When I first started writing my silly little novel, it was a desperate attempt to escape the demands of what we call “real life.” A pragmatic job? Burgeoning adult responsibilities? I graciously declined the offer. Raised by a single-salary single mum, I saw the tiring routines of being a teacher, nurse or midwife. Now I watched with horror as my friends went off to build those same careers. Not me!
I had been writing since I was a child, mostly to turn away from the actual world and into one of my own making. I kept up this escapist pretense well into my early 20s, which is when I decided to turn my pastime into an actual book. Never mind “making a living.” I am a writer, thank you very much — I have a creative vocation. Being from a low-income family allowed me to milk various grants; between those and my retail job (I was a vicious time thief, scribbling notes under the desk as customers waited), the finances could work. I sat down and began.
I wrote and wrote, falling into a delirious state, the IV drip of my imagination funneling uninhibited into what I was sure was the next “Middlemarch.” In every spare hour, I typed ecstatically … until … things sort of halted. In front of me was a series of rather major problems. The first being that I had an impulse to set the book in Zalipie, Poland, but I knew nothing about Zalipie beyond a charming photograph I had seen online. Also, I wanted my protagonist to have a lucrative career and had heard “underwriting” was a solid profession. But what was an underwriter? And how do you become one? While we’re at it, what’s the plot of this novel?
Suddenly there were all these tasks to be completed, so many that I had to start a spreadsheet to keep track: Research newspaper clippings from 1980s Kraków; learn some Polish to understand the search terms; transcribe chapters from notebook to computer; write a date-stamped timeline for each character; print and line-edit 200 pages; ad infinitum.
As the list grew, I watched in wide-eyed outrage. It was all administrative work! Bureaucracy! Editing, researching, transcribing, fact-checking — the kinds of things in LinkedIn job ads that friends sometimes sent me and I always ignored. My hopes that this process would be more Hunter S. and less I.R.S. were fading into the ether. I spent months triple-checking possessive apostrophes, mapping Polish Baroque churches I found on Gazeta Krakowska. I circled in red pen the many times I misspelled “separate.” I didn’t so much “flex my creative muscles” as slog through an unpaid internship to myself. I clocked into each novel-writing shift as if I were angling for a raise, opening my laptop at 6 a.m. before going to my retail job. I started to feel jealous of my own protagonist’s straightforward underwriter position, breezily signing off on mortgages in an air-conditioned office — at least she didn’t have to pay for her own printer ink.
Several manic years passed like this: I wrote, rewrote, researched, revised, took workshops, added characters, deleted them, ate countless tinned lentils. And finally, one day, I had a book. I treated myself to lunch with a friend, my hair frenzied, corpus likely unshowered. “I’ve finished it!” I cried out.
“Amazing!” she said. “So you sell it now or something?”
Oh. More administrative work.
A whole new set of urgencies were unfolding, related to that sinister mob known as “the publishing industry.” I slumped. I had finally upskilled myself into writing. Now there was this whole other profession to learn.
But I put on my big-girl socks. I mass-emailed published authors and pleaded for advice. Each one told me about their rigorous schedule of emails and meetings and nonwriting tasks. “You can’t hide away in your work cave,” one writer said. “You have to network, pitch, beg — become an ‘all-rounder.’” Grumbling but humbled, I started my research anew. Though these writers were clearly not nurses or midwives, they still worked disciplined, specialized, full-time jobs.
The novel I ended up with is nothing like the one I started. For one thing, my Polish had become passable enough for my characters to speak in slang. And my newly won lessons also weaseled their way into the work itself. My protagonist’s arc was now (suspiciously) a journey from escapist youth to adulthood. The novel was a record of my diligence and, most gratifying, it did the very thing art is meant to do: reflect back something I hadn’t anticipated — that I had indeed grown into a responsible adult.
Being in the flow state of writing had always given me a druglike joy, but reworking a novel over and over, feeling sweaty and frustrated and stuck and then getting unstuck — this kind of dull grown-up work was thrilling in a (dare I say) novel way. I liked knowing that I had the capacity to learn new skills quickly, and I liked being the kind of person who sacrificed (if a tad begrudgingly) short-term rewards in service of a bigger holy grail.
So I’ve come to honor the procedural graft of it all. Now at age 30, I have a novel that’s closer than ever to getting onto someone’s bedroom shelves — and that transformation of my childhood escapism into something other people can vanish into makes leaving my youth less horrifying. Writing my book delivered me the unglamorous yet oddly comforting realization that work is work, that there is no magic trick out of reality: Bureaucracy and failure and early mornings are the bedfellows of adulthood, and in life’s accompanying swarm of chaos, there are probably worse things to do than slog through a spreadsheet.
Klara Feenstra is a writer from London.
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