Productive Terror: Ten Very Different Writers on How They Got Their Books Done

Jo Piazza on achieving perfection, Susan Orlean on mahjong tiles, David Epstein on sand and stone, plus #1000 words of summer, stickers, and the specter of your own mortality

An author of mine recently asked me if I had any wisdom to share on how she could get her book done. This question haunts me, and I wished I could have given her a succinct and brilliant answer. If only I had some magic words to help my authors finish their books, we’d all sleep better at night (and I would spend far less time negotiating contract extensions).

Nonfiction presents its own idiosyncratic circumstances as most nonfiction books are sold on proposal. When your book is sold, you are handed a signing payment and a due date. This system is a blessing and a mindfuck. A publisher’s belief in you, and their investment, gives many authors confidence and nearly as many a renewed sense of self-doubt. You’re faced with the possibility of failure that can feel very public and uniquely humiliating; that fear can quickly become paralyzing. Even worse, friends and family members love to ask you how your book is coming along, and there is a good chance that when you are being asked this, you’re already feeling guilty about not working on your book at that very moment. (One of my preorder campaign giveaway ideas is a button that says, “Don’t ask me about my book.”)

These dark fears and feelings became one of my best motivations in finishing my book. I wrote TAKE IT FROM ME during an incredibly painful period in my personal life, a time of profound and accumulating loss. Shortly after I closed on my book deal, my marriage fell apart. My dog had recently died. I lost my home in the ensuing divorce, and wrote the book while living in a temporary apartment that inexplicably smelled like nail polish remover. I cried so much I had to wear dark glasses every time I left the house—and then I gave up on leaving the house. It was my first real bout with depression.

At some point, I decided I couldn’t bear to rack up another loss, and that I had to stop eating Peanut Butter Puffins for breakfast, lunch and dinner. One of the plus sides of the kind of religious upbringing where both heaven and hell are very real is I can viscerally imagine both positive and negative consequences. As bad as I felt, I knew failing to deliver my book would feel far worse. I also suspected that handing it in would be the confidence boost I needed. Reader, I was correct. The day my book went into production was one of the happiest days of my life—better than any wedding I’ve experienced. (On that happy note, you can preorder my book here.)

But don’t just take it from me. I wouldn’t wish the circumstances under which I wrote my book on anyone (not even my ex-husband), so in search of more uplifting examples, I went ahead and asked some writers I admire how they managed to finish their books—be it the mindset or method they found helpful, or how one informed the other. I also asked some editor friends for responses from authors of theirs who managed to deliver on time or under unusually challenging circumstances.

While there isn’t one magic trick (or frankly, any) to writing your book, I hope the below helps. If you have any secrets to share on how you manage to meet deadlines, please un-secret them in the comments below.

PS: I headed out on vacation for three weeks, so Delivery & Acceptance will be on hiatus. You can follow along with my Tuscan misadventures on Instagram.

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Adam Higginbotham is the author of the New York Times bestsellers MIDNIGHT IN CHERNOBYL and CHALLENGER, the 2025 National Books Circle Award for Nonfiction. Adam writes the kind of deeply researched yet always propulsive nonfiction that makes you ask, “How the f*ck did he do that?” Here’s what he says:

The short answer would be: terror.

The more considered and practical answer would be: planning. The process of writing both Midnight in Chernobyl and Challenger began in very similar ways, with the preparation of detailed 25,000 word proposals. I started these by reading: secondary sources, accessible primary sources and my own previous reporting, until I could identify a workable overall story arc—and some of the protagonists who might carry it. I broke this down into individual chapter summaries, mapping a complete narrative structure for the book which then provided a guide for my reporting, and for the first draft manuscript. As the manuscript evolved and my research revealed new information, I rebuilt, expanded and cut this initial structure. But having the details of it to work from before I began research in earnest meant that I had a good sense of where I was going and, crucially, how long it might take, before I ever started writing.

Also: terror.

