Fun fact: I’ve never had a sense of smell. Yes, I can still taste food; no, it didn’t give me superpowers. I’ve never regretted it—if anything, I’m relieved I never had to smell New York City in the summer. As an avid reader, writer, and painter, the only sense I ever cared much about was sight.
In early 2018, I began to experience mild eye discomfort. Just an ache, maybe a new allergen in the smoggy city air. But quickly, that tickle devolved into extreme pain. Keeping my eyes open was a trial. Reading anything, on a screen or printed page or my own handwriting, hurt. I shoved all my watercolor projects to the back of the closet. My new cross-stitch hobby was impossible. All I wanted was to close my eyes, but even that was only a bandage. Once my eyes were open again, the raw, aching pain was back.
The MRI said nothing was wrong with my brain. The first three eye doctors detected a mild dryness, but nothing an over-the-counter eyedrop wouldn’t fix. Each new appointment was a gut-aching fall from hope to disappointment.
Meanwhile, my work was suffering. The fluorescent lights and glowing computer screen were piercing. My emails were full of typos—I wrote them with my eyes closed. I wore sunglasses at my desk and pretended I had a migraine. One day, I had such an intense pain from the air conditioning hitting my eyes that I locked myself in a conference room and cried.
During all of this, I still dreamed of becoming a published author. I worked up my courage and submitted a manuscript, a to-this-day unpublished sci-fi novel, to a writing mentorship contest I had pined after for years. I sent my first book, The Lights of Prague, out on submission with agents, though I went months without a bite. I had finished the last chapters of my second book, A Portrait in Shadow, and wanted to start the editing process.
But writing hurt my eyes most of all. Becoming a published author had been my dream since early childhood, but focusing on words, no matter the font size, made my face throb with pain.
So, the night before the writing mentorship contest results were to be revealed, I emailed the moderators to drop out. The intense editing timeline—polishing the full manuscript in only a few months—would have meant an impossible number of additional hours at my computer. Heartbroken, I refreshed their webpage… They had posted the results early. I had won. When they saw my email, they rushed to delete the post and give a runner-up my place.
A terrible well of depression overcame me as I realized the pain was stealing my future. (Crying for the next week only made my eyes hurt worse, which was just unfair.)
It was a month later when I discovered the pilot light of A Spell for Change, my third novel. The idea came to me on a walk home one night, and I recorded a twenty-minute voice memo of ideas and snippets.
The characters appeared to me fully formed: Nora Jo, heartbroken by the loss of her dream job; Kate, the prophet haunted by a painful future she can’t avoid; and Oliver, the veteran plagued by a chronic pain that interferes with every breath he takes. The characters held everything I wanted to say, but didn’t have the words for.
The first draft was a slow and literally painful process. I would close my eyes, put on an ice pack, dictate each sentence into my phone, and then play it back to type the words into a computer with my eyes still closed. Even without looking I typed far more accurately than the many auto-transcription services I tried.
The truth was that the idea of giving up on my writing was more terrifying than the pain. Even with my other manuscripts stuck in unpublished limbo, this new story wouldn’t let go of me.
And in many ways, my new method gave me the strongest first draft of any of my books. I often sat and silently rehearsed new sections before saying them out loud, instead of rushing to my computer to type a flurry of ideas. Reviewing my voice memos, I edited as I transcribed, weighing every word at its inception.
Most importantly, I slowed d o w n. My old sins of rushing through books and skimming past familiar paragraphs were impossible now. With the pain insisting on regular breaks, I took on my new project in bite-size pieces. Gone were the days I would lock myself in a room for hours of work, some of which was done in such a hurried haze that I lost my focus. I learned to write deliberately.
Beyond that, I realized how often I sped through descriptive sections of books when reading for fun. My years of speed-reading zipped me past important scene-setting moments toward the dialogue and action. At some point, I had gotten more interested in the stories than the words. I had not even noticed myself doing it until I was forced to switch to audiobooks and transcribing my own voice. It gave me a vital realization: I was writing how I was reading.
In November, I finally found a doctor who knew what was wrong. It sounds so benign—dry eye disease. But in the waiting room, the form I filled out made me feel seen for the first time. “Rank your pain while reading.” “Do you get headaches from screens?” “Do your eyes feel raw?” Charmingly, the doctor said that with my severe case, my eyes looked like cobblestones under the microscope.
None of the initial treatments helped. As a stopgap, I started steroid eyedrops, which made me miraculously feel normal. But if you use steroids for more than two months, there are horrible side-effects. Permanent ones.
My respite from pain was a limited one, but came at just the right moment. That winter, I signed with my agent for The Lights of Prague. It was everything I’d worked for, and with my temporary health the looming revisions sounded easy.
And then the steroids ended, and the pain returned, rising up like swamp water until I was drowning again.
With deadlines on the line for my agent and then my new editor at Titan Books, I gritted my teeth and forged ahead. I let Siri’s mechanical voice drone the manuscript into my ears as I tried to hone the pacing in the first half of the novel while also trying to figure out which words I’d misspelled and which Siri simply couldn’t pronounce. (Writing my first two novels about cities that don’t speak English made for fascinating hiccups in Siri’s recitation.) I printed out a large print version of the manuscript, checking the flow on the page and scribbling notes with a broad-tipped Sharpie.
As I edited Lights, I slowed not just my process but my writing itself. When each sentence was part of an hourglass that trickled away my endurance, I learned to work deliberately and thoroughly. In addition to the usual knowledge that someone, someday, was going to read these words, I also needed each sentence to be worth what it cost me.
It took many months and thousands of dollars of experimental procedures before we found a treatment that started to work. It’s still not perfect, but I’m functional again. I still mostly rely on audiobooks to protect my eyes, but I’ve managed to pick up my old hobbies.
Since then, I’ve published two books and have a third coming just around the corner. For all of them, I used my new skills not just to rest my eyes, but also to give every sentence I edited the time it deserved. Even though I don’t need Siri to read me my emails anymore, I still use it to listen to my manuscripts in slow, precise detail. My appreciation for words and sentence craft has only grown.
A Spell for Change, the novel grown from that frightening, painful time, comes out this May. The characters share my aches and fears and heartbreaks. But they also share my hope, and are the result of my resilience. I even adjusted the last chapter before submitting the final version, giving a character a happier ending than I’d first written.
After all, I’d gotten my own happier ending. The pain shaped my story, but it wasn’t the end of it.
Buy the Book
A Spell for Change
Thank you for sharing!
Ditto… Thanks for sharing. This is an important lesson.
“Writing how you read” is a great insight. I’m wondering now, in what ways I might be doing that? A good way to find some of your blind spots as a writer.