Tear Everything Down

Why writing a book is a lot like building a house.

I’ve been spending what little free time I have these days watching home renovation videos. More specifically, I’ve been watching the home renovation videos that Jenna Phipps releases every week on her YouTube channel. Thirty-minute compilations of everything she and her boyfriend, Nick, have done that week while renovating their mid-century modern house in Vancouver, Canada.

If you go back to the beginning of their videos, you can see what the house looked like when they started: moldy and overgrown, burdened with the belongings of the house’s original owners who had long since abandoned it.

Soggy is the word I would use to describe the state of the house in the beginning. In the last years of it being occupied, the person who lived there had covered anything that started to warp or rot in that water-logged climate with a layer of cardboard. When that cardboard also got wet, they simply put down another.

Now, I’m definitely a sucker for a good before and after, but if satisfyingly dramatic shots of a house going from decrepit to decadent is what you’re after, these videos are not it. Occasionally, on their social media accounts, they’ll post before and after videos to entice new viewers, but on their YouTube channel, it’s just thirty-minute compilations of the work they did that week.

And it. Is. Painstaking.

Honestly, it’s pretty boring. Sometimes the videos are so long and tedious that I find myself fast forwarding through, advancing the video by ten second increments, because I really don’t need to watch thirty minutes of Nick nailing planks of cedar to the underside of the roof. But, some weeks, that’s all they get done.

Just the other week, I was watching the seventh—seventh!—video of Jenna and Nick installing insulation on the interior and exterior walls. It was a very long process, maybe the most boring of projects they’ve completed so far, and as a viewer, it was deeply unsatisfying to watch. It was long, drawn-out, repetitive work that took them months.

And then, halfway through the video, the camera cuts to Jenna and Nick standing by their checklist of things left to do looking defeated. The inspector stopped by. He said the way they had installed the insulation around the plumbing was incorrect. They would have to undo everything—weeks worth of work—and start over again.

I audibly gasped. Start over again? After all that work? After all that labor? All that effort was for… nothing?

It was then that I looked up from my computer and thought, There really is no better metaphor for writing a book.

Okay, this is the part where I tell you about the thing my husband told me not to tell you about.

“Don’t write about it yet,” he said. “You don’t want to jinx it. Not until you see how everything pans out.”

I know he’s right, but I also know I have never in my life been able to keep anything to myself, so:

Last summer, I went out on submission with my second book, and it didn’t sell.

Well, that’s not entirely true. It didn’t not sell. Two weeks into the submission process, my agent got an email from a dream editor at a dream imprint who read the book in one night and loved it. But, she had some pretty major suggestions for a rewrite. The edits she suggested—which I won’t get into the specifics of here because I do sometimes listen to my husband, and I really don’t want to jinx it—are so enormous, it was the equivalent of an inspector coming in and saying, “This is great! This is wonderful! I love it so much! But, in order for me to buy it, you’re going to have to tear everything down but the kitchen and start from scratch.”

Start from scratch? After all that work? After all that labor? All that effort was for… nothing?

I know you’re thinking that’s terrible news. And it is! But the weirdest thing happened: I knew almost immediately that this editor was right. Her suggestions for how to make the book better were really good. All through the writing revising process, there had been these things, these annoying problems, that I never could quite solve in the book, and her suggestions solved all of them.

“Oh shit,” I said to my agent. “I kind of love that?”

It was only after we hung up that I realized what that meant: it meant scrapping almost everything I had written. Three-quarters of the book. Just gone. Never to be needed or read again. All those evenings writing in my office after my son had gone to sleep. All those hours I paid for a babysitter so I could write new scenes. All of that time—all of that effort—would have to be thrown out, and I would have to start over.

I was devastated. I am still devastated when I let myself think about it. But the process of writing and publishing a book is not fast. It is painstaking, repetitive, tedious, and boring work.

I try to remind myself of that when I’m writing. I try to remind myself of that when I watch Jenna and Nick spend most of their week simply preparing their house to paint. Not actually painting the house. Just getting it ready to be painted. It takes a long time to build a good house. It takes a long to write a good book. Because that’s the thing: I don’t want to just write a book. I want to write a really good book, and I know the edits this editor gave me are right. Even if it doesn’t sell. Even if no one ever reads it. I am confident the book I’m writing now is so much better.

I can already tell: this version of the book is what the book was always meant to be.

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What Kept Me Writing:

The brilliant (and sometimes boring) home renovation videos of Jenna Phipps, the most recent of which is appropriately named, “we’re starting over from scratch.” Same, Jenna. Same.

This article, and its ensuing discourse, which was a necessary reminder to me that the publishing industry—and the people in it—know what they’re doing about as much as I do.

Glen Powell’s Saturday Night Live monologue about how the best things don’t happen overnight.

This heartening article about Virginia Evans, the writer of this year’s sleeper hit, The Correspondent, which is so popular I’m still at #281 on my library’s hold list for it.

I reread “The Crane Wife” by C.J. Hauser for a workshop I’m teaching, and it made me want to keep writing forever.

Are you listening to Scriptnotes? IT IS SO GOOD. I experience an average of seven epiphanies regarding my work every time I listen.

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What Keeps Me Writing:

My weekly writing workshops at Writers in Progress.

I signed up for my first workshop at Writers in Progress six months after completing my MFA program, and I’ve been taking and teaching them ever since. Some weeks, they are the only reason I keep writing.

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