Jo Piazza is the national and international bestselling author of many books, including THE SICILIAN INHERITANCE, which you must read if you love Sicily and/or the Second Season of “White Lotus.” Her new book, EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU, is out next month. Her editor is a mutual friend, and Jo was the first person she thought of when I asked her, “Which of your writers bangs it out?”

I have a mantra: perfection is the enemy of done. If you belabor it as you go along then it will never seem finished. I plow through to the end, know when to hand it off to early readers and editors and don't let myself slack in writing 1500 words a day until I come up with an ending. That ending may change in revision (and so might the beginning) but revision is how you end up with an excellent book. You have to allow yourself the grace for things to change later or it can be hard to keep going when you are stuck.

My client and fellow Substacker Katie Salisbury is the author of NOT YOUR CHINA DOLL: THE WILD AND SHIMMERING LIFE OF ANNA MAY WONG and at work on a cultural history of mixed race identity. Her approach to finishing her first book was very Memento Mori. (I don’t disapprove.) She also made use of Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer community, and you can too.

Having worked as a writer and editor, I had experience with the book making process but nothing prepares you for doing the thing yourself. I started by immersing myself in research of Wong’s world. The first two years of work on the book were luxurious and went by in a flash; partly because it was during the pandemic, which allowed me to get an extension on my deadline. By February 2022, I’d written about half of the book. The full manuscript was due in September 2022.

I realized I needed to speed things up to finish what I thought was four remaining chapters. As I worked through the material, the second half of the book ballooned from four chapters to nine plus an epilogue. For the next five months, I basically did nothing but write. I didn’t hang out with friends, go to literary events, or shower often! It was like being under house arrest. I missed birthdays and weekend trips. The discipline came from a real sense of urgency, not only because the deadline was looming, but because I had been living with the idea of writing a book about AMW for almost two decades, since I first learned about her as a college kid at 19.

I started having these morbid thoughts: What if I die tomorrow and the book isn’t finished? Maybe my husband could finish it for me? I mean, he’s also a book editor and a great writer, but I just knew in my heart, it wouldn’t be the same book. My feeling was, if there’s only one thing I accomplish in this lifetime, it’s gonna be this book. So just finish it, and if I die after that, it won’t matter. I’ll at least have succeeded in this one thing. It was such a relief when I did finally turn in the full draft!

Tactically, one thing that really helped me was participating in Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer. For two weeks straight (including weekends), I wrote 1,000 words a day or at least tried to. Some days I was over, some days I was under, but in the end, I had written about 15,000 words and built a steady momentum for myself that carried into the next few months. I sent my first full draft to my editor at the beginning of August 2022, a month ahead of deadline.

Does Susan Orlean even need an introduction? As it’s rude not to introduce people, Orlean is, in her own words, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of many books. A few of my favorites are SATURDAY NIGHT, THE ORCHID THIEF, and ON ANIMALS. Her forthcoming book is called JOYRIDE. What she sent me looked like a prose poem.

INDEX CARDS

Years ago, faced with a toppling mountain of research material, I remembered reading that John McPhee used big (5x9) index cards to organize before writing his books. I stocked up on them, and began transferring each discrete chunk of information (a fact, a quote, an observation) onto its own card. Eventually I had over seven hundred cards, and I laid them out like mahjong tiles and moved them around until I found a structure for the book. It broke down the huge task into manageable pieces and helped me see the whole of the book in a way I couldn't before that. Even more, the index cards made me feel like I could manage the material and shape it, rather than feeling like I was drowning. All those systems—index cards, daily word counts, and the like—seem so pedestrian, but what they do is free you up to be more creative, more adventurous, more attentive to the artistry, because they provide a nice, comforting foundation to work from. If they ever stop making index cards, I guess I'll stop writing books.

