How Andrea Bartz Wrote Her First Book While Working Full Time

Bustle’s Personal Best is a series on how to identify — and then unabashedly go after — what you truly want, by learning from people who’ve already done it.

Andrea Bartz is the New York Times bestselling author of thrillers like The Herd and The Lost Night. Her latest novel, We Were Never Here, was chosen by Reese Witherspoon’s book club and a movie version is currently in development at Netflix.

But before all that, she wrote her first book while juggling a full-time job. Bustle caught up with Bartz to learn how she made it all work.

What were you doing when you decided “I’m going to write a novel”? Or, at least, “I’m going to attempt to write a novel”?

I was the deputy editor at two magazines, Fit Pregnancy and Natural Health, so I was doing that full time. I’d seen friends write and sell novels, and that was sort of what made it feel possible.

I started writing The Lost Night during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). It’s a long-standing annual challenge that people sign up for all over the world. You all commit to writing 50,000 words in a month — about 1,700 words per day. A writer friend of mine knew that I had a book idea I hadn’t started working on. She was like, “Why don’t we do NaNoWriMo together? We can even make it a contest to see who can write more this month.”

There was something about the short duration of it — it was only 30 days, so I really needed to commit. And the contest part was motivating.

How did you carve out space in your day?

Something that was really helpful for me was the Pomodoro method — that is, working uninterrupted for 20 minutes. Some people do it with different numbers, but I do 20 minutes of uninterrupted work with my phone in another room. And then when the timer goes off, a five-minute break, and then repeat that if need be.

Did you always write at the same time each day?

I’m not a morning person. I was working on this in the evenings, often as soon as I got home from work or if I went to the gym after work, right after the gym.

For me, that worked, because during the day, I could think about where I’d last left off in the middle of a scene, and I could imagine what was going to happen next. And then I could come home and just bang it out.

Did you meet your NaNoWriMo goal?

I wrote basically half of the first draft in that month. And then by the end of the month, I felt like well, sunk cost fallacy. I’ve come this far — I have no choice but to finish it now. I remember thinking at that point that I was pretty far along, which, in retrospect, I was on Step 1 of 1,000.

Meaning you didn’t know writing that first draft was only Step 1 in the lengthy publishing process?

Exactly. Which is probably for the best. It would have been discouraging to know how much work was left to do.

During that year of working full-time and working on The Lost Night, did you feel like you were missing out on things, like not participating in social events or seeing friends?

During NaNoWriMo when I was trying to be super disciplined — I had these very high daily word count goals. I do remember having to come late to stuff or occasionally say no to invites because I was like, “No, I made this commitment to myself — I need to find time to write this.” After that month, I was just writing with my own fake deadlines in mind, and then I was a little bit more flexible.

Some people are very secretive when they’re working on something. ... But I think announcing it to your community gives you accountability, and it also gives you encouragement.

But I also would just tell people I was working on a book, and people respected that. Some people are very secretive when they’re working on something, or they don’t want to jinx it, and I get that. But I think announcing it to your community gives you accountability, and it also gives you encouragement. People will be cheering you on. My friends were so understanding, and, for me, that was really motivating.

How did you stay motivated?

It’s about finding these little pockets of time. And it’s about really committing to yourself and these plans you’ve made, the same way you would if you’d made plans with someone else. Or the way you’d make time for a fitness class you’d signed up for — you have to treat it like a real commitment.

I kept committing to, “Let’s at least get 20 minutes of writing in during the evening.” I’d get in a groove, and I wouldn’t put it aside for weeks at a time. That really helped me live in the world of the book and keep chipping away at it.

Any tips for overcoming self-doubt?

I’m a career journalist. Working on this project, and knowing I would have to do the entire thing and put in lots of work before it could potentially make me money or even potentially become a book was intimidating, to say the least. It’s like the world’s biggest on-spec assignment. I don’t like to write articles on spec — I want to know that it’s going to happen, that it’s going to be published, that I’m going to be paid for it.

I really tried to shift my view to one that I was learning how to write a novel, learning how to be a better novelist and a better writer through this. You have to detach yourself from those questions of “Will this sell? Will this genre no longer be in vogue? Will people hate this topic?” I absolutely had all of those fears. But it was like “just keep swimming.” I just kept writing, and that was the only way to quiet those fears.