The Archive of Ordinary Lives

My novel-in-perpetual-progress

October 2020: In the midst of struggling to write a eulogy for a dear friend and mentor, I kept sensing something flickering just outside my field of vision. I tried to ignore it, forcing my attention on the eulogy, but every sentence I cobbled together felt hollow—none worth more than a swift tap of the delete key. The celebration of life was scheduled for the next day, and I had nothing to say.

How do you sum up a life? What story do all of our days add up to?

Meanwhile, the flicker persisted, stubborn as a gnat. I typed, deleted, typed, deleted. Nothing was working. Not the eulogy. Not the thing that kept distracting me. Frustrated, I saved the still-unwritten eulogy, closed my laptop, closed my eyes, and sighed.

Okay, I thought. I’m listening.

And the flicker took shape—the smallest of shapes, and the most potent—an idea. I scribbled it in the margin of my journal:

A story about a woman who works as a family member for hire. She keeps a secret archive of the ordinary lives she encounters. She’s played so many roles—daughter, mother, mistress, wife, sister, aunt...but who is she really, behind it all? Behind the lives she archives, the roles she plays, the identities she assumes.

And thus began what has turned into a five-year (and counting) journey of writing my first novel: The Archive of Ordinary Lives.

So much of the mystique of writing centers on where ideas come from. Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic that ideas float around, seeking the right person to give them attention —a person dedicated to the task of transforming them into something tangible. If you ignore the idea, she warns, if you neglect it or abandon it, it may just drift off and find someone else.

I half-believe her. This idea certainly felt like it arrived from outside me. Like it chose me. Over the years, as I’ve tried (and failed) to be deserving of that choice, I’ve abandoned it more than once. I’ve thrown up my hands and said, This is too hard. I’m not up to the task. Go find a better writer.

But the idea has stayed with me. Stubborn and faithful as a weed in a garden, pulled up again and again only to grow back stronger. First draft, second, third, fourth, fifth…and now, unwilling to even embrace the notion of a sixth, a document I’ve titled “Draft 5b” on my computer.

People often ask how long it takes to write a novel. There are a hundred answers, which is to say, no good answer. Kerouac infamously wrote On the Road in a drug-fueled three-week mania; Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind took ten years and ten drafts of the over 1000-page tome; J.R.R. Tolkien spent a reported seventeen years on The Lord of the Rings (which makes sense given his invention of entire languages, histories, and civilizations). The average is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum (two to four years, from first draft to finished), although the true length of time depends upon the novel as much as it depends upon the writer.

No matter how many weeks, months, or years you spend writing a book, the commitment to its creation is astounding. My husband would tell you that I love pretty much every book I read (and I read a lot of books). The reason for this is that, at a baseline, I marvel at the fact that someone wrote the book at all. Writing a book is a tedious and absurd task. A task with no measurable reward for years on end, and no guarantee of success. A task at once admirable and insane.

My drafts of The Archive of Ordinary Lives have taken about a year apiece. Each year and each draft, I fight an increasingly weary battle against my own urgency to be finished with it. To type The End and really, really mean it. And, along the course of writing, I inevitably come up with a handful of new ideas to make it even better—and ensure that I’ll be working on it for at least another year.

Case in point: at the end of Draft 5, I decided that the entire novel needed to be switched from past tense to present tense and include a series of mysterious interview fragments at the start of each chapter. Enter Draft 5b. And a looming Draft 6, with still more developmental and copyediting for all the new writing I’m adding.

Which explains why lately, I’ve been thinking about that urgency to finish—where it comes from, what it does. Despite the pressure to have written a book (which I know will soon become the pressure to have published one), this story won’t be hurried. And so I’m learning not to hurry too. Because now, five years later, my focus is shifting from where the idea came to what I can still discover within it.

Something miraculous has happened in the passage of so much time and work. With each draft, the novel deepens. The characters gain nuance, the settings become richer, the dialogue sharper. The plot tightens. The scenes start to hum.

And best of all: the story’s central spark—the tiny flame that lit up in the darkness while I was trying to write a eulogy—burns brighter the more time I spend with it.

Of course, the story is still about a woman who works as a family actor and must discover who she is at the core. That was pretty much the whole focus of the first draft. But Draft 5b is so much more than that. It’s about pretending, but it’s also about truth. What we pretend is real. We are the stories we tell. It’s about the beautiful intricacy of the dreams we build into our lives.

And, most of all, it’s about what happens when all those dreams begin to flicker like fireflies in a quiet, dazzling symphony across the darkness. A dream, a story, a life, a book—these things are never created in isolation. They are born in the web of connection. Out of necessity, everything belongs. That’s what the book is about. But it’s also what the idea—that tiny, flickering light—is made of.

Writing is about so much more than writing. It’s about thinking deeply about what you're saying, and why. It’s easy to get caught up wondering whether the writing itself is any good. If you proved yourself deserving of the idea that chose you. But that’s the wrong question.

The better question is: Is the story whole?

Have you spent enough time with the idea? Have you discovered all that it holds? Have you touched every facet, smoothed every angle, dug into every recess, until the work shines, an incandescent prism of light refracting small flame that sparked its beginning?

In so many ways, The Archive of Ordinary Lives remains true to its origins. The delete key is nearly worn out on my laptop, and I’m still left holding an elusive idea in the palm of my hand. And I’m still asking the same questions I was asking that October afternoon.

How do you sum up a life?

What story do all of our days add up to?