Can you forget how to write a novel?

I wrote a novel during the pandemic and I'm not sure now that I can write a novel again

I wrote my last novel in spring and summer of 2020. Right before the world shut down, I’d bought a big old drafting table from a used furniture store in town. I posted a picture of it on Facebook and several people recognized the table and told me who the previous owners were. My daughter was starting her second semester at Indiana University and I was very tentatively beginning to use her bedroom as my writing space. I had the drafting table and as we moved into lockdown, I ordered a nice comfy red chair to sit in front of the drafting table. I have vivid memories of unpacking the chair and putting it together while I listened to a mystery writing conference that was supposed to be in-person but had moved to online instead. It felt cozy and fortuitous. The conference was in Chicago and I never would have gone, but now I could.

At that point, the pandemic felt very far away from our small town. It was months before I knew anyone who got Covid. I understood that in places like New York and Italy, there was no ignoring the pandemic. But here in Indiana, the world just felt quiet in an unsettling sort of way.

I spent a lot of the pandemic sitting in that red chair at the drafting table writing the novel that became Fair Game. It’s a novel that very much saved my life. It was an anchor in those anxiety-filled days. It filled time when I would have otherwise been doom-scrolling or raging at how little sense anything about the pandemic made to me. I distinctly remember thinking to myself, “If I don’t used this time to do something good, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”¹

Those are the conditions under which I last started and finished a novel. Now it’s four years later. I self-published Fair Game in 2023 after a couple years of unsuccessfully querying agents. In between finishing Fair Game and now, I wrote a linked short story collection or a novel-in-stories or some hybrid sort of thing that I’ve now sent out into the world, looking for a home.² It’s not like I haven’t been writing between 2020 and now, but what I was writing was not a novel.

This is where the magic happens. It looks so much less glamorous than most photos of writer’s desks, which they must surely spruce up for these pics, right?

Writing a novel is its own thing, different from writing anything else.³ My friend Ellen described it once as like swimming across the English channel, in the dark and the cold. Maybe also, you’re blind and weighted down with rocks. Writing a novel is one of the most painful and rewarding things I’ve ever done. It is a skill that does not improve with time and repetition. That’s not just me saying that. Every writer I’ve ever heard talk about writing a novel has admitted that every single time you have to learn everything all over again. It’s excruciating. We are all idiots for even attempting it.

Every day I sit down to work on this new novel, it takes at least an hour before I’m able to commit words to the page. I’m writing this post right now because it’s so much easier than working on the novel. I can invent so many things that are better than working on the novel. Doing dishes. Cleaning out the junk drawer. And, most of all, staring out the window for hour upon hour. All of it, so much better than the excruciating pain of trying to write a novel.

It occurs to me daily that maybe I don’t have the patience for writing a novel anymore. The short stories were so much easier. They just flowed out of the end of my fingers or at least that’s how I remember it. Maybe 7,000 words at a time is my comfort zone and attempting anything else is hubris.

I went full-on plotter with Fair Game, which means I planned out the structure of the novel ahead of time. I knew what the climax would be and I knew the twists and turns. This felt deeply comforting, like there was a map I was following. It made for a fast-paced novel that zips along. I’m not sure if it didn’t also get in the way of more fully developing the characters.

I’m trying to pants this novel (as in, writing by the seat of my pants), which is to say, I’m trying to just let the structure emerge as I write. I’m trying to let the characters tell me where they want to go and what they want to do. I’ve written this way before, but it is a little terrifying. I’m thinking there might be a happy place between pantsing and plotting. I’m trying to figure out what that looks like.

I know that the best way to write a novel is to get in the habit of working on the novel every day. The best way to write a novel is to make yourself sit down in front of the machine. When you work on the novel every day, you begin to take up residence inside that world. It becomes a place that’s comfortable. Familiar. If you’re lucky, some days it becomes a place you’re eager to go.

Of course, this is why writing a novel during a pandemic worked particularly well. Who wanted to live in that world of daily case counts and masks and worrying about whether we’d run out of toilet paper? It was so much easier to escape into the world of the novel, where there was no pandemic. In the world of the novel, I had complete control over what happened and what didn’t. What a refuge. What a gift.

I’m nostalgic about that period of my life. I’m nostalgic about almost every period of my life, even though I know at the time, it was excruciating. Memory rounds the edges of the painful parts. It’s one thing to know that and a whole other thing to do something about it in the present.

I haven’t truly forgotten how to write a novel. There’s really only one way to do it. I’ll sit down in that red chair in front of the drafting table. I’ll build a novel word by word. Sentence by sentence. Page by page. Day by day. It is slapping paint onto the canvas. I’ll spend a lot of time staring out the window. Or doing dishes or going for a walk. It will be messy and most of the times unsatisfying. But it’s the only way to get it done.

Amongst the other tricks I have tried to make the horror of writing a novel a little easier is to buy a fancy wireless keyboard. This one doesn’t make clacking noises quite like a typewriter, but it is bright green and louder than your average computer keyboard. I took it to the coffee shop this week, thinking that the combo of the fancy keyboard and the new setting would make the words just flow. The problem—there’s a guy at our local coffee shop who has his own loud, special keyboard (he’s now added a raised platform for his screen, too, which I also find impressive). Said writer was clacking away at his loud keyboard and the sound was, well, intimidating. I mean, sometimes I’m typing away like that (mostly, actually, when I’m writing these posts). Most of the time I type one sentence and then stop and stare out the window. I know writing isn’t a race, but, fuck, if it was, I was definitely losing.

1. I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to write during the pandemic. First, to have had the time because our semester effectively ended in mid-March. And second, to have been able to write. I know many people felt unable to write under those conditions, which is totally understandable. Writing, in those days, was my anti-anxiety medication. That and the many gatherings we had in our backyard with friends. I could not have survived without either and will be eternally grateful to the people who helped me through.

2. I’m sort of proud of the title, which is Sex of the Midwest. Sort of like Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, one of the greatest short story collections ever, really. But also, what’s the opposite of the Midwest? Sex. Sex is the opposite of the Midwest. This is a hilarious joke to me and I will enjoy it thoroughly until someone makes me change the title.

3. Okay, I don’t know that for sure. I’ve never tried to write a memoir, but I suspect it might be equally difficult, if not slightly more difficult, wading around in the mess muck of your own life. I appreciate

Lauren Hough

’s honesty about how hard it is to write her second book.