Writing a book is like childbirth

Have you ever seen a movie where the plot is the main character is a writer and they have a book deal? And they can’t write it? And they’re dodging their editor?

That was sort of the subplot of The Beast in Me and I feel like I’ve seen it before. Writers are self referential, I guess. The Shining was like that… sorta. But in that movie, he actually goes insane and never finishes the book, which I hope doesn’t happen to me. 😬

This whole trope though, I have to say, it’s not at all a sympathetic. When I’m watching, I’m just like this person is an unlikeable POS.

Boo hoo! There are people literally working in coal mines! And your job is to write a book! And you have the audacity to complain and be a baby about it, maybe develop a drinking problem or whatever? It’s the ultimate first world problem. Just be an adult, and do your job.

Sometimes when I’m working on a writing project my butt falls asleep and I think to myself, I am the softest human being alive. Truly. HOWEVER, writing is still very hard sometimes. Writing a book is hard.

Don’t get alarmed or anything, if you are my editor and reading this, which I am confident will not happen otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. I have actually written 46,000 words in my book. Out of 75,000 that I promised. I’m actually on track to finish when or before I promised (the end of the year). I am not a procrastination kind of person.

STILL THO. Every day I think to myself, I CANNOT do this. And I’ve written a book before! I also wrote a blog post about how writing a book is not that hard 🙄, so I must have blocked it out from last time.

Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the sheer work of it, how slow it’s going. How much I still have to do.

It reminds me of how I felt during childbirth. Both my kids were 9 pounds at birth roughly. And they were both late. The first one more than a week overdue.

The whole time I was giving birth, I was thinking “I can’t believe this is happening to me.” And also, “I can’t do this.” “Someone help me.” “I can’t do this.”

There were people right there helping me, namely my husband and a midwife yelling “push” and telling me what a great job I was doing. I didn’t feel like I was doing a good job though because I was numbed from the waist down by an epidural and I had never given birth before.

The midwife just keep telling me to push just like I was pooping. I just did what I was told. She told me when to push and I tried to do what she said. But it was all too much though. I was tired.

If you think about pregnancy and childbirth, it’s so nuts. Like if you had never heard of it and someone described it to you, you’d be like, “YOU’RE INSANE. I cannot grow a child inside my stomach and then pass it through my vagina!”

This is something humans have always done though, right? But that doesn’t make it any less impossible somehow. (A lot of them did used to die while doing it to be fair).

My first born had to be induced more than a week overdue. At that point, I was enormous. I had been sick my entire pregnancy. It was all very healthy and uncomplicated other than that. Even in that case, though it is an insane thing to go through. I was overwhelmed and scared.

I had a good birth though, I guess. At the hospital they can really help you. They gave me Pitocin, to induce contractions, and they gave me an epidural when I was 3.5 cm dilated, the earliest you can possibly get it. At the time I was literally screaming in pain. (Either Pitocin-induced labors are hard or I am a big baby. I don’t have any frame of reference.)

I felt like I had already been through so much. Then, the baby is half out and I’m just like, “I can’t do this.” What I wanted so badly was someone to reach in and just pull the baby out somehow.

(Funny enough, that is actually how I was born. Pulled out with metal forceps and apparently it really mangled my head and my dad thought I was dead. So I don’t know if that would have been good.)

Regardless, that’s all I could think. “I can’t do this, someone help me. It’s too much.” The midwife was standing there saying, “you’re doing great, you’re doing it.” And the whole time, I was like “is this lady nuts?” “I’m not sure she knows what she’s talking about.” But also I’m just trying to follow instructions because on some level, my life or maybe my child’s depended on it I knew. Also, I had no alternate course of action readily available.

I couldn’t quit even though I very much wanted to. However many hours later (I pushed for two hours I think) the baby was born. And I was sewed back up and trying to sleep.

It took a few hours but then the reward hormones kicked in and the baby was perfect and I felt like I had won the lottery except better. NEVER in my life have I done anything that everyone I knew approved of so much as pushing out a healthy, post-term 9 pound baby boy with a full head of hair. The first child of a new generation for the family.

Anyway, right now in the book writing feels a little like that time I remember from labor. Where I am just internally rebelling against what I know I have to do. I am just staggered by the weight of it.

I read a book one time — “I’ll be Gone in the Dark” — where the writer died (of a drug overdose) before she was finished. And someone else, her assistant or someone, took up the project and finished it for her. It’s a dark thought and I’m not going to die of a drug overdose (her book was about the Golden State killer), but I keep thinking about someone else finished her book! It has happened before!

That writer, she was sort of the real-life counterpart to the character in The Shining, where a writer loses their mind trying to write a book. The seeds of the problem are laid out right there, by King with isolation, self doubt, being consumed by the unreality of the world you’re trying to create. The writer in the Shining, his escape was into drinking, and then in his case misogynistic (homicidal) resentment.

I read Stephen King’s book On Writing, his autobiography, also. And there are some parallels to his own life but also some differences. He talks about his days as a struggling writer. Contra, the character in Shining, who turns on his wife, King’s wife was his earliest and most important supporter, he says. When King was working as a menial laborer in Maine and they were barely getting by, his wife pulled his Carrie manuscript out of the trash and said “I think you’ve really got something here.” He says if she wouldn’t have believed in him, he probably would have given up on his dream and become some frustrated alcoholic.

When he sold the paperback rights to Carrie, not long later, they were sent for life. But King still struggled with substance abuse for many years. I heard someone say King’s fiction has never been as good since he quit drugs. I don’t know if he was on meth when he was his most productive and creative. But it’s sort of a cliche for writers to reach for stimulants or depressants I guess. Maybe that’s not just a writer but a human thing.

Anyway, I don’t meant to alarm anyone. And I don’t have any substance abuse problems. Though I do relate to the extent that I keep buying expensive coffee and thinking that’s gonna help me be productive. The idea of some external force taking over and helping is very seductive! It’s kinda intense.

When I’m struggling with something like this now, I try to remember that experience in child birth to remind myself that we can do very hard things. Things that seem impossible, people do all the time. Especially a little at a time.

So thank you for listening to my little self pep talk and also, if one of you wants to write the last 30,000 words of my book that would be very much appreciated.