"When I started struggling at work, writing a novel became a therapeutic task for me, and it really saved me"
Going behind the scenes with Caitlin Wahrer on how she crafted her own Second Chapter as a writer.
Towards the end of 2023, I signed up for a 90-day novel writing course with Donna Freitas. Shortly before the course started, I found out I was pregnant. Those early weeks (weeks 5-11ish) were wrecked with exhaustion, so I didn’t get as much writing out of it as I imagined. But, I did get a writing community of women. Twice a month we would get together to discuss writing problems to work through, ideas we had, or just about our lives.
Caitlin Wahrer was one of those women. When we met, she was doing some work as a lawyer as well as writing her second novel. Plus, she was raising a child and, coincidentally, we had close due dates for her second child. She always offered great advice and even just from a Zoom screen, she exuded that type of warmth that made you feel like you already had a cheerleader on your side.
I wanted to know the secrets of how she did it…and with her honesty, you can now, too.
Let’s start in the past. Tell us about your pre-author career journey.
Before I sold my first novel, I worked as a lawyer for five years. Two of those years were spent clerking for the appellate court in my state, where my job was largely a research and writing gig. Then I started at a very small firm doing court-appointed work. In Maine, when someone has a constitutional right to a free attorney, that attorney comes from a list of court-appointed lawyers who are paid by a state-funded commission (rather than a public defender’s office or somewhere else). Most of my work was in juvenile defense (kids charged with crimes) and parents’ defense (parents whose kids had been taken or were at risk of being taken by the State). I also did guardian ad litem work, where I did investigations and made recommendations to judges in cases involving kids. Almost all of my work involved kids and families in some kind of crisis, and I burned out quickly and ended up getting a job at a civil litigation firm where my best friend worked. I had been there for just about a year when I got my book deals.
I’ve always been a multipassionate person…is that a word? It should be. Ever since I was a kid, I believed I would write a novel one day—I have the funny old journal entries to prove it. But I also wanted to have a career working for people in need, and that was where I was aiming myself all through college: not toward creative writing but juvenile defense, which I’d latched onto as a perfect career for myself. Burning out came as a real shock, and in hindsight I didn’t guard against it very well because I didn’t understand the risk that it would happen. But when I started struggling at work, writing a novel became a therapeutic task for me, and it really saved me. Without it, I wonder if I would have ended up falling into a crisis and needing to stop work abruptly, rather than giving my bosses lots of heads up that I needed to start making changes for the future.
Juggling anything with a day job is hard work, especially something as in-depth as writing a book. Can you set the scene for what your life looked like when you started writing?
When I started writing my first novel, which became The Damage, I was married with a dog, a house, a FT job, and no kid. My husband Ben was supportive from day 1 (earlier! he bought me a journal years before for my creative writing), and he took over taking care of Biscuit (our dog) in the mornings so I could have time to write before work. I spent weeks preparing for a new routine I wanted to try, and when we were ready, we were off: we’d both go to bed around 8:30 at night to read and I’d make sure I had my light off by 9:30. I’d wake up at 5 the next morning and write until 7, then I’d join Ben and Biscuit downstairs and get ready for work. For me, this routine was everything: it let me go to work every day having already had two hours of completely selfish time to myself.
I’m not sure what gave me the determination to keep going draft after draft, because I spent two years with that book. I started writing it in late October 2017, and I signed with my agent and sold it in October 2019. I’m a big believer in talk therapy, but writing became a therapeutic experience that I needed most days, and I think the excitement of seeing what might come of it helped me stick to the project rather than jump around to other ideas.
A huge element of writing and the path to publishing comes from a cultivated community. What is your writing community like?
Not too long into writing, I joined a writing group at a local library (shout out to the South Portland Public Library!!!) and that was a great experience. The group still meets two Saturdays a month, but I fell out of the habit during the pandemic and never got back into it. (If you couldn’t tell from my other answers, routine is pretty important for me; otherwise I’m scattered and just don’t do things!)
