My guest post for the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) blog.
One question people ask me is, “How on earth did you manage to write a book in a pandemic?”
I submitted the first draft of the manuscript 12 days before the UK went into lockdown, but I still had weeks of drafting, cutting and revising left to do.
Being a NaNoWriMo winner in 2018 (whoop whoop!), I was used to churning out words at speed. But this was a work of nonfiction involving interviews, studies and checking sources. Also the topic was both deeply personal and hugely important. I couldn’t just wing it. Here are 5 lessons I learned in the process of writing a book during a pandemic:
Lesson 1: It’s Ok to Freak Out
I spent the first weeks of the pandemic scrolling news feeds 24-7 and becoming an amateur epidemiologist via the School of Google. Similarly, when I started writing the book, I lost entire days to ‘research’ (aka Facebook).