We Need to Talk About Bad Writing

Three years ago I broke my brain. Or, I should say, my brain was broken by grief. That summer my graduate mentor, the writer Aurelie Sheehan, died after a swift and truncated battle with terminal brain cancer. I first learned of Aurelie’s illness in June of 2023, but as I understand it, she received her diagnosis the previous December, and by August she was dead.

The death of a writing mentor is a specific kind of loss. In ways both quantifiable and unquantifiable, Aurelie had perhaps the most significant impact on my development as a writer. She was the only professor I studied under during all four semesters of my time in the MFA program at the University of Arizona, and she had served as my thesis advisor. In the seven years since I graduated, she had written me countless letters of recommendation for fellowships and grants and teaching applications. But more than any of this, my relationship with Aurelie was deeply personal, characterized by love and mutual respect for each other as people and as artists.

In the weeks following her death, I struggled to articulate exactly what Aurelie had meant to me. She was not my friend, though our relationship was friendly. She was not my mother, though she had behaved maternally toward me. When I called my friend Cat Powell to tell her about Aurelie’s passing, she used the term “art parent” to describe the role mentors play in the lives of young writers. That moniker was the most accurate description I’d heard, but even it felt like it failed to fully convey the impact Aurelie had had on my life, especially in my conversations with people who were not artists, and I grew increasingly frustrated by my inability to communicate the exact nature of our relationship. This, I’ve learned, is perhaps the most maddening aspect of grief—the persistent feeling that no one else understands what we have lost because the loss is particular to us.

In the rooms of 12-step recovery, I often talk about the fruitlessness of comparative suffering. I remind people that emotional pain functions in the body exactly like physical pain does. It lights up all the same pain centers in our brains. And because we carry our emotional pain in our bodies, because both emotional pain and physical pain are physiological experiences, our own pain will always be more real to us than the pain of other people. We may empathize with others, but empathy is an act of imagination: It requires us to imagine another person’s experience and call upon similar experiences we have had in order to relate to them. For this reason, other people’s pain is always an abstraction. It is not visceral, which is to say embodied, in the way our own pain is. And though it’s true that perspective can be helpful when discerning the difference in magnitude between our losses and those of other people, comparing our pain to theirs—and by extension our right to feel our pain—is not a productive undertaking. Everybody loses at that game.

But as frustrated as I was by the feeling that no one understood what Aurelie’s death meant to me, my frustration was compounded by the fact that my grief over her death felt inconvenient.

The summer Aurelie died, I was in the middle of what I hoped would be the final revision of a novel I had spent five years writing. With the exception of my sobriety, I had never pursued anything with the same degree of devotion as I had that novel. For 11 months of each of those years, I had written for at least two hours a day on that book. Some months, I wrote for eight to ten hours a day. I’d written the novel three times from scratch, beginning to end. And even during the months I took off between drafts, I was still conducting research for the project. I read thousands of pages of research in service of that book. And after five years, I was ready to be done. I was so close to being done with it.

And then Aurelie died.

One afternoon shortly after her death, I got on my yoga mat and pushed back into downward dog position, and at the edge of my peripheral vision, I literally saw my grief, a presence hovering at the corner of my mat, waiting for me to let it in.

“I see you there,” I said to the room. “I promise I’ll get to you when I can.”

But, I didn’t say. Not yet.

First, I had a novel to finish. I told myself I would grieve once I finished it.

Looking back, I think I convinced myself that maybe I could out-busy my grief. At the very least, I hoped to assign my grief a timetable that would be more convenient for me.

Needless to say, this did not go well.

In a letter for Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round, author Megan Mayhew-Bergman discusses her anxieties about producing a novel she felt she could stand behind. “I didn’t want to write an adequate book,” she confesses. “I wanted to write a good book. My first versions felt adequate, not outstanding.”

Reading Mayhew-Bergman’s words, I felt my own insecurities articulated. I had once told my mother, also a writer, that I would rather write a book that did the thing I wanted it to do and never see that book published, than publish a book that failed to do it. I am a competent writer, and I trusted my ability to write a competent book. But like Megan Mayhew-Bergman, I didn’t want to write a competent book. I wanted to write a great one. To settle for competency would have felt adjacent to failure. And yet, even after five years of drafting and revising, I still hadn’t produced a version of my novel I felt I could stand behind.

