Taking 6 Years to Write a Book | Thoughts on Finishing a First Draft!

A first draft can take years—not because the writing is slow, but because the writer has to rediscover what the story actually is. ShaelinWrites describes a six-year path to finishing Holding a Ghost, starting with a sudden creative spark in 2015 and ending with a completed draft in 2020 after multiple emotional and structural resets.

The origin moment came in February 2015, when a Tumblr photograph of a broken gravestone (“will not be forgotten” with the name missing) triggered an immediate story vision. Within three days, she had a full outline and began drafting during a high-stakes period of high school exams and scholarship pressure. She wrote the first draft quickly—about three months—then later edited it during university. The early version, originally titled I'm Fine, functioned as a kind of emotional channel: the main character’s feelings drew from her own, even though the plot and characters were not based on real people. She describes the book as comfort during a difficult time, especially as a young adult story that helped her process what she couldn’t yet name.

By 2017, the emotional distance became a problem. As she grew and moved on from the feelings that fed the original draft, she lost empathy for the character and even disliked the “bones” of the story. Over one summer she ran through five drafts, improving prose and cutting “cringy” parts, but still feeling that the essence didn’t work. The book became a relic of a past self—one she no longer wanted to inhabit—creating a painful mismatch between what she’d hoped to share and what she could no longer love.

A year later, the project revived through a new lens. In summer 2018, she considered whether the story needed to become a sequel or a full re-envisioning, then chose to “gutted” it rather than polish it. The arrival of a new character, Nadia, helped breathe life into the narrative, and the process aligned with a major personal turning point: recognizing her own bisexual identity. She notes that the protagonist’s bisexuality—Andy June’s—had been present but overlooked, and that clarity changed how the story could move.

By late 2018, the narrative form finally clicked. She shifted toward a ghost-narrator structure, building on brief hallucination scenes from the fifth draft until the dead character became the book’s narrator. She also reworked character identity—Juniper as the protagonist’s full name and Andy as a nickname—so the later timeline felt consistent with who the character had become.

In 2020, momentum returned when she finished Honey Vinegar in March and started Holding a Ghost immediately. The first push produced about 20,000 words, but the opening didn’t feel alive. The fix wasn’t about motivation; it was about structure. She realized she’d made two key technical mistakes: writing in past tense despite the story’s present-tense “sound” in her head, and shaping it into standard scenes rather than the vignette-like, experimental form she’d always wanted. Restarting for NaNoWriMo in November made the book “instantly better.” From there, the draft flowed—about 30,000 words during NaNoWriMo, then steady work through spring 2019—until the full manuscript landed at roughly 70,000 words.

The finished draft, she says, felt easy only after the hard part was done: finding the protagonist’s true narrative rather than treating the character as a stand-in for therapy. Holding a Ghost became a softer, joyful counterpoint to darker fiction, and she credits the six-year journey with teaching her that characters and stories remain “there for you” as long as the writer keeps wanting them—sometimes in changed form, but still worth finishing.