I Wrote a Book on my Phone

This post was originally published May 16, 2024.

Okay. I’ll admit it. I’m always on my phone right before bed. I know I shouldn’t be, but what if I told you it was actually a good thing?

Well, it has its pros and cons, but around the end of last year, I learned how to turn my bad habit into an advantage.

With my chronic pain, I’m no stranger to doing work laying down. Admittedly, it’s a bit difficult with a computer, so from time to time I’d use my phone. It started with responding to emails, then reading articles, until eventually I realized that the motivation hurdle to writing was smaller when the google document could be one finger swipe away. I would work on my own articles, proofread grants, and jot down a few lines in whatever was my latest creative writing project.

Some of those projects included notes and planning for Dungeons and Dragons games. As someone who’s absolutely in love with folk tales and mythology, I took comfort in exploring my creativity through collaborative, oral storytelling.

Last year, the same friend who I write with every Monday, ran a D&D campaign just for me. I created a character torn between two social stratospheres with a wealthy, estranged father and a criminal mother, who met an untimely demise under mysterious circumstances. In a city that worshiped the Light, my character Miriam took to the shadows in an attempt to find her mother’s murderer. When the campaign finished, I was absolutely taken by how my friend and I created a perfect allegory for grief. The heavy darkness that comes with losing a loved one never goes away, but in time, you learn to balance it with the light of living.

Truthfully, I wasn’t ready to let go of Miriam or her story, but I knew that it had ended all the same. Her story was over, but my love for it was not. While on my phone one evening, I opened up a new google document and began to write. 

Starting in December 2023, I wrote the first session, then the next, and then the one after that too. Every night, I laid in bed with the lights off and tapped away on my phone’s tiny keyboard, remembering all my favorite parts of the story that had previously only been spoken. Some nights I wrote pages, while other nights I only wrote a few words. By the time May rolled around, I was done. 47,815 words. For comparison, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens has just under 31,000 words.

I’m not planning to do anything with it, except share it with my friend, but I did want to write about it here because the whole experience taught me something invaluable about my writing process.

Writing a story requires multiple drafts. You write it, edit, rewrite, and rinse and repeat. Writers will commonly say that the first draft is just you telling yourself the story. I never thought that my first draft would be so literal. When my friend and I told the story, I jotted down important notes like names and places. All things for me to remember in case they showed up again. Those notes became the outline for my written draft, and oh my goodness, was it so much easier to know the entire story before writing it down.

My last book took five years to write. A lot of that was stopping and starting again, as I lost motivation due to all the stress of moving, changing jobs multiple times, and dealing with a global health crisis. The hardest part of being a writer is sitting down and doing the writing, but now I might incorporate more oral storytelling in my outlining process. Like all the greatest stories of old, it might just take me a few times hearing it out loud before I finally climb under the covers and write it all down.