And so I persisted revising the novel in an attempt to outpace my grief, and as I did, something happened I could not have predicted. I began to experience an ever-present and unbridled rage. I lost patience for anything and anyone. When someone merged into traffic in front of me without using their blinker, I found myself screaming at them from the quiet confines of my car. I was short with customers at work. I became intolerant of my co-workers. And I knew—I knew—that my rage was my grief coming out sideways. My grief was telling me it would not be ignored. Still, ever the optimist, I tried my best to ignore it. I continued to revise the novel, and I continued to rage.

Then one morning my avoidance of my grief reached its limit. I was standing in my kitchen, feeding my tiny dog his breakfast. The tiny dog was 14 years old and the size of a kitten, and the vet had recently prescribed him a diet of wet food. But the tiny dog had become a bit neurotic in his advanced age, and that summer he had begun to refuse to eat his food unless I hand-fed it to him. Did I mention this was wet food? It was a disgusting process we performed twice a day, and it made for a terrible mess. That morning, I stood over the tiny dog and waited for him to eat his food from his dish, and all of my rage boiled to the surface.

“I don’t know what you want from me!” I screamed at him—though, of course, I knew. He wanted me to feed him from my hand. “I don’t know what you want!” I screamed again. “Eat your food! Just eat your fucking food!”

By then the tiny dog was mostly deaf. He just looked up at me and cocked his head. And in that moment all my resistance gave out. “This is not sustainable,” I said. I was so dysregulated, I felt like an insane person. I was so angry, I felt like I was on fire. So I decided to pause the novel revision and allow myself the time and space I needed to grieve Aurelie’s death. For the next month, I did very little. I read, and I slept. I went to work, and I wept on my yoga mat. And twice a day I got down on the floor of my kitchen and fed the tiny dog wet food from my hand.

“I guess this is just what we’re doing now,” I told him.

Slowly my rage subsided, and my patience returned to me. In some ways, this was the last gift Aurelie ever gave me, those moments with my dog on the floor of my kitchen, because one month later that tiny dog—the dog I got when I was 10 months sober and had lived alongside for the last 14 years—stopped eating altogether and died.

I cannot say for certain whether it was the consecutive losses of Aurelie and my dog, or the proximity of their deaths to one another, but whatever the case may be, the combined grief of those losses broke my brain. I don’t know how else to describe it. In the weeks that followed, I felt concussed. I moved through my days in a haze of distraction. I would arrive at my job and not remember driving there. I would stop people mid-conversation and ask them to repeat themselves because I could not follow what they had just said. It became impossible to read or do anything that required sustained concentration.

By then I had set the novel revision aside for more than four weeks, but there was other work that needed my attention. Earlier that year I had started publishing a series of essays about the intersection between the writing life and 12-step recovery and mindfulness practice. The first two essays in the series had been fairly easy to write. Each essay had taken a week to draft and another week to revise. The next essay was on the topic of rejection, and it centered around a piece of advice Aurelie had offered me post-graduation about the difference between the creative and business mindsets. The deadline for the essay was approaching, and I thought writing it might be therapeutic, a way to ease back into my creative work while accommodating my new cognitive impairment.

I was wrong.

An essay that should have taken me two weeks to write, took me more than eight weeks to complete. I struggled to track the logic of the argument, the progression from one paragraph to the next. The harder I pushed through my brain fog, the worse the brain fog became. This alarmed me for many reasons, not least of all because I knew I would never be able to finish revising my novel in that condition. Grief had broken my brain, and now even competent writing felt out of reach.

In hindsight, it probably would have served me better had I simply stopped writing altogether and allowed my brain more time to heal. But I’ve learned I am better when I am writing—engaging in a creative practice has become an essential component to my psychological, emotional, and spiritual health—and in the depths of my grief I was afraid to forego it. So I made a different decision.

I decided to put the novel revision on an indefinite hiatus.

And, in the meantime, I wrote a bad book.