Tessa Fontaine is the author of the memoir THE ELECTRIC WOMAN: A MEMOIR IN DEATH-DEFYING ACTS and the novel THE RED GROVE. Tessa is one of the coaches at the Accountability Workshops, which offers “accountability, community and expertise in anti-workshop format to get your writing done.” She takes the Hemingway effect approach to writing, i.e. “to stop what you are doing when you know what happens next”

Starting work and getting into the zone is the hardest part of each day - once I'm in, I'm good. The thing that helps me jump over this hurdle is to know exactly where I'm going to start each day. Sometimes I write down my starting point when I'm finishing work the day before, so I can jump in there. Sometimes I just think about it when I'm coming home from dropping off my daughter at daycare. Whatever it is, knowing exactly where to start (and not flailing, trying to decide) is one of the big differences between a productive session that moves me forward and panicked, anxious floundering.

Speaking of panicked, anxious floundering, I also turn my wifi off. I am incapable of having it on because I will always jump over to my email for a second, which turns into five minutes, which reminds me to order new sheets, which reminds me to schedule a doctor's appointment. So, no wifi for me.

The third thing I'll say is knowing that my first readers are going to be people I both trust AND respect - my writing group, Annie Harnett, Clare Beams, and Rufi Thorpe. I know they love and support me and so I'm not afraid to show them stuff if it's still a little messy, but I also respect the hell out of them and deeply want to impress them, so I set a date by which to send it to them, and then am VERY motivated to finish and make it as good as I can because I want to win their love. Don't worry about psychoanalyzing that, we can agree it's not pretty. :)

The aforementioned Annie Hartnett is the author of RABBIT CAKE, UNLIKELY ANIMALS and THE ROAD TO TENDER HEARTS; she is also a writing coach and co-founder of the Accountability Workshops. (No, they do not give me a cut; I just like to share helpful resources!)

I use a sticker chart and give myself a sticker for every 500 words written. It helps to have a visual representation of how much progress you're making. We are big on sticker charts in the Accountability Workshops, and we'll do sticker swaps in the mail. I also eat a lot of M&Ms while I write ... I read a study in college that candy helps you concentrate and I haven't questioned it since. Basically the tools I use to finish a book are the exact same ones you use to potty-train a toddler.

I also have a mantra: "keep calm, one chapter at a time." I want to write and edit the whole book in one go, but the truth is, books get done in small chunks over a long period of time, and if I start to get anxious about how long it's taking, that doesn't help at all. Reminding myself to keep calm is important.

My client Dorothy Brown, author of THE WHITENESS OF WEALTH and the forthcoming GETTING TO REPARATIONS, is my own example of an author who really gets it done. In her spare time, she is the Martin D. Ginsburg Chair of Taxation at Georgetown University Law Center. I think her relationship with ego is instructive.

I think I finish my books because I have a day job where writing is expected, if not required once you get tenure. My summers – mid-May to mid-August – come without teaching responsibilities, and I am eligible for sabbaticals every seven years, and teaching leaves more frequently. In other words, I get paid to write and nothing else during those semesters. I wrote THE WHITENESS OF WEALTH, however, without any leaves or sabbaticals so I vowed not to make that mistake the next time! When I moved from Emory to Georgetown, I negotiated for a sabbatical that I used to finish my second book GETTING TO REPARATIONS which is scheduled to be published in January 2026. When your day job is writing your book, it’s a lot easier to get the book done!

The other reason why I believe that I complete my books is because I continually overcome my fear of showing my work to editors/others. Law professors typically present their works in progress to their peers to get their ideas refined and the scholarship improved. Feedback is sometimes helpful, and sometimes not – but I long ago got over the hurdle of having people judge my writing. It is a leap of faith that I know I will come out OK on the other side no matter what feedback I receive. It does not feel good to have your writing judged, but I see it as a necessary evil. My experience, however, has been overwhelmingly positive and I can’t wait to write my next book!

My long-time client Judy Batalion, author of the New York Times bestseller THE LIGHT OF DAYS and the forthcoming debut novel THE LAST WOMAN OF WARSAW, among other titles, is also a banger-outer. (Is this getting gross?) The below is taken from our email exchange about how we use the curse of anxiety to motivate us.

