I wrote a book in a year with work, kids and COVID. Here’s my very honest recap of how I did it.

I had two years. 

Two years, exactly, between the release of my last book, I Give My Marriage A Year, and my new book, The Couple Upstairs. 

It was designed that way. Some authors, once they are lucky enough to have a deal in place with a publisher to put their work out in the world, also get a schedule. Two years is seen as a pretty good rhythm. 

And two years probably sounds like a long time to write a book. If you’ve never met a writer. 

No matter how interesting and unique we think we are, writers generally fall into one of two camps:

They’re either:

This book will take as long as it takes. Don’t rush my process, it could be next year, it could take a decade. 

Or… 

Give me a hard date, make it tight, I like to push to the pressure of deadlines. Three months, here we go. 

Generally speaking (all of this is generally speaking, there is no fail-safe rule book for writing, no matter what someone might try to sell you), working journalists who write books fall into the second camp. If you’ve spent your entire career ruled by strict deadlines, you can’t work any other way.

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For our camp, actions don’t happen without a deadline. Tell me I have to get out of bed without a time frame, and it’s unlikely to happen. I can bounce up at 5am if there’s a train to catch at 5.30, or I can lie there indefinitely, doom scrolling, until a child or a dog literally sits on my head. That’s how my brain is wired, that’s how things get done. Deadlines, deadlines, deadlines. 

If you ask me to do something without a deadline, I’ll smile and say, ‘Sure, I’ll sort that out’. And you will never hear about it ever again. 

So. Now we’re clear on that. 

My new novel is called The Couple Upstairs. The fact that it’s on the shelves at all is a miracle and a mystery. Because in theory, I had two years to write it. But those two years, as it turned out, were 2020-2022. 

You might remember, you might have heard. They were terrible, anxiety inducing years. 

A pandemic closed us down and locked us up. Even in the good bits (the ‘good bits’ are a relative term, but consider them to be when, pre-jabs, case numbers were low and we could leave our homes, have a picnic, maybe venture beyond our LGA), our minds were particularly skittish. Not least because we were having to expend energy on learning things like what LGA we lived in. And what an LGA was. 

As with the deadlines, writers went one of two ways.

I met one (a writer, that is) recently who loved the quiet years. A smaller life had, for her, removed distraction, focussed her in space and time. Allowed her brain to slow and hone in on her craft. “I feel almost guilty saying it,” she said. “But I enjoyed it, I went for walks and I wrote, and that was it.”

That’s not how my pandemic went, friends. 

Mostly because for some stretches, I was locked up with my children. And every parent knows that being in close proximity to bored children is the enemy of getting shit done, because they don’t want you to do your shit, they want you to do their shit. In fact, they need you to. They needed me to learn what Google classroom was, create 25 passwords, do their maths for them, feed them three times a day at least, distract them from their terrifying reality with Marvel movies about even more terrifying realities and they needed me to attempt to convince them that walks, and picnics, and walks with picnics, were fun. 

Add in a long-considered move out of the city, the pain of separation from family overseas in a world of closed borders and the pressure to thrive in my full-time job in uncertain times… It barely needs to be said, but clear writing time was scarce. 

So, how does this book - my closely-held novel about love, lust, longing, age and that fine line that hovers between a passionate relationship and a toxic one – exist? 

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Let me give you a few hard truths I learned along the way.

• Plot vs Pants will only get you so far. It’s said that novelists are either plotters or pantsers. That is, they either plan out every single element of their book before they write it, or they make it up as they go along (flying by the seat of their pants, you see). It will surprise no-one who knows me that I am usually much more on the pants side. My ideas very often get in “flow” when I’m writing, not when I’m planning. But this time around, The Couple Upstairs is “plotty”, as in, it matters what happens when and relies on the timing of every reveal, so I had to focus much more on the planning. And ultimately, with my stressed monkey mind in full flight, that was very helpful, because I could refer to my plan and refocus quickly in the small windows of time I had available to me. Which brings me to…

• If five minutes is all you’ve got, it’s better than nothing. Sometimes I’d panic that I was writing this novel in five-minute blocks. Because the kids were around so much and because my anxious pandemic self was unable to sit in a chair and focus. It’s not ideal. You need stretches of time to settle into writing fiction, to relax into the characters and dialogue. But when I’m writing other things, I frequently have to write in fast bursts. If I am at the office, I am constantly interrupted. If I am at home… well, during the writing of this piece I have had to stop to pick up my son from school. Stop to go and get some shopping while the market was open. Stop while I took my daughter to football practice (and wrote in the car). Stop while we ate dinner and got the kids to bed. This is easily my fifth go at finishing this story today, and I had to accept that this time around my fiction writing would be similar, and flex that muscle instead. 

• A second location is essential. As soon as it became legal and possible to do so, I joined a co-working space so I could still have an “office” to go to to write when I was able. The house we moved to in the country was much bigger than our city flat, but still not big enough for there to be a space I could write where I wouldn’t hear the kids, Brent and the dog either having a wonderful or awful time. Or where I couldn’t see the mountain of washing that needed folding. Or where I couldn’t be instantly invaded. A separate space has always helped me focus, whether it’s a library or an office or an empty friend’s house or an isolated Airbnb in the final sprint. Anywhere that’s not home. 

• Early, early mornings are your friend. Or late nights, if that’s more your speed. It’s a cliché that writing mothers set their alarms at ungodly hours for some clear air to create. But it’s a cliché because it’s true. I could get a solid 45-minute block in before the kids woke up on a good day. I would long for the invention of an entirely silent kettle, so my necessary tea habit didn’t cause them to stir. The hours between 8-10pm are also peak-writing time for me, although as the kids go to bed later and later that’s becoming harder to pull off. 

• Call in some support. Sally Hepworth counselled me to get better at Scrivener (excellent writing tool for long-form projects) and saved me from my wall of post-it notes (although I kind of miss it, we are renting). Tori Haschka took me away for a dual writers’ weekend and helped me nut out some difficult plot points. And, then, of course, when the inevitable happened (you’re about to read about it), I needed more help...    

For each of my books I’ve scheduled some time off from my Mamamia work to do an intense ‘sprint’ to the deadline. Depending how far along I am in the writing process, this will either be a time of revision and re-writing, or a period of finishing off.  

I had booked that time and the kids would be away for some of it, too. This was to be an epic period of finishing off. It was called January. 

And on January the 6th I finally got COVID. 

Not the good kind. I know that’s a flippant thing to say. There is no good kind. But from where we’re sitting with Omicron variant #4542, with multiple jabs in us, we’re quite used to the ‘I had a sore throat for a day and then I was tired’ version of COVID-19. 

I got the kind that had me sweating and sleepless, headachy and addled, short of breath and drained for far longer than I’d imagined. 

I lay in bed, unable to hold a coherent thought, the days clicking down to deadline swimming in front of my eyes. I was scared, I was stressed. 

Friends, I think you think I’m going to tell you that I pushed on through. 

I did not. 

I learned, in January, 2022, that rest is more than staying still. I broke, and asked for a deadline extension, got one, and gave myself some time to actually recover. 

So my last learning, of how to get a project finished when nothing is going according to plan, is… 

• Don’t. Even for those of us who live and die by our due dates, sometimes, you need to get realistic. There is only so much any human can do when the world is ganging up on them. Reach out, reset, and make a new plan.

Hopefully, the book is much better for it, and you can find out for yourself.

The Couple Upstairs is on sale August 30, available in all good bookstores. 

Feature Image: Instagram/@wainwrightholly