We’ve all read them, have we not? The bad books? The books that sold for six or seven figures. The books that were heaped with critical praise and awards. The books that made the bestseller lists. The books that even our most trusted readerly friends recommended. I’m not talking about the books that are not suited to our tastes. I read a lot, and I don’t like the majority of the books I read. This is likely an unfortunate byproduct of my years working as an editor. I am generally inclined to think that most writing could be better, more thoughtful, more carefully developed, or more boldly executed. I also finish every book I start reading because I believe even books I don’t like have something to teach me about the craft of writing and the art of storytelling. I’m not talking about those books. I’m talking about the books that when we read them seem to us obviously and objectively bad. I’m talking about the books that leave us bewildered, wondering how they got published in the first place, or why they performed so well in the market. I’m well aware that none of these judgments are actually objective. I’m not delusional. And yet I remain convinced that everyone who reads enough has read a bad book.

By late October, I was still deep in my grief and my brain fog still had not lifted. If anything, it was worse. There remained a ceiling to the level of critical thinking I could access. I simply could not get my brain to switch over into a higher gear. I finished the rejection essay, but only with tremendous effort, and the difficulty with which I had completed it convinced me I did not have the mental bandwidth I needed to return to the novel revision. I called my friend Cat to complain about it.

Cat was in a tight spot of her own. That fall her second novel had died on submission, the second novel of hers to die on submission in three years. There are many reasons a book fails to sell—anyone in publishing will tell you this—but Cat Powell is one of the best writers I know, and from my perspective, her novel’s failure to sell had very little to do with the quality of the work and more to do with the work’s representation. Either way, the disappointment was crushing. Cat had decided to part ways with her agent and was debating whether to throw in the towel altogether.

“I cannot imagine writing another book only for it to not sell again,” she told me. “I don’t think I’d survive it.” Then Cat paused and said, “But I have an idea—and it’s a good idea, I think—for a short novel I could write.”

“That’s weird,” I told Cat. “I had an idea for a short novel this past summer.”

This was true. Around the time I learned of Aurelie’s diagnosis, I awoke abruptly from a dream. That summer a family of foxes had burrowed into the hillside below my bedroom window, and in the early hours of the morning, one of the foxes had screamed and startled me out of sleep. I shot upright in my bed, and there it was: an idea for a short and spooky literary novel about a woman who travels to an artist colony to research a cursed play. As I lay in bed for the next hour, outlining the premise of the novel in my head, I felt that familiar mixture of excitement and dread. It was a good idea, I believed this, but I did not have the time to write it. I was still only a third of the way through the previous novel’s revision. The next morning, I jotted down a few notes in my journal about the plot and the characters. I hoped the idea would stick around. Then I promptly forgot about it.

When I told Cat this story, she got very animated.

“We should write our short novels together!” she said.

I laughed. “Maybe one day,” I told her.

Then I asked Cat if she had ever heard of The 90-Day Novel.

A few years prior, during the early months of the COVID shutdown in the United States, I was taking my daily afternoon walk while I caught up with my friend T Kira Madden on the phone. I was two years into writing my previous novel and had just started the book over from scratch—again. I told T Kira if I ever wrote another novel, I would never write it the way I had written this one. At the time, T Kira was writing a novel of her own. She asked me, “Have you ever heard of The 90-Day Novel?” T Kira explained that though she had not completed Alan Watt’s 90-day novel writing program, she had found the first phase of the process, which consisted entirely of freewriting exercises, extremely helpful. I bought a copy of The 90-Day Novel: Unlock the Story Within shortly after our conversation and read it. The program Watt outlined was appealing, but I felt too far along in my own process to switch approaches midstream. Still, the possibility of using the program for a future project stayed with me. If I ever wrote another novel, I told myself, I would give The 90-Day Novel a try.

After my conversation with Cat, I continued to percolate on her suggestion that we write our short novels together, and I wondered whether using Alan Watt’s program might be a way for me to keep writing without doing any further damage to my brain. I brought the idea to my recovery sponsor during our next monthly meeting. Cathy had been sober for more than three decades and was herself a writer, teacher, and visual artist. She had watched me persevere through the years I spent writing my previous novel, and she understood the impact Aurelie’s and my dog’s deaths had had on my cognitive faculties.

“I think it’s a great idea,” she told me. “I think you’re too saturated with this other project, and you seem genuinely excited by the prospect of writing something new. At the very least, it might give your brain the time it needs to heal so you can return to the other book.”

By that point in my recovery, I had learned to follow directions, so after our meeting I went home and took a picture of The 90-Day Novel with my phone.

I texted the picture to Cat.

Okay. I’m in, I wrote.

