I believe in writing every day. Sometimes that means a hundred words. Sometimes 2500. Did you hear me say good or great words? No, I didn’t say that. Today, let’s talk about the actual writing life we should achieve.
A Writing Life You Can Actually Live
Three proposals, a Vermont retreat, and figuring out the writer I want to become.
Before I get started, this week’s download, the writing goals calculator, is available in my resource shop for free. Get the link at Substack or my website.
I just turned in three book proposals. One new idea. Two reimagined, tires kicked, engines inspected.
And absolutely no pages of an actual story.
I need my agents buy-in and I don’t know those people yet. We’re still being introduced. I’ve just stocked piled articles in Newspapers.com, Wikipedia and YouTube Rabbit holes, and the occasional ancient tome on my shelves.
But in Vermont—the writers who shared that retreat with me—gave me space to think about what I want my writing life to look like over the next three years. The answer kept coming back to multigenerational stories that tie our present to a vibrant, often hidden past. I want to focus on sisterhoods carrying love, ambition, secrets, and unfinished business across time.
Apparently, even after all these 31 books, I’m still asking: Who do I want to be when my writing life grows up?
Truthfully, that’s a question that all of us need to ask and keep asking. Heck, it’s the secret to staying young.
Everyone’s trying to figure themselves out. Writers do it on the page and in front of an audience.
As we figure ourselves out, we ask:
What do we want to do?
Whom do we want to become?
All while balancing the real world: Those other occupations that pay bills. And what about our relationships? Do we have them? Are we keeping them: Family, friendships, peers, romantic and platonic coexistence—all of this makes up our complicated and gloriously messy thing called our lives.
Did I mention the money? Most of us need it—unless we’re nepo babies, but sometimes that gift doesn’t work out. We all do need the money.
But I digress.
I’m not a writer who can sit still. You may have figured that out already. Yet every time I commit to a book idea, I need it to do more than sound interesting. It has to stir something inside me. It has to give me a reason to say: Yes. These are the people, the questions, the history I want to spend the next year or two researching, writing, revising, promoting, and talking about.
A proposal can be a few pages. The commitment behind it is considerably larger.
As authors, we spend a lot of time worrying about our brands. Some of us are still trying to figure out what that word means when applied to a human being who occasionally writes in pajamas and tiaras.
My slightly Type A personality has helped me think about the direction of my work from the beginning. I knew I wanted to tell historical stories. My first avenue was Christian fiction. Then came Regency romances. My work expanded into historical fiction that brings the Caribbean diaspora into view—a history my very Southern American education too often skipped or downplayed. Or obliterated—thanks to United Daughters of Confederacy.
What I like to write or read changes as my curiosity grows. Each book has helped me see more clearly what I want to explore in the next.
Vermont gave me time to listen to that curiosity without immediately demanding a word count from it.
Which brings me to this week’s lesson: Get comfortable in your own writing skin.
It’s tempting to want to be the writer who sits down and produces a 80,000-word book in three or four weeks. Sounds enviable, but often we miss the preparation that it took to get there. Some writers I know who work at the speed of light have already spent months deeply studying their subject, developing their characters, and figuring out the story—before sitting and writing.
We as voyeurs see the words arriving. We miss the months of work that made it possible.
My friends call me a fast writer. We’ll sort of. I can produce a lot of words when I’m sufficiently caffeinated, the research is done, the characters are clear, and I know where the story needs to go.
There have also been times when my Type A personality took the wheel and I checked myself into a hotel with room service to crank out ten or twenty thousand words in a day.
That habit can get expensive in more ways than hotel bills.
Sleep deprivation. Health. Family time. Isolation. Everything leaning out of alignment with that elusive word: balance.
Even if I can do this pace, I must consider what it costs me.
This week’s writing tool is the word-count chart. Download it. Keep it displayed. It shows how steady effort adds up and gives you a realistic sense of how long a draft might take at your current, realistic pace.
A hundred words a day.
A thousand words a week. Whatever fits the life you actually have—these numbers help you make a commitment and understand how long it will take before you can type “the end.”
I think some people become frustrated because writing a book “takes too long.” They have a wonderful idea, perhaps even a strong beginning. Then the middle stretches out ahead of them. Life gets busy. The ending seems impossibly far away.
The story goes quiet in a notebook or a forgotten Word document.
Writing a book—even writing a blog post—requires more than motivation. I believe you need fire in your belly. I want you to care deeply about what you’re putting on the page.
But you also need to know yourself well enough to help that fire survive an ordinary Tuesday.
How much time can you give this work? How quickly do you usually write? What preparation helps you move forward? What schedule can you return to when the initial excitement settles down?
I believe in writing every day. Sometimes that means five hundred words.
I didn’t say good words.
For me, much of the magic happens in editing, and I need something on the page to edit.
If you’re a weekend writer, that’s okay, too. Build the habit around the time you have. Make writing important enough that it gets a place in your life.
Be careful about repeatedly teaching yourself that your writing time is the first thing you can give away. An emergency is an emergency. But when every invitation, errand, or passing distraction takes precedence, you may find yourself waiting for time that never arrives.
Writing is a commitment.
I know. A scary word for some folks these days.
You can love it and fight with it. You can get frustrated, need a break, and come back wondering why these people in your head won’t behave. There will be highs and lows, rejections and wins, sentences you adore, and a whole chapter you would prefer never to discuss again.
That’s the love story of writing.
I want a writing life I can look back on and say: Yes, I probably should have gotten a little more sleep. But I love what we’ve done together.
So as I wait to get properly acquainted with the people in at least one of those three proposals, I’m focused on sustaining a life that will help me tell these stories—and still leave room to live my own.
You should too.
This week’s book list includes my Vermont crew’s books:
* The Inevitable Undoing of Zahara Douglass by Leslye Penelope — A woman searching for the missing twin sister no one else remembers uncovers family secrets and supernatural powers that could threaten the world.
* Private Bodyguard by Veronica Forand — A security operative must protect the tech billionaire she blames for her brother’s breakdown while confronting their tangled past and unexpected attraction.
* Where the False Gods Dwell by Denny S. Bryce — Three women accompanying Katherine Dunham’s 1935 research expedition to Jamaica forge an unlikely sisterhood as personal secrets and a deadly storm threaten their futures.
* Analiese Rising by Brenda Drake — A teenager investigating a mysterious list discovers she can raise the dead and becomes entangled in a dangerous war between gods.
* Southern Discomfort by Sharina Harris (Preorder)— After a scandal threatens her career, a vegan influencer returns home to repair her relationship with her mother and reconnect with her family’s magical heritage.
* Seasick by Kristin Cast and Pintip Dunn — Two former best friends must work together to unmask a killer when a celebratory yacht trip with their privileged classmates turns deadly.
* A Deal at Dawn by Vanessa Riley — A viscountess strikes a desperate bargain with the ailing duke she once loved to regain access to their daughter, confronting betrayal, rekindled passion, and threats to their child’s future.
And Mahogany Books is my Indie of the week. Check them out for these books or any of mine.
You can also try one of my partners in the fight, bookstores large and small, who are in the trenches with me.
You can find my notes on Substack or on my website, VanessaRiley.com, under the podcast link in the About tab.
Here’s the link for today’s free workbook download.
Let’s write together. I need you. That’s the truth. Like, share, subscribe, and stay connected to Write of Passage.
Thank you for being here.
I want you to come again. This is Vanessa Riley.
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