happening now.

I’d thought, in some nebulous way, that my work was being backed up to the cloud. But there was nothing there: not the writing I’d done for the last five years I’d had the computer, not the pictures I’d taken, not the notes I’d written down for future projects, and certainly none of the novel. I’d already written more than 30,000 words of notes and scenes. It was all gone.

The Genius told me that Apple could repair the laptop but they couldn’t guarantee my data would be safe if I sent it to them. They might erase the hard drive or put an entirely new one in.

In my grief, I panicked. The novel was probably gone and I deserved to lose it. It was my punishment, you see, for not valuing it more. For not bothering to check whether my backups existed. For taking things for granted. I would lose everything, like I’d already lost so much. I wanted to start over? Well look at me getting what I wanted, a blank slate. I sent the computer in to be erased and fixed.

When I moved out, I’d left the bed and the couch and given up the better car. I’d relinquished the right to care about the yard which I’d spent the last seven years tending. The dogs, unsuited to apartment life, would live with my ex. The chickens would have to find a new home. Some of the losses were hard but they were manageable, necessary. I wanted to make the split as easy as possible. The word people use for this is amicable.

The day after I mailed the laptop, I woke up in a panic. I tracked the package and saw it was already at Apple. Is it melodramatic to say I felt like I was waiting for my own execution? All those words, gone forever.

None of them were so good that I couldn’t have rewritten a version of them. I remembered most of the scenes. Still, the thought of losing it all broke something in me even though I wasn’t sure what, really, I was losing.

I called Apple and cancelled the order just in time. I sent the laptop off to a company that specialized in retrieving information off hard drives and paid an ungodly sum of money to get my “data” back. (I had to buy a new laptop too. I laughed about it when it didn’t make me want to cry.)

The day after I got a USB with my data on it, I moved into my new apartment. I started a job at a restaurant, realizing that if I went back to working nights, I could keep my days free to write. I wouldn’t have paid time off or a lot of money but I’d have enough to make it work. I’d have this project. I’d have a room of my own.

I kept writing. Some days I only put down a couple hundred words and others a few thousand. I wrote this newsletter. I watched the book that had been in my head for a year take shape on the page. I regularly backed everything up to email and an external hard drive. I saw my life take shape and expand as the word count on my draft grew from twenty-thousand to forty to sixty to eighty.

In September, a few months before I finished a draft of the book, I went to a dance class with my friend Joy. We talked about the big projects we were working on. I was scared, I said, that the novel wouldn’t sell. I was scared that it wasn’t good enough. But I wasn’t scared that I wasn’t going to finish it.

“I just know that I need to write this book,” I said. “And I think there are people out there who will want to read it.” I knew, in that moment, that even if this book didn’t sell, I would still write another one, and another. I see myself most clearly when I am writing. It’s how I process the world around me. It’s the thing I can’t give up without giving up myself along with it.

I danced in a room of people until every joint in my body ached. And then, when I recovered, I went back to the page to write a few more words. And a few more.

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Notes

tl:dr — a few weeks ago I finished the first full draft of the novel. The draft is 84,308 words long—roughly 200-250 pages. I took a week off and have started revising it by completely rewriting it from the beginning. It’s hard, slow work but feels as satisfying as cleaning a dirty window until it shines.

a beautiful screenshot of Scrivener stats about my book

On my friend

Maggie Pahos

recommendation, I got a copy of Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell which is about revising a novel (though I think its advice applies to any long work!). It’s brilliant and simple. Unfortunately “rewriting” has been such a successful method of revision, I might have to start doing it for all my second drafts.

For a little treat, read this article written by a scientist who taught rats to drive (!) in exchange for Froot Loops (!!). The video of rats zooming around in their rat mobiles is my favorite thing I’ve seen all week.

Lastly, a reminder that you can get a signed—and personalized!—copy of Under the Henfluence sent to you or a chicken loving friend. Order from Broadway Books by December 2 for holiday delivery.

Keep going,

-Tove

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