The Writing Life – Abbie Ham

Waiting on milestones

As a writer, I know how narrative is supposed to work. It’s hard not to wish for a simple narrative structure when it comes to my writing career.

The inciting incident: Finishing that novel in the fall of 2024.

The gathering tension: Revising, revising, and revising some more. Sending out those first newborn queries.

But then … is there a climax coming? The triumph of a yes?

Don’t I have enough content now to roll up into a montage of “working toward getting representation?”

If you’ve made it this far in life without realizing that life never unfolds in a convenient and predictable narrative, you’ve probably been reading the wrong kinds of books.

I started writing “Dreams We Had,” a novel about sisterhood, forgiveness and what we owe to each other, in 2024, shortly after moving to an apartment on an old farm road in rural New Hampshire.

I spent many early morning and late nights at the kitchen table that was my parents’ in their first apartment and my grandparents’ in theirs, writing by the gold light of a single bulb.

By Christmastime I had started revising, editing and rearranging. That’s gone on for the past year. I continue to make changes (improvements, I hope!) even as I write and rewrite query letters and send them out into the world with a prayer for good luck.

Last summer, I had a manuscript that I was happy with and started querying it seriously. While that was taking up a lot of time and effort, it didn’t feel like writing.

So as often happens in the wake of a long-term prose project, I found myself drawn back to poetry.

I did some new writing, but for the most part I turned my attention to the poems I had written in and around working on the novel for that first year I was in New Hampshire.

Those poems have an internal synchrony that I worked to accentuate and harness to put together a cohesive chapbook of about 12-30 poems. When I felt it was ready, I submitted that project to a few different contests and publications.

It hasn’t found a good fit yet, but I hope it will. For some reason it feels less urgent than the prose, maybe because for me poetry has always been a little bit more for myself.

By the fall, I was ready to jump back into the world of prose again, and I had an image I hadn’t been able to get out of my head that was demanding to be written down.

My process with “Dreams We Had” was slow and methodical. Before I wrote the first words of the first draft, I had pages and pages of information about the characters, the plot, the voice and the themes.

The manuscript I started in the fall came differently. It started with Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini, a picture of a concert master in the moment before the nod that starts the music, and my battered copy of A Seperate Peace.

Those three things lived in my head so long before I started writing that when I finally it was all just there.

Elements of the story came to me on walks with the dog, in the shower, at work, at the grocery story, and I hurried to get them down.

It’s the first thing I’ve ever written start to finish, without any circling back or jumping around. Initially, I wrote the wrong ending.

I gave the two protagonists a kind, gentle conclusion that answered the central question of the novel and told the reader exactly how things turned out for everyone.

I knew it was wrong. And more than that, it was a betrayal of the rest of the novel. If the rest of it was going to matter and be taken seriously, it couldn’t end like that.

So I rewrote it, with an ending as painful and inconclusive as the first had been gentle and tidy.

Such is the way of the world that this version is more honest and more true.

That brings me to now. I’m a few months into revising that second manuscript and have sent out a few select queries about it.

It often feels that I’ve accomplished nothing in the past year, because I haven’t hit the milestone I was hoping for: representation by an agent.

But as I look back, I see and am grateful for the work that I put into both manuscripts, the poetry chapbook, and the other one-off projects I’ve found time for.

The writing life is not a sprint.

I’m especially grateful for the generous publications that were home to my work over the past 18 months, including The Northwest Review and Poetry Society of NH’s Touchstone in the fall of 2024, The Heartland Review and Greensboro Review in the spring of 2025, and Trace Fossils Review in fall 2025.

Each of those was a reminder of the purpose of the writing life: the strengthening of souls by the sharing of words.

Seasons in the writing life

In the movies, writers spend all their time hunched over their desks, furiously scribbling or typing.

Then, at the end of the montage, a book is born.

As a kid, when I dreamed about “being a writer,” that’s what I pictured.

But the longer I work at that dream, the clear it becomes that being a writer has less to do with how many hours you spend at the keyboard and more to do with how you live.

In a particularly difficult phase of life somewhere in the unmapped wilderness of having just graduated from academic success into a search for real-world purpose, I once told a writer friend that nothing bad can really happen to a writer.

The worst thing that could happen to a writer might very well be the exact thing I dream of – a quiet, uneventful life with my dog and a garden.

Life happens. It keeps happening. And from it are born the stories.

And just as life has different seasons that shape and change us, so, too, do the seasons of our writing lives each contribute to the final form of the stories we’re made to tell.

Writing seasons are my favorite, but they’re also the most difficult. When I’m in the swing of a project – writing before work, writing after work, waking up early on the weekends to write – I feel most alive, productive and fulfilled.

But it’s a bit like carrying the ring of power. The story is on your mind all the time, urgent and heavy.

Then comes the painful-but-relieving tearing away of the eyes. For a time, you must look at anything but the project.

You discover reading again, and you take up poetry again. This is for enjoyment – for nourishment.

Then, toil.

This is the season I’m in now with my novel. I’ve spent the last 10 months editing, revising, forming and forming the text and doing the same with query materials.

A considerable portion of my Google Drive storage is now dedicated to various drafts of query letters and synopses. (How can it be so hard to write about what one has written?)

I’m in the long dark winter known as querying. It feels endless, but I maintain faith that, like the changing of the clocks come spring, something will shift and this season, too, will pass.

Do you find that your writing life goes in seasons, too? What season are you in now?

The struggle is real

Writing is hard, even in the best of circumstances. There have been times when I’ve been sat in my parents’ beautiful backyard in northern Vermont with no responsibilities pending, gentle spring sun on my skin, keyboard on my lap … and still, unable.

During the normal flow of life, the obstacles multiply. There’s work, laundry, trying to exercise, … a social life? …, dishes piling up in the sink. Time-management issues aside, the mental drain of it is enough to make writing feel impossible by the time there’s a spare moment for it.

To make matters worse, there are voices on all sides ready to tell you how wrong you’re doing it, if and when you manage to do it at all.

You have to write every day, they say. Or, why aren’t you reading more? Or, you better build your following online or no one’s going to care about your writing. Or, stop focusing so much on your following and get back to writing.

It’s stressful, and confusing, and heavy, and there are days that I find myself thinking “what am I even doing this for?”

There are sometimes weeks when I don’t write at all, and I think about letting it all just slip away. Let it be something I did, not something I do.

But somehow, I always find my way back to writing.

In college, a fiction professor gave me a simple piece of advice: “Don’t be a writer unless you can’t not.”

That’s a nice way of saying: “This is gonna suck! If you’ve got a shot in hell of being fulfilled without doing this, DON’T DO IT!”

Which is really just another way of saying what Franz Kafka said in a letter to Max Brod in July 1922:

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”

That’s how I know I have to write. Because when I’m not writing, I become a monster courting insanity.

So I write because I can’t not. And maybe someday, that’ll mean something to a reader.

For now, I’m locked in a cycle of self-editing, revising, querying and collecting rejections like postage stamps. It’s fun, at times. Most of the time its just work. But it’s the kind of work my soul can’t live without.

It’s lonely work, though. So tell me, where are things at with your big writing project right now? Does it feel like writing is making you more human, or are you stuck in a monster period?