For years, I’ve struggled with finishing novels and stories. I’ve been sitting on one since 2012, writing drafts, writing outlines endlessly. I feel a little as though I’m perpetually on a diet, falling off, restarting. That doesn’t do wonders for anyone’s productivity.

I also had a pathological need to write a Great American Novel. I was an English major, an English Master, for Pete’s sake, and I needed to be Serious.

Then I started reading again, not comtemporary literary fiction, not classics, but stories that weren’t Serious. I read Emily Henry’s Beach Read, and I realized that it was exactly the kind of book I wanted to write. It’s women’s fiction, and I hadn’t read it before, exactly because I bought into the pejorative narrative around it: it’s about relationships and families and small stuff. It’s not small at all–they’re the events and wanderings and hopes and catastrophes of life. Beach Read showed me that I don’t have to write about tragic figures in elevated tones. Characters can feel real, flawed, and dealing with deeply personal shit, and they can feel to readers as though they’re more than the sum of their problems. I can tell my stories and be serious and upbeat and sometimes funny (hopefully intentionally) without being ponderously Serious.

And I never really wanted that to begin with. I want other people to immerse themselves in the worlds I tell them about and care about the characters who live there. I want them to feel a little sad that the book ends. That’s the pleasure for me of reading: that’s reason I wanted to write fiction from the very beginning, at eight years old. I wanted to pull off the most dazzling magic trick I’d ever experienced.

The unfortunate thing is that I carried that Serious baggage for years, and it kept me from writing. It didn’t keep me from telling the stories to myself, just from writing them down. The self-editor’s comments were so strongly worded that I could never finish. I know now that I was trying to write the story for the wrong audience, the wrong genre. It didn’t have the meaning of Woolf, or the language, and so I had a parade of failure in my head.

But as I’ve said, I have a plan. I have a shiny new writing desk at home that’s intended only for writing–no work, no play, no bill-paying, just writing. I have a story in mind, but it’s not strictly outlined. I know what happens roughly, but I’m not going to hem in invention yet. Three months is 90 days: 1,000 words a day gets me to a 90,000 word draft. Weekly (on Sundays), I’m going to post here on my progress, even if no one is paying attention.

That’s Draft 1, establishing characters and plot. Draft 2 is cleaning up structural issues. Draft 3 is reinforcing theme. Draft 4 is cleaning up, line edits and such. The plan is to be done within a year. This is the theory, anyway.

Here we go.