Don’t Trust the Process
If you want to succeed, you must learn to engage with your process — instead of blindly trusting it
About nine months before I wrote my first book, I told my former high school English teacher to stop asking when I was going to write a novel.
“I’m never going to be that kind of writer,” I explained. “I’m a critic. I write nonfiction.”
As a PhD student, what I said was true. I loved being an English nerd, and I was good at reading other people’s books and thinking through the problems they presented.
As the person who had taught me literature, my teacher understood. But maybe she also sensed the truth: There existed a secret part of me, one I’d papered over with critical essays, that longed to make rather than just dissect.
Because I had papered over that part, I had decided long ago that I wasn’t any good at creative writing because it was so hard. Ideas for essays, on the other hand, came to me easily. Reading a book, any book, turned my brain into something resembling the finale of a fireworks display. I could see multiple opportunities for arguments about gender, sexuality, power, and all the other juicy theories I’m obsessed with.
