I can’t remember a time when I didn’t dream of writing a book. It was something I fantasized about when I was a kid, long before I even considered becoming a journalist. 

So in 2021, when an editor at a university press reached out to see if I wanted to write a book expanding on an article I had recently published, it felt as if the universe had sent me the greatest gift. I had no idea what went into creating one — all I knew was that a childhood dream was being realized. At that point, I’d written several long-form journalism features: How different could a book be?   

After three years of working to bring it life, now I know better. Last month, my debut nonfiction book, “Devoured: The Extraordinary Story of Kudzu, the Vine That Ate the South,” released. The process taught me that writing a book is so much more than writing a book. It’s an isolating, exhilarating, heartbreaking and inimitable journey; one riddled with questions that you often can’t find any answers for. 

When I first started working on my draft for Devoured, I thought hitting 100,000 words would be my biggest obstacle. Oddly enough, that ended up being the easiest part. Edits and fact-checks, altogether a lengthy affair, also wouldn’t be the most challenging  component of book writing. (Although the latter did turn out to be the most costly.)

And while it certainly wasn’t the easiest, promoting the book was not the most difficult process, even though it’s a responsibility most authors are left to navigate virtually on their own.   

In my experience, the hardest part of writing a book is the aftermath. Those anxious days melding into sleepless nights after you turn in your final draft, after your last review of page proofs, after advance copies get sent out, after release day. It’s the questions you incessantly ask yourself once you no longer have control of your book’s narrative: Will anyone read this? Is this thing I spent years working on any good? The fears that plague you: What if they don’t? And what if it isn’t?  

The psychological toll can get to you. It becomes almost too easy to shirk positive feedback in favor of the negative. To get caught up in comparing ourselves and our work to what our peers put out. Even the critical and commercial response to our book becomes entangled in how we look at it, and sometimes how we see ourselves. Meanwhile, nothing feels more isolating than dealing with the inequitable power dynamic between an author and their publisher — particularly as a young, first-time author of color without an agent in their corner.

All of this might give you the impression that my experience writing a book was marred by a series of lows. But my voyage through the process was also sprinkled with incredible highs. From the sense of accomplishment I felt when I finished my first draft to the incomparable feeling of holding a physical copy of this project that I gave so much of myself to and all of the opportunities that have emerged since its release, there have been just as many moments of celebration as there have been pitfalls. 

And yet, looking back, there are so many aspects of book writing and publishing that I wish I had known when I set out to produce Devoured. I wish I had better understood the differences between university presses and trade publishers and why literary agents are so important to finding a good home for your work. And that I had a clearer idea of how much fact-checking, indexing, and field reporting for the project would hurt me financially. Above all, I know now that I should have devoted more time to getting to know other journalists who had been in my position, so the publishing process wouldn’t have felt as lonely as it did. 

It’s my hope that getting candid about my experience writing my first book will encourage other authors to share what they went through to bring their works to life. I hope that by being transparent about our struggles and triumphs — what met our expectations and what left us rattled — we can help better prepare fellow journalists of color working on debut books of their own. More than ever, the world needs our stories.