A couple months ago I found myself alone in a Northern California beach town, walking the hills and talking into a recording app on my phone. None of my usual ways of writing were working anymore. Not the laptop or the overpriced word processor with no distractions and an e-ink screen. Pen and paper— my method of choice up until a few days before—didn’t feel free and easy like it once had. At night, when I played the dictations back in order to transcribe them, I heard mostly half-formed thoughts; fragments of dialogue; a word to slip in somewhere for mood; long, deep sighs; the crunch of my footsteps on gravel.

A dozen books into my career, I’m still figuring out how I work and what I need. For years I’ve been drawn to other writers’ routines and processes, scouring interviews for rituals, raising my hand at readings to ask writers how they do it. At my own readings, when asked, I give honest answers: A song playing on repeat. A candle. A quick walk when I’m stuck. Keeping books I love within reach, turning to a random page for inspiration. All of these things have worked for me at one time or another, still do work for me a lot of the time. When they don’t, I tell myself I need a day of writing in bed, or a clear desk, or a dedicated room in my apartment, or an office outside of my home. I’ve tried all of these. They’ve all been right; they’ve all failed me. It depends on the day.

And then, sometimes, when I least expect it, there are the rare, exquisite, ecstatic experiences of writing, when the story bursts out, and I struggle to type as fast as I need to, afraid the sentences are going to fly out of my grasp.

Here’s the story of one of those times:

It was 2020, the era of staying home, and after many years of publishing young adult novels, I had just finished writing my first novel for adults. For months, all time not spent with my wife and daughter was time spent writing. My clear desk and my songs on repeat and my candles and my tea and my slippers and my closed door kept me afloat. And my characters did, too—the restaurants they went to, the people they fell in love with, their moments of growth and stagnation, their small wounds and pleasures. And then I was finished with them, for a time, and I turned my focus to long walks with my daughter.

We had only just moved to our duplex in San Francisco three days before the shelter in place orders. We barely knew our new neighborhood yet; these walks were our introduction. I emerged after months spent in a room to secret staircases cut into hillsides; views of the downtown skyline surprising us around a corner; a chicken named Lady Gaga who lived at the edge of a front yard a couple blocks away. My daughter and I walked and walked and, together, we fell in love with the place we lived now. Each colorful Victorian. Each empty park and playground. Each person we passed, waving from a safe distance.

It was strange, wandering our neighborhood’s streets and finding them so quiet and empty. We felt the absence of people and noise and life. All the shops had “closed” signs in their windows. At the little park with cherry trees and a stone bench overlooking Twin Peaks and the downtown skyline and the very top of the Golden Gate Bridge, we imagined a pair of dogs playing. One was a little white fluffball, the other a golden retriever. We ran through dozens of names for our imaginary dog friends, settled on Daisy and Danny. And who were their owners? We picked names for them, too. The thimble-sized pink house around the corner belonged to one of the men, and the other man lived up the street in the blue apartment building with the palm tree, and as the months went on and our stories grew, the men we made up fell in love and got married. We lay on the grass and imagined the wedding (a fiasco, I’m afraid) and then I sat up.

“This should be a book,” I said.

My daughter agreed.

We rushed home and I grabbed the laptop, perched at the edge of the bed, and began. It was effortless, joyful. Time became a blur. It didn’t matter where I was. Music could be playing or not playing. I didn’t need any of it. I didn’t know what I was writing. Was is it a short story or was it a novel? A single book or a series? It didn’t matter.

I wrote with the feeling of my daughter’s hand in mine as we explored our neighborhood streets. With the expansiveness of time on days when nothing was expected of us. Maybe most of all, I wrote from a place of wanting. Here we’d been, living downstairs from our dear friend who we couldn’t be with, new neighbors all around us who we hadn’t yet met. I wrote remembering all the apartments I’d lived in throughout my life. The teenager who babysat me by our shared pool when I was a little kid. The old woman with the tremor, holding her hands out for a plate of my mother’s scones. When I was in grad school, my wife and I lived across from a man who’d knock on our back door with bowls of matzo ball soup and under an opera singer who’d practice late at night, piano keys plinking, a high soprano. Downstairs to the left were a poet and attorney who kept their bed in the living room so the office could have a door. To the right was a traveling coffee saleswoman whose tabby cat we looked after whenever she was on the road.

I wanted that kind of life back, breathing the same air as the neighbors, moving casually from one apartment to another, footsteps always above or below or right past the door on the landing. I wanted my daughter to have that kind of life—who knew if or when we’d have it again?—and so I put a girl like her into the book, gave the girl a set of keys, established that she’d lived in the big, pink, Victorian apartment building for her entire life—nine whole years—and knew its inner workings, its residents, its quirks, its sounds.

I finished the book, named it The Apartment House on Poppy Hill, decided it was, in fact, the first in a series. Who could have imagined?  An entire book, written in just a few electric days. A gift, to work that way.

And yet—here’s this other novel I’ve been working on, the one I sighed over in my voice memos and couldn’t get down. After a stretch of floundering months something broke open and now I know what I’m doing. Hard-won clarity is a gift, too. Because I’ve spent years immersed in this book I’m writing now, it’s real to me in a new and distinct way, as though its characters are sitting on my living room sofa as I write this, drinking whiskey and listening to records and shaking their heads and laughing. Timing in publishing is forever dissonant. You work on a book and then you wait, sometimes for a very long time, and it comes out when you’re deep in another project, and you’re reminded of how strange and wonderful a thing it is to write a book, how unfamiliar each time. Right now, for me, it’s pen and paper, coffee, and a song.

