Why I left publishing to write

I edited other people's books for twelve years. Good books, mostly. Some great ones. And the whole time, I had this low-grade guilt about the fact that I wasn't writing my own.

The problem with knowing too much

The thing about being an editor is that you learn exactly how much work a novel takes, which makes it harder to start one, not easier. You know what bad drafts look like. You've seen manuscripts arrive as disasters and leave as books, and you know that the distance between those two things is hundreds of hours of work that nobody ever sees.

That knowledge is paralyzing. Every time I sat down to write, I could hear my own editorial voice pointing out everything that was wrong with the sentence I'd just typed. It's hard to write a first draft when you've spent a decade perfecting other people's third drafts.

The timeline

Here's roughly how it went:

1. 2004-2008: Assistant editor at a small press. Learned how books get made. Wrote nothing.
2. 2008-2014: Editor at Knopf. Got good at my job. Kept a notebook of novel ideas that I never opened.
3. 2014-2016: Started waking up at 5am to write before work. Produced forty pages of something that didn't go anywhere.
4. 2016: Quit. Moved to a rented farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. Wrote Maps of the Interior in six months of total panic.
5. 2018: Book came out. I cried in a bookstore.

What I learned

The first draft of Maps of the Interior was, by my professional standards, terrible. I knew it was terrible while I was writing it. The sentences were clumsy. The pacing was off. There was a subplot about a neighbor that went nowhere for sixty pages.

But here's what I discovered: knowing how to fix someone else's book does not mean you know how to write your own. They use completely different parts of your brain. Editing is analytical. Writing — at least the first-draft part — is closer to an act of faith. You have to keep going even when every trained instinct is telling you to stop and revise the sentence you just wrote.

I finished the draft. I revised it. I revised it again. I sent it to an agent who I'd worked with when I was on the other side of the desk. She sent it back with notes. I revised it again. And eventually it became a book.

A writer friend told me once: "The only failed novel is the one you didn't finish."

I think about that a lot. It's the closest thing I have to advice. Finish the draft even though it's bad. You can fix a bad draft. You can't fix a blank page, or forty pages in a notebook you stopped opening.