When the Story You’re Writing Changes

One of the hardest things to do was to let go of the story I thought I would write.

light blue pencil with a curved shadow against a neutral background
(Israel Sebastian / Getty)

My next book, A Living Remedy, will be out in April. Last month, when I shared designer Vivian Lowe’s gorgeous cover for it and began begging for preorders (as writers must), it felt like the beginning of the book’s life as a public object—something I find both thrilling and nerve-wracking. For a long time, my book was like a little island, one that I lived on alone with only the occasional visitor. I am eager to share it, but I don’t yet know who will find it or how it will be read. I know that it is my whole heart. I know that I’ve never worked harder on anything.

Until I began writing this newsletter, I was private about my writing process. I tend to feel that something is risked or lost when I’m too forthcoming about a work in progress—I’m protective, I suppose, when I’m still figuring out what it wants to be, and I would rather tell you about it when I feel I’m on solid ground. I keep thinking about something Megha Majumdar said during our conversation a few months ago, about writing “quietly”: “Every book is an instrument of communication, and so it often feels like you want to have a certain reverence for that instrument … The thing you want to tell [people] about the book is the book.”

When I write, I rely a great deal on planning and preparation—once I’ve plotted something out, I believe that I can complete it. I always knew that this book would be a memoir touching on personal and generational grief, how this country abdicates responsibility for the health and well-being of those who live here, the ways we scramble to support and care for each other when systems fail us, and what it can mean to survive and navigate through deep loss. But my life and the entire world changed after I began it, which meant that the story changed too. My outline was useless; plot points I’d thought of as important landmarks shifted or disappeared entirely. I had to start over, and start over again, and learn how to write about things I never thought I would.

The form changed, too, as I worked on the second draft. I had conceived of it as a memoir in essays, a tight collection of pieces that could be read and considered individually while working together as a whole. I was quite attached to this idea early on—when I sold the book, I’d already drafted several essays for it. But when I began to rewrite it in late 2020, the new narrative grew in a continuous arc, novel-like, and I couldn’t see a way to force it into any other shape. The essays I’d written early on either got cut or turned into chapters. I still haven’t given up on the idea of writing a linked essay collection—it’s a construct I enjoy as a reader, one I’d like to try—but I’ve accepted that that’s not what this book is.

One of the hardest things for me to do was to let go of the story I thought I would write. My mother got sick, the pandemic hit, my life was unrecognizable to me, and I found myself trying to write my way through something far more tangled and arduous. It was frightening to start over again, humbling to realize that first one timeline, then another, wasn’t quite right. Even after I’d assembled all the pieces of the new story, it took me months to figure out how to put them together. It felt impossible, most days—until it didn’t. Eventually, I stopped feeling so afraid and learned how to listen to the new story. I am still shocked at how suddenly my thinking shifted from “This book will take me another five years to write” to “This book may be close to done.”

As an editor, I am supposed to trust in the revision process. I do, when I work with other writers, but it can be harder to maintain that confidence when it’s your own writing and you are on draft three of you-don’t-know-how-many. It helped to share my twice-rewritten manuscript with a few trusted readers—when other people believe in me, I find it easier to believe in myself. I was encouraged when a friend and editor read it and said that my efforts to reshape it were on track; I just needed to have more faith in my own instincts.

“You’ve been making the right calls all the way through,” she said. “When in doubt, trust yourself.” In the future, if I’m struggling to do just that—particularly if the story I’m working on changes entirely in the writing of it—maybe it will help to remember this book and how I had to stop looking backward, obsessing over the trail I thought I’d lost, in order to know where I was.

Nicole Chung is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter I Have Notes. She is the author of A Living Remedy.