I've Been Writing the Same Novel for Thirteen Years

Everything else I write, I write fast.

Ad copy in an afternoon. A book with AI in a day. A LinkedIn post between the kettle boiling and the coffee going cold.

And then there's the one novel I've been writing for thirteen years.

It's called Willful now. It didn't start with that name, and it didn't start as the book it is. But it started with a nerve I've never lost, and that nerve is the reason it's taken this long.

Let me be clear about one thing up front, because it matters. Willful is fiction. It's a novel written as a fake memoir, which is a very different thing from my memoir. The narrator built a ministry and hurt people doing it. I did not. He's a character. The "I" on the page is his, not mine. The whole trick of the book is that it reads true enough to make you forget that, and forgetting it is the point.

It started as a book called Oxygen

Around 2013, right when I was finishing Gripped, I started a different thing entirely.

It was called Oxygen. It opened with a single sentence so filthy and so unbothered that it dared you to keep reading. The kind of first line that tells you exactly what you're in for and gives you a clean chance to walk away. Most people didn't walk away. That was the idea.

I'm not going to print that line here. Not because I'm precious about it, but because it belongs to the book, and the book has earned the reveal. If you know, you know. If you don't, that's a reason to read it.

Oxygen was loud and young and a little proud of itself. Exactly like me, at the time.

Thirteen years of it refusing to be finished

Here's what nobody tells you about a book you can't let go of.

It grows up while you do.

The version I started in my twenties was a provocation. A dare. All nerve, not much underneath. I kept picking it up over the years and every time, the person picking it up had changed, and the book he'd written no longer told the truth he now knew.

So it changed. The dare became a confession. The provocation became a memoir voice, quiet and unreliable and far more dangerous than the shock ever was. Oxygen became Willful. A story about faith, and the machinery people build around it, and the specific damage a person can do while completely convinced he's doing good.

None of that is my life. All of it is true in the way only fiction gets to be true. That's the tightrope. That's the thirteen years.

Why fake memoir is the hardest thing to write

Writing a novel that reads like a memoir is a special kind of hard.

Real memoir has the safety net of "it happened." You can lean on the facts. Fiction that wears memoir's clothes has no net. Every detail has to feel remembered, not invented. The narrator has to lie to himself convincingly, in a voice so intimate you trust him right up until you shouldn't.

You can't fake that in a first draft. Or a fifth. You have to become a better writer than you were, and then wait to become a better one again, and let the book stay open long enough to catch up to you both times.

That's the real reason it took thirteen years. Not writer's block. Not laziness. The book kept demanding a version of me that didn't exist yet, and the only way to write it was to go become that person and come back.

Fast is a skill. Slow is a different one.

I'm proud of how fast I can work. Speed is a real craft and I'll defend it against anyone who thinks good and quick can't share a sentence.

But Willful taught me the other discipline. The one where you protect a thing for over a decade. Where you resist the urge to ship it early for the small dopamine of "done." Where you let a book be smarter than you and refuse to dumb it down to finish it on schedule.

Both are craft. Most writers only ever learn one. I needed the fast one to make a living and the slow one to make the thing I'll actually be proud of when the making stops mattering.

It's almost here

Willful is coming. After thirteen years, that sentence still feels illegal to type.

When it lands, it's going to read like the most honest thing I've ever written. It isn't. It's the most carefully built lie I've ever told, in service of a truth I couldn't get to any other way.

That's what a novel is for.

If you want to know where the door is when it opens, keep an eye on the books page. It'll show up there first.

Thirteen years. Worth the wait, I think. 😘