I wrote most of Herough Herough in the corner booth of my own beer bar, which is a sentence that sounds like a brag and is actually a confession.
Here is what nobody tells you about writing a novel while running another business: the bar will always ask for one more hour. Not because the bar is needy. Because the bar is alive. A new keg arrives. The card reader stops talking to the printer. Someone you have never met walks in and asks if you serve the kind of lager they had in Germany in 1994, and you do not, but you spend the next twenty minutes talking to them about the beer they think they remember. By the time you sit down with the manuscript, the manuscript has gone cold and the corner booth has filled up with people who want to talk about anything except sentences.
So here is what I learned, in the order I learned it, mostly the hard way.
1. The bar does not care if the book gets written.
This was the most useful insight I had in four years. The bar will keep running whether you write the book or not. The book will not exist if you do not write it. One of these things is generous and one is jealous. Make peace with the jealous one.
2. Pick a worse time to write.
I tried to write on Thursdays – our delivery day. Did not work. I tried to write at 10 pm after closing. Did not work. I tried writing on Mondays when we were closed. Did not work.
What worked was writing at 5:30 a.m. each day, getting it in before the bar – or anyone engaged with it beyond me – was influencing it.
3. Use the bar as a research lab.
The book is about competing seafood restaurant owners. I do not own a seafood restaurant. I do, however, own a place where people gather, complain, compete, gossip, and reveal themselves through what they order. Everything I needed to know about the rivalry in Herough Herough I learned by watching people argue over an IPA they pretended not to care about.
4. The bar is also the readership.
When the book was done, the first people who bought it were people who had watched me write it. Not because they cared about the book. Because they cared about the booth.
I would not recommend writing a novel inside a business you also run. But I would not recommend doing it any other way, either. The bar made the book stranger, slower, and more crowded with real human voices than it would have been if I had written it alone in a quiet room.
Stay Positive & Happy To Let You Into The Bar At 5 a.m. If You Need A Place To Write
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