Smoking Diary 25: The Lonely, Slightly Ridiculous Path of Writing a Book

by Sarah Hepola

The glamorous part

A book comes into the world, and the reader thinks: Well, of course it happened that way. But it almost didn’t. Most books are a string of false starts, embarrassing stumbles, and best guesses, and if you’re lucky, and patient, you keep going.

At 5:09am on a Sunday, your narrator does not have her laptop nearby, so she offers an audio ramble about: Her upcoming book deadline, all the drafts she’s written (not successful), the uncertainty of creative projects (painful, humbling), woodland elves that might or might not be nearby, the genius of The Truman Show, and why a person writes a book anyway.

One question that emerges is: What’s a successful draft, anyway? Much like love affairs — which don’t generally end well, and which also happen to be the subject of this second memoir — all those false starts and mistakes turn out to be instructional. The trick, as ever, is to keep trying.

Why a person writes a book, in the end: The vain but altruistic hope that the story might help someone else.