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The Apartment House on Poppy Hill by Nina LaCour, illustrated by Sònia Albert, is available from Chronicle Books.

When I was twenty and visiting New York for the first time, I stepped into a Brooklyn café and a character came to me. In the near-empty room, I saw her clearly: Tall with short hair, fiercely guarded, with a younger brother. I knew they loved each other, knew Sara had abandoned him and was trying to make amends.

In the months that followed, back in San Francisco, I wrote scenes, painstakingly trying to excavate a story. Soon another character came to me—Emilie—and I knew she and Sara would fall in love but I didn’t know how they’d come together. Their lives felt so different, and yet I could see how right they’d be for one another. I couldn’t stop thinking of them—of Sara and Emilie, and all the years it would take, the events that would need to transpire, the growing they’d need to do before they’d find each other. This would be my first novel, I realized with a thrill.

Slowly—often excruciatingly—I amassed a modest stack of pages, longer than any short story I’d ever written. College was coming to a close but I knew I had more to learn, so I used some of Sara’s and Emilie’s scenes to apply for an MFA program, worried for months that the sample wasn’t good enough, was overjoyed when I got in.

I showed up on the day of my first graduate level workshop eager and shy, riddled with self-doubt but also incandescent with hope that my colleagues would see something worthy in my pages, would give me the validation I craved. I sat around the massive oval table, one of only two first-year students in the class. My voice trembled as I read a couple pages aloud, and then I sat silently as the scenes I’d labored over were torn to shreds.

Afterward, I cried in a bathroom stall. Composed myself. Put the novel away for a very long time.

I wrote a different first novel instead. Not a love story, but a grief and friendship story, a book about a sixteen-year-old that I felt better equipped to write. I was only twenty-one, I told myself. What had I been thinking, writing a story about adulthood? I wrote my young adult novel with confidence. I knew what it was like to be sixteen, to lose a friend to suicide, to live in a small suburban town and dream of something more.

That book, Hold Still, was sold in 2007, and for the next thirteen years, in between writing my young adult novels, I would take Emilie’s and Sara’s pages out of the folder I kept them in. I’d scatter the pages across the floor, searching for salvageable moments, and ultimately—each time—I’d find myself estranged from the version of myself that had written them. There were so many phrases I didn’t recognize, words that didn’t feel like my own, scenes that didn’t move me. I’d changed, of course; it had been so long since I’d walked into that Brooklyn cafe.

And then, in 2020, during those strange and quiet months at home, I took the pages out once more, and it hit me: Oh—I’ve grown up.

I was finally ready, so I started over. From the perspective of my thirties, I wrote about young women hurdling through their late teens and twenties. With the experience of my five novels (six if you count the one I co-wrote with a friend), I now knew how to tell Sara’s and Emilie’s stories.

Now the novel, Yerba Buena, is about to be released, and a certain question keeps coming up: “What are the differences between writing for teens and writing for adults?” Or, put in a way that made me laugh, “What is it like, entering adulthood?”

I’ve struggled with this question. Yes, Yerba Buena is for an older audience, but it still comes from me. Like my YA, it’s full of longing and quiet moments and art and vulnerability and heartbreak and love. It isn’t any more or less honest than my YA work. But of course it’s different.

When I’m writing YA, I feel like I’m holding my readers’ hands and saying, “Come here, I’ll lead you through this. It might be hard, but I’ve got you.” Writing Yerba Buena felt more intimate, like it was just me and the story, and I didn’t feel the same kind of responsibility to comfort; all I needed to do was discover.

As I type this I’m thinking of what it must be like to scuba dive. I got all my gear, made sure I had enough oxygen, and then I plunged in. I got deeper and deeper and didn’t know where I was going or what I’d find. I ended up in some very painful places at first, and then I found so much beauty, and finally I emerged and it all made sense together, and I thought, “Here is life in its difficulty, its confusion, its wonder. Let’s see if I can make a story of it.”

Here’s another answer to the same question:

The most tangible gift of “entering adulthood” was a feeling of expansiveness and the freedom to stay with my characters well past their teen years. In my YA, the timelines are compressed, so I follow my characters through an event and its immediate aftermath. I spend a week or a year with them, and during that time I get them to the place where they’ll be okay for a little while and a next step feels possible.

But what happens after that? This was the question I didn’t know how to answer when I was twenty-one, but it felt luxurious to explore it in my late thirties—to have over a decade of time to play around in, to allow myself so much space. Both Sara and Emilie suffer traumatic events in their teens. Though unequal in scale, the events are foundational; they shape the way they see themselves, the choices they make, and the ways in which they interact with the world. The events reverberate, but they’re only a part of the story. Years pass, and Sara and Emilie continue to grow and change and understand what they want from their lives. They see the past from new vantage points. They return to it, wrestle with it, attempt to make sense of it from a distance—exactly all the things I needed to do in order to tell this story.

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Yerba Buena by Nina LaCour is available via Flatiron Books.