The breaking point came when I was pretty emotionally low, and decided to rent a cabin on Whidbey Island, which is a place I'd been before that had really helped my writing. I flew across the country and rented a car. Put it all on credit cards. And three blocks from the rental place, I got in a terrible accident: A woman ran through a red light and destroyed the car I was driving. I hadn’t taken the insurance, so that was another $15,000. The police had to pry the doors open with a crowbar. And I just felt, “Dear God, what else could happen? What else could go wrong?”

At the same time, once I sat on the sidewalk, and brushed the broken glass from my hair, I was grateful, deeply grateful, to still be alive. Who knows how much time any of us has? This was on my mind already, as I was worried about losing my family. They were fighting for each new day. In comparison, this accident was nothing. I got to my feet and limped back to the rental car place. I got a second car and continued on.

Somehow, hitting bottom gave me the courage to chuck everything I’d written and start from scratch. But it took getting to a place where I had nothing to lose to write what I wanted to write, simply because I wanted to write it. I wrote with the idea that nobody was going to see the words. Without hope of any kind. And those pages turned into the first chapters of my new novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. Through it all, T.S. Eliot gave me much solace.

The day-to-day writing was still a slog. It's always a slog. But letting go of expectations enabled me to be much more creative. It’s like the first line of the excerpt: I said to my soul, be still. I dove into a new world and tried to be present for the characters, to just show up for the story I was trying to tell. This allowed me to take risks, too. Because if you’re waiting without hope, if you're waiting without love, waiting without waiting for the wrong thing, you start to feel brave enough to say, “What the hell? I might as well try this.”

Another thing that helped was that I started to draw. I’d gone to a lecture that Lynda Barry gave about creativity and the human mind, and she spoke about how by doodling or doing little sketches, you can get your brain into a more imaginative space. That was a part of my process, as well, and another kind of creative freedom—the drawings were another thing nobody was going to see. They didn’t add to my word count. But they helped to quiet my mind. That kind of stillness is necessary, if you’re going to try and peel back some of the layers of what it means to be alive.

I don’t write every day. It ebbs and flows. But when I have a project that I'm working intently on, I tend to write at night. I think it gets back to that same word: stillness. The world starts to fall asleep. The emails stop coming in. The phone and texts go quiet. Even social media slows down. It’s almost like there's more energy in the air for me to access. From 11 p.m. until 2 or 3 in the morning, that's when I write my best stuff. You feel like you're doing it in secret. That nobody is watching. All around you, people are dreaming. You can almost get yourself into a dream-like state. That's much harder to do in the middle of the day.