The following week Cat ordered a copy of Alan Watt’s book and we scheduled a phone call to make a plan. I like plans. I like setting plans down with paper and pen. It’s one way I’ve learned to clarify expectations and to hold myself and other people accountable for our actions. During our call, Cat and I made a list of agreements (with each other), commitments (to ourselves), and goals (for our projects) in preparation for The 90-Day Novel.

To begin, Cat and I agreed that for the next 90 days we would follow the program laid out in Alan Watt’s book. Every morning, we would read Watt’s entry for the day and complete the freewriting exercises and/or drafting as prescribed. In short, we would do whatever Alan Watt told us to do. Once we completed the day’s work, we agreed to text each other a short voice-message recording to confirm we had done our writing for the day, along with any insights we’d had or resistance we’d come up against. Finally, we agreed to a weekly phone call every Monday afternoon, during which we would process the week’s work.

In terms of commitments, Cat decided she would work on her novel for two hours a day, but I was concerned about my brain’s ability to sustain that level of concentration, so I committed to working on my novel for one hour a day during the initial phase of the program. Once we began drafting our novels in phase two, I would reevaluate my commitment and adjust it if necessary.

Lastly, we set down our goals for our novels. My goals were fairly simple. One, I wanted to write a spooky (and slightly wacky) literary novel. Two, I wanted to write a short novel. I would aim for 60,000 words. And three, I wanted to write the novel in brief, concentrated blocks of text in which none of the dialogue was offset. It was a narrative mode I’d used often in my short fiction, though I’d never attempted it in the longform before.

Clarifying these agreements, commitments, and goals from the outset proved invaluable—and prescient—because at any point in the process we could return to our lists and measure our progress by how well we were abiding them and gauge whether we needed to course correct.

At the end of the call, Cat and I set a date to begin, the seventh of November. If we followed Alan Watt’s program to the letter, we’d finish our 90-day novels on February sixth.

The following Tuesday, we began.

In the days leading up to our start date, I set aside some time to consider what actions I could take to make The 90-Day Novel as forgiving a process as possible. The agreements, commitments, and goals Cat and I had set down would help, but I knew if I was going to write an entirely new novel in 90 days and not overtax my brain, I would need to properly resource myself. The first thing I did was recommit to the intentional resting practice I developed in 2020, by which I would limit myself to four tasks a day, including the novel work. The second thing I did was implement a practice Julia Cameron refers to as “containment.”

In the third installment of The Artist’s Way series, Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity, Julia Cameron cautions artists against discussing work-in-progress. “Talk uses creative power,” she writes. “Talk dilutes our feelings and passions. Not always, but usually. It is only talk with the right person and at the right time that is useful. As artists we must learn to practice containment.” Cameron goes on to explain, “Both a person and a project need a roof over their head. Both a person and a project need walls for privacy. Just as it is uncomfortable to have people enter your home when it is in chaotic disarray, it creates embarrassment and discomfort to show a project too early to too many people. What’s worse, it’s risky. Projects are brainchildren. They deserve our protection.”

I knew from experience what Cameron meant. During the years I wrote my previous novel, I discovered that talking about the work had two unintentional (and unfortunate) effects. First, when the writing was not going well—and the writing was often not going well—talking about my frustrations with other people kept me stuck in an antagonistic orientation toward the novel. I would say things like, This novel is going to be the end of me, or, If this novel doesn’t kill me first. These narratives begged the question: Why on Earth would I want to work on a novel I felt was going to kill me? And for that matter, if projects were indeed brainchildren, why would the novel trust me to write it when these were the stories I told about it? Giving voice to these narratives over and over only reinforced them, and they certainly didn’t leave me feeling remotely encouraged.

The other pitfall I discovered was that so long as talking about the novel was on the table, I experienced a constant low-grade anxiety in my interactions with people. When I met up with friends or family, I found myself bracing for the inevitable question: “How is the novel coming along?” Or worse, “When do you think your novel will be done?” The answer was always the same—“I don’t know”—followed by all the familiar stories and a resurgence of my frustration.

So as Cat and I neared our start date, I decided to take Julia Cameron’s advice. I reached out to all the important people in my life and informed them that for the foreseeable future I would no longer be discussing my creative work. For the next 90 days, I would only talk about my writing with Cat and my sponsor. I would tell no one else I was writing a new novel. This decision also provided me a convenient pivot when anyone else asked about my writing. In response, I asked them if they’d ever heard of Julia Cameron or The Artist’s Way. Then I described Cameron’s perspective on containment and told them I wasn’t currently discussing work-in-progress. If they asked me again at a later date, I simply said, “I’m still practicing containment.”