With time, I built a community of awesome writer friends. Many of them I met online, after one of us bravely reached out to the other because we loved the other’s book or newsletter or whatever. Some of them I’ve met in my local community, because I heard about them from someone else. In most of these in-person instances, I was the one to initiate the friendship, often with an Instagram DM invitation to coffee.
If you want writer friends, I would say: be brave. Show up to a public writing group. Slide into DMs. Reach out to people and invite them to have coffee or go for a walk. Not every writer you meet will become your friend, and that’s good because not everyone is made to be your friend. But you don’t have to be lonely just because you’re a writer!
The Damage is published by Pamela Dorman Books in the US and as Damage by Michael Joseph Books in the UK. Could you tell us a bit about how you got published?
This might be weird, but I’m going to answer in bullet-point form, because otherwise I might go on for five thousand years.
I worked on my novel from October 2017 until May 2019, doing many revisions in that time.
I collected agent names from book acknowledgments, Manuscript Wish List, and google searches.
I used resources from Susan Dennard, the Pitch Wars website, and Query Shark to draft my baseline query letter, and I got feedback on it from my writer’s group and through the Pitch Wars competition.
I used QueryTracker to save agents, look up information about them, and track my queries as I made them.
I cold-queried eleven agents. Some politely rejected me; most didn’t respond; one asked for the full manuscript.
That agent got back to me about a week later with a revise and resubmit. I liked her suggested edits, so I stopped querying and just worked on the manuscript again.
Meanwhile, I paid to pitch an agent in person at a conference (Maine Crime Wave). She asked for the full manuscript. I told her I was doing an R&R for another agent and she said to send her the finished version.
When I was done with the R&R edit, I sent the manuscript to those two agents. A month later, the conference agent sent me a form rejection email.
I wallowed. Then a writer friend told me to get over myself and query more people, and to use Publisher’s Marketplace to look up the agents I did query, because she was in the process of parting ways with an agent she wished she’d done more homework on.
I used PM to look up the agent who still had the manuscript and the agents whose names I’d saved but I hadn’t queried yet. One was Helen Heller. I queried her along with three other agents. (Now it’s October 2019.)
Less than a half hour after I hit send, Helen responded asking for my full manuscript. The next day, she called me around lunch and offered me representation. She had a really clear plan for how she’d sell the book, and because I’d already looked up all my people, I said yes after a really brief pause to call my husband and freak out.
Helen sent initial chapters out to her contacts while I worked on some small edits she’d suggested. I only had a couple days to do the edits, because she had a plan and it was a short timetable (because it involved a book fair she was attending in a few weeks).
Within the week, Helen sold the book to Pamela Dorman Books in a pre-empt, two-book deal. This was after Pam and I talked on the phone about her editorial vision for the book.
A matter of days later, Helen sold the book to Michael Joseph Books in the UK, also in a pre-empt, two book deal. This was after I took calls with a couple UK editors and chose MJ Books between some competing offers.
Then Helen went to the Frankfurt Book Fair and sold a handful of translation rights (just on The Damage, not the TBD book 2).
Months passed as the contracts were finalized, the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and I eventually got a nine-page edit letter from my entire team.
I worked on those developmental edits for months, if I recall. Then we did a smaller round of developmental edits, and then we did line edits, then copy edits, then a sensitivity reader read the book and provided feedback and I incorporated his suggested edits in the final draft. Then there were the final rounds of edits, where the Word document turned into something that looked like a real book!
The deals were done, verbally, in October 2019. The book was actually published in June 2021 in the US and Canada, and other versions started coming out after that.
I think my story demonstrates that even if parts of publishing look and feel like they move at breakneck speed, most of it moves pretty slowly, and patience is a virtue! (As is “writing the wait,” where you work on Book B while you wait to see what happens with Book A.)
To be able to pivot any career, there’s usually a supporting financial element tied to it. Did you have any financial support that helped you on your journey? Could you share what that looked like?
Once I had the two-book deal in the UK, on the heels of the US deal, I decided to take a break from lawyering. I gave my firm seven weeks’ notice and finished up my projects, and my office threw me a “retirement party.” At the time, I thought I was probably totally done with lawyering.
