It Takes Real Living to Write a Book

How I Love You, Charlie Tanner came to be and what I'm thinking about the writing process these days.

I miss just wandering.

I know that sounds funny—I mean, I just got back from England and that was a wandering trip, wasn’t it? But no…I mean the empty time and free days with a lot of time in nature because that’s where creativity embeds in my bones and I start to come alive.

Wandering in England on the moors, March 2025

Can you relate?

I have a book coming out in about six weeks (another book, I know, this book-a-year thing is intense! But more on that later…), and I’ve been thinking about all the things that had to happen for this story to be created.

First: graduate school in Vermont in the early 1990s. Yes, that far back. I spent time in the forests of Vermont with other writers, aching into my poetry and finding my voice in my early 20s and it was a coming-alive time that was essential to building my identity. Having the courage to go to grad school for poetry when my father was pushing me to go to law school was perhaps the first time I truly listened to myself.

That little voice inside was screaming: You are a writer!! Stop trying to be something else.

And all the voices around me were like: Be a writer? Ha! How will you support yourself?

My very first book, published in 1996 by IM Press, and me with my brother at the book launch party

And despite all the external and societal pressures, I went to grad school and I wrote achingly about my life and my musings and my wonderings and my yearnings and by the end of the two-year program, I had a manuscript of poems and a publisher who packaged it into a book in time for me to arrive at commencement with a box full of my first collection and wow, it was such a moment.

Scotland wandering, July 2022

Second: During my writing sabbatical in Scotland in 2022, I visited a little agricultural commune on the Moray Firth which spills into the North Sea. On the gravel path, I spoke for a while with an older man who had given up his life in New England decades earlier to live in this community and I both admired and feared his journey. Driving away, I thought, “Gosh I’d love to be a part of such a hippie earthy community,” and just as quickly I reminded myself, “No, you’d hate it. So much group-think. You’d never fit in.”

Third: My writing sabbatical in 2023 to Nova Scotia was a gorgeous trip of exploration. I drove from Detroit through Ontario on Canada Day with all the maple leaf flags flying proudly and then into Quebec province, where there was no mention of national pride, and then on to New Brunswick and finally to Cape Breton, where the second language was Gaelic and the rugged land not unlike the Scottish Highlands. (Well, the continental break hundreds of thousands of years ago separated that land mass so it’s no wonder.)

I spent a week driving around Cape Breton, which included visiting my friends Maggie and Kit Davis, who have a little homestead near Bras d’Or Lake, and then I settled in Nova Scotia for another three weeks before driving home through Maine. It was wonderfully empowering and enlightening and that place, Nova Scotia, is so gorgeous and remote and full of its own culture and identity.

All of these experiences influenced the ideas behind I LOVE YOU, CHARLIE TANNER, my third novel and twelfth book, due out on June 12th. In each of these three influential experiences, I had to suspend daily living to just be. To find me. To take time to listen to the creative voices and the birds and the wind.

Please join me for the virtual launch!

If you want to attend the in-person party in Michigan, reply to this newsletter, and I’ll save you a seat.

Can I Tell You a Secret?

I love writing books. I love everything about the creativity it requires, from ideation to writing to editing and refining and even the packaging—cover design with my talented team and packaging and all that. That’s what I love.

See something missing here?

By the time the book comes to be, I am done with it. And yet, that’s where it begins for the world. For don’t we write books in order to share them with others, see how the story lands, maybe even make some money selling them?

Sure, but for me, honestly, I’d be happy just writing and creating the thing and then moving on to create something else. I tell my writing students all the time that it doesn’t matter if they want to publish or not—have a “why” for your writing. Why do this? What do you get out of it? What is your goal?

And 12 books in, I’m realizing my goal is to write a great story and be satisfied with it. Full stop.

The other day I was pondering why I plan ahead so much—travel, work, what classes I’ll teach, the next book, etc., etc. It’s a problem, this planning gene. And I realized that it comes from a time early in my life when I was miserably bored on Sundays.

My senior portrait, 1989…was I bored on Sundays then, too? Uncomfortable in the quiet, alone with myself?

Sundays in the 1970s and 1980s were quiet, dark, empty. And I was uncomfortable in that. There wasn’t anywhere to go or anything to do. And while my mother always forbade us from using the word “bored”—Go find something to do, she’d say—I think I felt alone and lonely on Sundays. I wanted to fill the empty space with conversation with a friend or going somewhere or being busy and ever since, that’s what I’ve done, fill my schedule to brimming until my head spins and my body sags and I am just done with everything.

It’s in the boring, it’s in the quiet, it’s in the empty where the soul lives. Have I been avoiding my soul purpose all these years?

And also, when I am planning the next great adventure, I am not here, in this moment, with whomever is in the moment with me. Always looking ahead, never living in the now.

Sad, isn’t it?

I think that’s why I like writing books so much. I can immerse in a story, and get to know my characters, and see how they take over, channeling through my fingers, and help me tell the story. And then the puzzle of revision, where I look at what doesn’t quite work and figure out how to make it all flow.

That's fun. For me, at least.

I wonder what it might be like to write a book for the purpose of just writing a book. Not to sell it or to publish it, but just to write it. Full stop.

Can I do it? Could you? What would be the point?

Maybe to live in the act of creation and make something beautiful that satisfies me.

It’s sunny in Michigan these days and way too hot for early spring. I’m hoping for rain so we don’t end up in a drought. The birds are so musical. This morning, I woke before the sun and the birds were awfully conversational. The windows were open because I can’t bring myself to turn on the air-conditioning quite yet. I want to live in the shiftiness of the moist air and the fluttering world for just a little while.

Thanks for reading A Look in the Mirror by Lynne Golodner. This twice-monthly newsletter is free for everyone, but if you’d like to support a working writer, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Through June 12th, all paid subscribers will receive a free book of their choice by Lynne Golodner. Click the button below to join in! And also, please share this newsletter with anyone who might find it valuable. All love, Lynne