With our agreements, commitments, and goals in place, and the support of my intentional resting and containment practices, Cat and I embarked on The 90-Day Novel. The program is divided into two distinct phases. The first 30 days are devoted to what Watt calls “imagining the world of the story,” and consists of daily free-writing exercises and structure questions designed to lead the writer to a loose outline of their novel. The next 60 days are dedicated to drafting the novel proper.

I bought a large yellow Moleskine notebook, and every morning I read Alan Watt’s entry for the day. Then I set a timer on my phone and responded to the five or six freewriting exercises for five minutes each, longhand. During the remaining 30 minutes of my one-hour commitment, I answered the structure questions.

I knew from my previous reading of The 90-Day Novel that Alan Watt relied on Aristotle’s classical three-act structure and the Hero’s Journey outlined in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as his models for novel writing. I have a lot of respect for the work Joseph Campbell did to popularize mythic narrative traditions, but I also recognize that Campbell was a product of his time, and the Hero’s Journey has always struck me as an inherently misogynist narrative framework. No sooner did I commence answering the structure questions than I found myself resisting them.

“I hate this model of storytelling,” I voice-messaged Cat.

Cat was sympathetic.

“It’s definitely problematic,” she messaged back.

Then, to her credit, Cat reminded me of our first agreement: For the next 90 days, we would do whatever Alan Watt told us to do.

Goddamnit, I thought.

But yes, I had agreed to this.

Throughout The 90-Day Novel, Watt advises the writer never to confuse the story of their novel with their idea of the story. “It’s not that our ideas are wrong,” he writes, “but rather that through inquiry, a more fully realized story emerges.” I was keenly aware from my years as a mindfulness teacher about the benefits inquiry can yield. I also knew that creative constraints could be generative precisely because they push against our habituated patterns of thinking. They produce friction. My agreement with Cat to do whatever Alan Watt told us to do was an example of one such constraint. So as I continued to reflect on the structure questions, I considered how I could adapt the three-act structure and the Hero’s Journey in a way that might sit right with me.

Early on, Cat had jokingly referred to my 90-day novel as an “art thriller.” I knew nothing about the thriller or suspense genres, but I began to think of the novel’s plot as a series of revelations. Some of these revelations would be uncovered by my protagonist as she researched this cursed play. Others would be revelations for the reader. As I envisioned it, each revelation would introduce a question that was only answered by a subsequent revelation, which in turn would introduce a new question. I began to wonder whether I could map these revelations onto the plot beats of the three-act structure and Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.

I bought a corkboard and a pack of yellow index cards (to match my yellow notebook) and commenced scaffolding the plot of my novel with this idea in mind. As I did, phase one of the process became something of a meditation on the many potential narrative arcs of the novel. Like T Kira, I discovered there was real magic in imagining the world of the story, daily, over an extended period of time. A loose outline for the novel emerged, and it emerged organically. I was surprised by how little effort it took. I just kept shuffling notecards around on the board as I answered the freewriting and structure questions and remained open to whatever information I received, like I was taking a kind of spiritual dictation. Even now, I maintain that the first 30 days of The 90-Day Novel are the most useful and brilliant part of Watt’s program.

By the time Cat and I reached the end of phase one, I felt like I had everything I needed, if not to write the whole novel, at least to begin writing it.

Then we transitioned to phase two and all of my openness evaporated.

I took back control of the process and immediately diverged from Alan Watt’s approach.

One of the benefits of belonging to a fellowship of other recovering people is that we’re not all insane on the same day. The same proved to be true about writing a novel alongside another person. With phase one of the program completed, Cat and I began drafting our 90-day novels. I had done the freewriting exercises longhand, but in phase two, I transitioned to drafting the novel on my computer, which has always been my preferred way to write.

This was a mistake.

In phase two, Alan Watt recommends writing 1,000 words a day. For me, this word count was incredibly high. When I write I do a lot of recursive drafting. I edit and refine sentences as I write them, so that the momentum of the narrative voice pushes one sentence into the next, until a block of text locks into place, not unlike George Saunders’s P/N meter approach or Gordon Lish’s concept of consecution. The benefit of writing this way is that my first drafts are usually closer to a third or fourth draft. It is slow, inefficient work, but it is the method I know best, and as I began drafting the novel on my computer, I defaulted to it.