To make that kind of decision, I absolutely had financial support, really in multiple forms. The most obvious support I had was my husband: Ben was working as an attorney too and made a salary that could have supported us both, if needed. (And he had insurance I could jump on.) We also lived in a house that we bought with help from family; at the time, this meant we were paying a mortgage amount that was less than we would have been paying if we’d been renting. Similarly, because of family support and our jobs, we were already in a very stable position financially, so when I was paid a large advance, we were able to put that money in a savings account and treat the account as “my income,” pulling money as we needed. If we’d been in a different position, we might have needed to use that advance money for something else.
There’s also a blackhole when it comes to how much authors make, which can enable a myth that once you’re a published author you’re financially set for life or writing full-time is an option. You're still a lawyer and a published author who is writing another book. Could you tell us more about that?
As much as I would like to one day be fully transparent in terms of money, I feel squirrelly about talking specific numbers, I think because the culture is so tight-lipped and I feel some kind of anxiety that I would be saying what I’m not supposed to say. (Which I know is how things stay the same.) That being said, I’ll say the parts that I know are available if you go looking: Publisher’s Weekly reported my two-book US deal as “high six figures.” I also have a two-book deal in the UK, and we sold some translation rights for the first book. It probably goes without saying, but this is not an average advance situation.
So, having hinted at those numbers, from a financial standpoint I don’t necessarily have to work as a lawyer anymore, even though I’m unsure when I’ll earn the next portion of my advance. This is because of how much I have been paid, plus my husband’s job and our financial situation pre-book deal.
That said, my last advance payment was in 2022 when the paperbacks were published. I’m working on a novel that should fulfill my second part of the two-book deal, but I genuinely don’t know when it will be published or when I’ll earn the next installments of my contract. In the past year or so, I’ve felt a psychological toll from not earning money; I’ve always worked, even during college and some of law school. That feeling of ‘not carrying my weight’ by actively making money has put pressure on my writing that doesn’t work for me. (I know some writers are essentially the opposite on this topic: financial pressure motivates their writing.)
Last winter I decided to start doing contract legal work. Essentially, this means doing projects for firms where I’m not an employee. I’m also reactivating my law license so that it doesn’t lapse at the five-year mark from when I went inactive. For me, making these changes has been like lifting a weight off myself. And, to my surprise, I’ve actually enjoyed returning to the law after my four-year break. I guess I can’t help that I’m a research and writing nerd. The law is kind of fun, especially when you aren’t strung out that you’re going to accidentally ruin a kid’s life. Ben and so many of my friends and family are lawyers, too, that it’s nice to have something in common again, even if I’m not in the emotional trenches of litigation anymore.
I expect that I’ll always benefit from having something in addition to my career as an author. (I actually worked at my local library before the pandemic hit the states, and I was preparing to apply for a job there when the state shut down. By the time the library reopened, I was pregnant with our first and figured motherhood and writing would keep me plenty busy…which they have, but apparently I need even more!)
Okay, time to put on your wise Hindsight Glasses. What advice would you give to aspiring authors?
I wouldn’t say that I advise you not to quit your day job, because I don’t know you! I know there are authors who find the financial pressure stimulating to their creativity and careers. There are also authors on a more consistent publication schedule than myself. There are plenty of reasons you might decide to make writing your full time, only job. But I would say not to assume it’s right for you, and don’t beat yourself up if you try it and need to make a change.
My only real you-should-do-this advice is something Cori already asked about: make a community for yourself. Even when you get the dream deal, publishing is weird and writing is hard and it’s so important to have writer friends who understand different facets of your unique experience.
Thanks so much to Caitlin for sharing her story! I hope you find some inspiration from her story to keep writing, querying, or building your own writing community.
You can find Caitlin on Instagram @caitlinwahrer and on Substack
. She’s also one-half of Substack.If you haven’t read THE DAMAGE yet, now is the time.
Photo Credit: Justine Johnson Photography
Loved the bullet point breakdown and the honesty here!
Loved this!