Why I Took Five Years to Write a Novel

On October 7, 2021, I started working on a novel. There was a series of loose concepts I thought about for the few years prior and the desire to make them somewhat coherent. Yet a miserable group cab ride on the way back from an engagement party sparked an idea so vivid and visceral that I stayed up all night taking notes. (I would continue to take notes for the next eighteen months).

On January 2nd, 2024, I "finished" this novel and put it in a drawer. I thought about it for the better part of 2024 and went about my business until the election. After the election, I realized that some of what I wrote seemed not only a tad prescient, but also ended as a real bummer. (This was also confirmed to me separately by folks in the know.) 

Around the start of 2025, I began to rewrite the end into something rather hopeful, which took about nine months of planning and removing close to 60,000 words (which, coincidentally, is about the size of the draft at the moment). After extensive rewrites and some careful edits, I finished this draft of my novel — as there are always more — on the evening of Monday, March 9th.

Why it took me this long to get a draft that I felt comfortable putting in front of others and how I can avoid such errors is worth rehashing — to help others working on creative projects, sure, but also helped me externalize what I can avoid doing in the future.

An Erratic Timeline

In 2021, I walked a mile and a half to the Artist and Craftsman Supply (once in Park Slope, now in Sunset Park) to buy a few cork boards, some index cards, and a bunch of push pins. For the next few months, I plotted out the book, developed characters, and generally figured out how everything would weave together (or if/why they would). I have no problem showing you one of these boards, currently sitting in my attic, as none of it makes sense to anyone but me at the moment and my handwriting is atrocious.

After arranging, rearranging, adding, and removing cards, I had the basis of an outline, which I added to a Moleskine notebook along with scattered notes related to my book. (I would eventually fill two of these notebooks, at about 400 pages worth of notes alone.) I purchased a Decomposition Notebook to start writing the novel freehand, where I wrote the first third of the novel — averaging about 120 words a day, mostly on nights and weekends.

By the time I was a third through, I found myself slightly dissatisfied with a structural choice I made and stopped writing. I spent close to eight months stewing on this decision, dealing with some level of writer's block and avoiding the novel. Yet eight months later, I realized I could, in fact, write my dissatisfaction about a choice into the novel itself, which not only fixed my issue, but renewed my passion for continuing the project.

Around winter of 2023, I took what I had so far — about 45,000 handwritten words (never mind the pages of crossed-out material and line edits), wrote them word-by-word in Microsoft Word, and spent the rest of 2023 finishing the manuscript. I truly loved what I wrote, and much of that Word doc is what exists in my current draft today. I just didn't love the ending, so at the start of 2024, I put the book aside, focused on work and life, and only thought about the novel on occasion.

Sometime after the election in 2024, I watched Bicycle Thieves on the Criterion Channel, which indirectly got me thinking about the novel again. Just as the horrible cab ride of October 2021 sparked the idea for the novel but had nothing to do with its contents (I had written it in early in passing but edited it out immediately), the classic Italian film got me thinking about a more hopeful ending that didn't leave the reader frustrated. Thus, I spent most of 2025 figuring out what this would look like, writing and rewriting the first few thousand words of this ending, developing character voices that differed from the remainder of the book, and ultimately planning out the entire trajectory of the book's end that matched thematically with everything that came before.

I moved the Microsoft Word draft into Scrivener, a convoluted and somewhat antiquated writing app and one that I regret ever using. From there, I just wrote when I could from December to earlier this week, writing and rewriting until I felt satisfied with the end and the book as a whole. On Monday night, I emailed some friends about what I did (asking them to read a draft in a couple weeks), printed out my manuscript, and started line editing one last time before I sent out drafts for review.

What I Would Do Differently

In five years, I used note cards, two Moleskines, a notebook, Microsoft Word, Scrivener, and now my paper manuscript to write and edit my novel (in that order). These are a few mediums too many, and though I will continue planning out my next works the way I did with this one, I'll stick with one medium for the entire duration of drafting, as shifting between the physical and digital world took quite some time and added stress. 

A lot of the time lost between writing was less about uncertainty of what I was writing but how it would be perceived. As I have over a decade in content, comms, and marketing, I am hyper-aware of how the micro and macro of a message could be received, and years were lost in the process worrying about an audience finding concepts, forms, and even styles in this book to be stupid. A lot of self-doubt went into this novel, and it took moving past that to finish the book. Twice.

Finally, I would make more time for writing. After so many years, I finally have a routine where I can write in the morning, go to work, and take my new MacBook Neo to a public workspace and write well into the evening (still mostly on weekends, for now). Previously, I would write when I had the energy, time, and patience, which only happened in spurts over the last five years.

I'm currently in the middle of editing the manuscript with a red pen before I send it out to friends and peers for critiques. After considering everyone's comments, I'll move on to another draft this spring, which I aim to finish as quickly as possible. The novel could go a few different places from there. For now, I'm having fun reading the sum of the last five years of work, discovering new things each time while remembering where I was in life when I wrote certain sentences. It's a fun project, one that still has a ways to go and hopefully one I get to share with countless others in the future.

Recommended Resources and Tools

Decomposition Notebooks or Shinola Ruled Journals
Micron Pens (of which I use a special size not made in the US)
Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell
Blick, who is staffed by people way more generous and kinder than any other art supply chain in NYC