The first day, I wrote 110 words. The next day, I wrote 250. I spent most of that first week finagling sentences. Should the novel be in the present or past tense? I wasn’t sure, so I kept revising between them as I attempted to shore up the narrative voice. By the end of the week, I should have been close to 7,000 words, but I had only written 1,000 words total. I knew what I was doing. I was trying to write the way I had always written, despite my current cognitive limitations, but I felt powerless not to do it. Thankfully, the decision to write the novel with Cat as an accountability partner saved me from myself. 

On Friday of that first week of drafting, I sent Cat my daily voice-message recording and lamented the fact that I had fallen behind. Cat pulled no punches in her response. “You, Benjamin,” she told me, “you are not doing what Novel Daddy Alan Watt is telling you to do.” Cat was right, of course. Once again, I had balked at our first agreement. Luckily, she was there to remind me of it.

Cat advised me to return to the program as it was laid out in Alan Watt’s book. She told me to write 1,000 words a day, and she encouraged me to write them by hand to circumvent my inclination to edit sentences as I wrote them. Cat had determined that four of her handwritten pages amounted to approximately 1,000 words, and she suggested I do the same. I returned to the large yellow notebook I had used during phase one of the program and counted the number of words on a line, multiplied that number by the number of lines on the page, and multiplied that number by four. Again, Cat was right. If I wrote four handwritten pages, I’d hit roughly 1,000 words a day.

Finally, Cat offered me a piece of advice she referred to as the path to god.

She told me to work to the time, not to the task.

For more than a decade, Cat had tutored students preparing for the Graduate Record Examinations. In that time, the most important lesson she impressed upon her students was, “Work to the time, not to the task.” Cat told me her students often misunderstood their fundamental purpose when taking the GRE. Her students believed the task before them was to answer every question on the test correctly. “It’s a lot like being a writer,” she said. “If my expectation for accomplishment is to do it all and do it perfectly, I’m never going to show up for that, because the expectation for accomplishment is too overwhelming.” The goal, Cat told her students, was not to answer every question correctly. The goal was to answer as many questions correctly in the time allotted to them. Working to the time created what Cat called a “reasonable container” for the task. I understood what she was trying to tell me. Endeavoring to write 1,000 words a day and write them perfectly would be too overwhelming, but filling up four handwritten pages within a contained period of time might not be. With this in mind, I recommitted to our agreement to do whatever Alan Watt told us to do. But I also returned to my list of goals and added a fourth goal to it. This is when I decided I would write a bad book.

Most writers I know have heard of author Anne Lamott’s praise of writing “Shitty First Drafts.” As Lamott describes it, a shitty first draft is the draft in which the writer sets aside any and all expectations of writing beautiful sentences, or even a coherent narrative, in order to put down material the writer can later revise.

This is not what I mean when I say I decided to write a bad book.

For context, my previous novel was the most ambitious project I had ever undertaken. It was narrated from an omniscient third-person perspective that inhabited the consciousnesses of a large cast of characters. It moved freely through space and time, pivoting frequently between the present action and memory, history, and backstory. It had a darkly comedic and muscular tone that relied on the discursive nature of the prose. And it had entailed an enormous amount of research into subjects ranging from botany, permaculture, natural philosophy, comparative mythology, homesteading, and—perhaps ironically—grief recovery.

This all made the previous novel an incredibly difficult book to write at the technical level. But like Megan Mayhew-Bergman, I believed the novel’s technical difficulty was what would make the book not merely adequate, but good. It also made revising that novel impossible, given my limited mental capacity at the time.

If I was going to draft a new novel and give my brain the opportunity to heal, I knew I would need to lower the bar. In fact, I suspected I would need to lower the bar as low as the bar would go. So I decided to write a novel that would allow me to rest on my laurels, to rely on every skill that came easily to me as a writer, and to capitalize on many of the narrative conventions and techniques I often found underwhelming, both as an editor and a reader.

This is what I mean when I say I decided to write a bad book.

