I Tried to Avoid Administrative Work. Writing a Novel Was a Poor Way to Do So.

When I first started writing my silly little novel, it was a desperate attempt to escape the demands of what we call “real life.” A pragmatic job? Burgeoning adult responsibilities? I graciously declined the offer. Raised by a single-salary single mum, I saw the tiring routines of being a teacher, nurse or midwife. Now I watched with horror as my friends went off to build those same careers. Not me!

I had been writing since I was a child, mostly to turn away from the actual world and into one of my own making. I kept up this escapist pretense well into my early 20s, which is when I decided to turn my pastime into an actual book. Never mind “making a living.” I am a writer, thank you very much — I have a creative vocation. Being from a low-income family allowed me to milk various grants; between those and my retail job (I was a vicious time thief, scribbling notes under the desk as customers waited), the finances could work. I sat down and began.

I wrote and wrote, falling into a delirious state, the IV drip of my imagination funneling uninhibited into what I was sure was the next “Middlemarch.” In every spare hour, I typed ecstatically … until … things sort of halted. In front of me was a series of rather major problems. The first being that I had an impulse to set the book in Zalipie, Poland, but I knew nothing about Zalipie beyond a charming photograph I had seen online. Also, I wanted my protagonist to have a lucrative career and had heard “underwriting” was a solid profession. But what was an underwriter? And how do you become one? While we’re at it, what’sthe plot of this novel?

Suddenly there were all these tasks to be completed, so many that I had to start a spreadsheet to keep track: Research newspaper clippings from 1980s Kraków; learn some Polish to understand the search terms; transcribe chapters from notebook to computer; write a date-stamped timeline for each character; print and line-edit 200 pages; ad infinitum.

As the list grew, I watched in wide-eyed outrage. It was all administrative work! Bureaucracy! Editing, researching, transcribing, fact-checking — the kinds of things in LinkedIn job ads that friends sometimes sent me and I always ignored. My hopes that this process would be more Hunter S. and less I.R.S. were fading into the ether. I spent months triple-checking possessive apostrophes, mapping Polish Baroque churches I found on Gazeta Krakowska. I circled in red pen the many times I misspelled “separate.” I didn’t so much “flex my creative muscles” as slog through an unpaid internship to myself. I clocked into each novel-writing shift as if I were angling for a raise, opening my laptop at 6 a.m. before going to my retail job. I started to feel jealous of my own protagonist’s straightforward underwriter position, breezily signing off on mortgages in an air-conditioned office — at least she didn’t have to pay for her own printer ink.

Several manic years passed like this: I wrote, rewrote, researched, revised, took workshops, added characters, deleted them, ate countless tinned lentils. And finally, one day, I had a book. I treated myself to lunch with a friend, my hair frenzied, corpus likely unshowered. “I’ve finished it!” I cried out.