I've been thinking about our correspondence and I do think there is some 'pleasure principle' at work, i.e. I create a very anxious situation for myself and then I survive it, which brings catharsis. (This is also, I'm sure, an inherited trauma thing.) But ultimately, I think the reason I am so reliant on external deadlines is because it's the lesser of 2 anxieties. The fear of the ticking clock is a more comfortable fear than the fear of having to make decisions. I am very bad at making decisions. If I give myself a tight deadline, then I don't need to think, reflect on options, second guess myself, or get in my own way (for now). So I like the deadline, because it means I'll have less anxiety with it than without.

Reeves Wiedeman is a Gernert client and author of BILLION DOLLAR LOSER: THE EPIC RISE AND SPECTACULAR FALL OF ADAM NEUMANN and WeWork. He wrote it in about just a few months, which you would never guess from reading it. (It’s excellent.)

For starters, I was writing my book during the early days of the pandemic—there wasn't much else to do! I do not wish another pandemic on anyone, so I suppose some advice to take from that experience is this: you are going to have to sacrifice other things in order to get your book done on time. I had the additional motivation of writing a non-fiction book and knowing that there were two other reporters working on a book on the same topic, so there was a real material consequence if I missed my deadline and the other book came out first. (My deal was also structured so that I received a bonus if I hit a certain deadline—that was certainly motivation.) If you don't have those incentives built in, it's probably worth figuring out some way to reward yourself for hitting the deadline. Speaking of rewards: every writer knows this in the back of their brain, but it's worth remembering that there is real psychic relief in turning in a draft and letting someone else take a crack at fixing whatever you've been working on. That's a nice reward—to get to stop thinking about your book for a bit—even if you're eventually going to have to dive back in.

David Epstein is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller RANGE: WHY GENERALISTS TRIUMPH IN A SPECIALIST WORLD and the bestseller THE SPORTS GENE.

My three word answer: fear and curiosity. Kidding ... sort of. For my first two books, I let the project completely swallow my life. There are advantages to giving into obsession for something you're curious about, but I'm no longer willing (nor able) to take that approach. I think I'm better personally and professionally for my current, more-contained approach.

In my first two books, I wrote easy chapters first, which was right for me early on, but also led to sprawl, where I was writing chapters in a disconnected way and ended up way over length. I had to cut an entire reporting trip to the Arctic! With my book projects, I spend the first year only doing research and organizing ideas, not writing. With my new book, during that first year I also plotted out an external architecture for the book — four sections each with three linked chapters, and preceded by a new slice of the book's opening story. Because the structure was more coherent, chapters affected one another more than in the past, so I couldn't jump ahead very easily; I wrote chronologically for the first time. The result was that I was a much more efficient writer. I still worked like crazy, but it didn't swallow my entire life and the new book is the tightest I’ve written — 20% shorter than the other two. Experiment and reflect on what works for you.

Three quick, practical things:

-I need nonjudgmental people who I can talk my ideas to when they're in that early, nebulous phase.

-Information organization is my primary challenge. I turn my physical and digital workspace into a living wiki of my book project. Lots of horizontal shelves labeled by concept where I'll dump related material and a "master thought list" where I keep points of interest, citations, quotes, my own thoughts, etc. grouped by concept, and seeded with words that I would search if looking for that idea. (My master thought list for my new book is much longer than the book.)

-I'm drawn to expansive concepts for book projects. If I think about the full journey from start to finish, I'll despair. So I think of it like cutting stone. If you need to grind a stone into dust, you have to do it one hack of the axe at a time. I put one thing on a notecard every day that, if accomplished, will mean I advanced the project. That can be prepping for or conducting an interview, planning a research trip, reading some related set of journal articles, transcribing an interview recording, whatever. Sometimes I get much more than the one thing done. Sometimes I don't even get the one thing done. But most days I get the thing done, and it moves the project forward. Eventually the stone is sand.