To start, I decided I would do the opposite of everything I had tried to accomplish with the previous novel. I would write in the limited third-person perspective, hewing closely to the point of view of a single character. I would write in the present tense to keep the plot moving forward. I would prioritize plot over character. I would write little to no backstory, and I would conduct no research. I am not by nature a particularly descriptive writer, so I would write as little description as possible. I would not strive for a specific voice or tone. If the prose felt flat, I would allow it to be flat. If it was funny, I would let it be funny, but I would not aim to be. I would write popcorn dialogue. I would write lackluster narration that conveyed information and nothing more.

I bought another large yellow Moleskine notebook and an old-school visual timer, the kind designed for neurodivergent children who struggled to conceptualize the passage of time. The timer proved to be an artifact of magic. Unlike the digital timer on my phone, the visual timer allowed me to see how much time it had taken to write what I had written and how much time I had left to complete my pages. I soon discovered I could write two handwritten pages in 45 minutes, so I recalibrated my one-hour commitment, and every morning after I meditated and journaled, I set the timer for 45 minutes and wrote two pages by hand. Then I took a 10-minute break, and when I returned to my desk, I reset the timer and handwrote another two pages. I wrote quickly and poorly. Sometimes I switched tenses mid-scene. Other times I wrote scenes out of chronological order. I corrected none of these errors. I just kept pressing my pen forward until the timer went off.

For the next seven weeks, I did this.

This is how I wrote a bad book.

As it turned out, writing a bad book was not as easy as I hoped it would be. Mostly, because writing a bad book triggered a lot of my anxieties about scarcity and time and artmaking. When I write, I commit fully to a project—I’m rarely, if ever, writing more than one thing at a time—and during the years I wrote my previous novel, I had put off a number of other projects because the previous novel was the book I most wanted to write. But it was daunting. I was approaching 40, and though I felt relatively secure about what I had accomplished as a writer, the decision to continue postponing these other projects, in addition to the previous novel—which I had come to think of as the real novel—just so I could write a bad book felt like a risky endeavor.

Two of the projects I had long put off were ideas for nonfiction books that would have required me to compile a good deal of research I had conducted on and off over the years, as well as several months of personal correspondence, text messages, voice-message recordings, and journal entries. I knew I couldn’t begin either of those projects until I had first transcribed and organized that material, but I also knew that doing so would have demanded time and attention I didn’t have while I wrote my previous novel.

But I was no longer writing that novel.

I was writing a bad book.

So as I continued drafting my 90-day novel, I developed one final practice. I called this practice “20/20,” and it’s a practice I still use to this day.

In the evenings when I was not working my regular job, I began transcribing the research for those two nonfiction projects as one of my four tasks for the day. And here, too, I took Cat’s advice and worked to the time, not to the task. I set my magic timer for 20 minutes and transcribed the research for one project; then I reset the timer for another 20 minutes and transcribed the research for the other.

It amazed me how easily my brain accommodated the rote nature of this writing-adjacent work, and how much headway I was able to make on those projects in 20-minute increments, three or four times a week. But more than anything else, the 20/20 practice relieved me of any pressure I felt to make the bad book good.

I used to believe that as a writer who desired to build a body of work, it was important for me to feel equally invested in and satisfied with everything I wrote—that everything I wrote needed to rise to the same level of excellence. And it was in this spirit that I had pursued my previous novel. I first conceived of the idea for that book a decade before I even started writing it. Then I spent another five years working tirelessly to bring that novel into existence. But 15 years is a long time to emotionally invest in a project, and the longer I worked on that novel, the more invested in it I became. In some ways, this was an asset: It motivated me to keep writing and to hold my writing to a high and meaningful standard. But at some point my investment in the novel facilitated the exact thing Alan Watt cautions against: I began to confuse my idea of the story for the story itself. Not in terms of the novel’s plot, but in terms of the novel’s potential. I truly believed that novel could be great—and I still believe it—but my investment in writing it had warped into an attachment to its success, which impeded my ability to approach the novel with any semblance of equanimity. The stakes were simply too high if I failed to get the novel to do the thing I wanted it to do.

The 20/20 practice helped prevent me from making this same mistake twice by distributing my investment of time and attention across a number of projects. Whenever I found myself entertaining fantasies about how brilliant the bad book could be, or how the book’s more commercial sensibilities might appeal to a broader readership, I reminded myself that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to write a bad book. And if nothing else, the 20/20 practice offered me the consolation of knowing that while I was writing a bad book, I was also making real and necessary progress on other projects that were important to me.

