I Paid Someone To Yell 'F You' To Me Every Week So I Would Finish My Novel

What kinds of things have you done to help motivate you to be productive?

Most people who know me know I’ve been “working on a novel” for approximately 22 years. I’ve started and stopped again and again since college but I’ve never fully finished more than a few chapters. (Unless you count the summer after fifth grade when I hand-wrote 100 or so pages in a journal of what was, as far as I remember, a cross between Judy Blume fan fiction and a “Sweet Valley High” knockoff.)

This was the version of “Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret” I had in 1990 — or whenever it was that I started reading books that were not yet age-appropriate.

“But this time is different,” she says trying to convince anyone reading this but mostly herself….because, for the past three years, I’ve been slowly chipping away at what I hope will become my first published novel.

It is not going terribly! That’s about the nicest thing I can say about this process of pulling thoughts and feelings and ideas out of my brain and shaping them into sentences. It is also not going as well as I would like it to.