Writing a Novel in Life’s Margins

Margins are to be stretched and filled with a little piece of something creative

Originally posted on Substack on July 1, 2026.

Were you ever a doodler? Have you ever happened upon an old notebook from school and the margins are filled with scritchy-scatch drawings of stars and hearts and flowers and quotes and poems. Maybe there was a heart with an arrow through it and your initials plus those of your crush? A fresh margin was always an opportunity. Fertile ground for something random to blossom.

Sitting in the parked car, logging sentences in my notes app. Jotting in my day planner during meetings. Scribbling in a Field Notes notebook when my daughter’s basketball team is in a time-out huddle. These are the life margins where bits of my novel writing landed. This time it’s not necessarily notebook margins but rather those framing spaces around the epicenter of life. They are moments I stretch as far as I can, spaces I try to fill with a little piece of something creative.

While I often worry I should be further along by now and that a quiet office with a bucolic view of some water and woods and long stretches of writing time might fix me, my creative process has realistically and truly become grounded in writing in snippets. Inspiration that hits unexpectedly, a story coming together as life keeps happening around me.

It turns out that when you don’t have much time to write that the creative accumulation of work that compounds over time becomes essential. Many beloved works have been born out of mess, chaos, and busy schedules. Writing does not have to be precious. I have found that the words often flow the most when I’m standing over the kitchen counter, racing the countdown until I have to join a Zoom call, logged between loads of laundry, written in a haze after a long day of work and driving my 13-year-old around. Tomorrow, I will write for hours. 2,000 words. It will be easy. I whisper to myself. I feel like it could be possible, but compassionately I know that those big writing chunks are rare. That is the midlife bind: being old enough to understand the want but busy enough to feel blocked from it.

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