As Cat and I neared the end of our 90-day commitment, a problem I had not foreseen presented itself. I was closing in on the final scenes of the bad book a week before the program ended. There had also been a period of two weeks around Christmas when I’d gotten sick and could only write two pages a day. Combined with the false start of the first week of drafting, this meant I was more than 10,000 words behind my 60,000-word goal. If I finished the novel early—and I suspected I would—I’d be closer to 15,000 words short of my short novel.

Every day I did the math in my head, hoping to arrive at a different conclusion. And when I did in fact finish the novel a week early, I began in my panic to write these weird little scenes, spooky vignettes I hoped I could wedge into the book sometime during revisions, just to increase my word count.

Then something miraculous happened.

Three days before The 90-Day Novel ended, I physically recalculated my word count. I counted the number of words on a line in my large yellow notebook, multiplied that number by the number of lines on the page, and multiplied that number by four. With a shock, I discovered my original calculations had been incorrect. I had not been writing 1,000 words a day—I had been writing 1,750. I did the math one more time, just to be sure, and arrived at the same number. Despite the false start and the two weeks of sickness, I had written 90,000 words. I had written a bad book, but I had also written a full-length novel.

I picked up my phone and voice-messaged Cat.

“You’re never going to believe this,” I said.

After we completed The 90-Day Novel, Cat and I took a month off from writing to rest and recover. When we returned to our novels a month later, my bad book was as bad as I expected it would be. But as I read through the initial draft, I could see that something about the novel worked. There was a coherent arc to the story. There was genuine tension and spookiness and humor. There was a real element of surprise as the revelations of the plot unfolded over time. And there was this: The novel trafficked in themes I found compelling about the commodification of artmaking—the seeds of which, I could see, had been planted by Aurelie and had served as the inspiration for the essay I’d written about rejection. The prose was atrocious, but there was something satisfying about the bad book despite its awfulness.

What’s more, the brain fog I had experienced that fall had finally begun to lessen. I still didn’t have access to my usual degree of critical thinking—the kind I would have needed to return to the previous novel’s revision—but I had enough of my brain back that I thought perhaps I could make the bad book a little less bad.

Cat and I scheduled another phone call and agreed to revise our novels together for another 90 days. We used the same agreements, commitments, and goals we had used during The 90-Day Novel, and I continued to implement my practices of intentional rest, containment, writing to the time (not the task), and 20/20. Once we completed those 90 days of revision, we took another month off and repeated the process. As we approached the one-year mark, my bad book was still bad, but it was improving, so I continued to revise the novel for another six months while Cat took a break from her project. With each revision I endeavored to make the bad book just 10-percent better than it had been in the previous draft. That was all the effort my brain could muster. Altogether I put the novel through 22 drafts in 18 months, stretched out over a period of two years, and finished the final revision in October of 2025.

To be clear: I did not set out to write a bad book and instead wrote a masterpiece. That is not the arc of this story. Even now, I remain agnostic about the quality of the writing and the value of the project overall. It is not a great book, but it is a competent one. I could try to sell it, or not. People could read it, or they could not. Either way, that no longer felt like a failure, because the bad book did the thing I wanted it to do: It kept me engaged in a creative practice when my grief had made it impossible to write the way I had always written, and gave my brain the time and space it needed to heal. By the time I finished the final revision, the sharp edges of my grief had softened and my brain had been restored. Now, when I look back on this process from my current vantage, I can see this was only possible because every agreement, every commitment, every goal, every practice, and every constraint I had engaged with had performed the same function.

They rightsized my expectations for accomplishment.

They created a reasonable container for the task.

Shortly after I completed the final draft of my 90-day novel, I received a newsletter from a writer I greatly admire, in which he stated that he wanted everything he wrote to be the best thing he’d ever written. There was a time when I would have related to that desire, but on the other side of having written a bad book, all I could think was, That is the path to suffering. Not everything I write needs to be the best thing I’ve ever written. It can’t be—at least not for this writer—because that expectation for accomplishment is not reasonable. But everything I write can serve a purpose. When I look at the bad book from this perspective, I can see its place in my body of work. Here is a thing I made once. People say that even bad books are hard to write. I know this is true from experience. But I also know now that the value of a bad book cannot be determined by the quality of the book itself. The value of a bad book can only be determined by what writing it did for the person who wrote it.