I grew up the eldest of six kids in a religious movement that valued motherhood as a woman’s highest calling, the vocation she was expected to devote her life to. I had other work I wanted to do. In my early twenties, my mantra became “Marriage and motherhood are the enemy of my dreams.” When I did eventually choose to become a mother (having already married and managed to hang onto my dreams), it was with a lot of careful thought and a good dose of fear about how I could be a mother without losing myself.

I felt invalidated by the general societal approval of my choice to mother, the disproportionate burden of labor placed on me versus my husband, and the glib assumptions about one of the most complex experiences of my life. I loved my daughters, I wanted them to have a nurturing and secure upbringing, I wanted to support them into becoming fully-realized women…and there were many days when I felt like devoting myself to this had sabotaged my own self-realization.

I couldn’t speak any of this. So I created a character, Sadie Jones, who is a lot more brazen than I am: Not only does she say it, but she chooses to leave her toddler to preserve her own self and her own dreams.

This story was always two-sided for me, though, and I also wanted to give full voice to a daughter whose mother prioritizes her own thriving. I was acutely aware of the inherent unsolvable dilemma in Sadie’s choice: When Sadie leaves, what does that do to Jude? I wrote this book to explore that dilemma.

This structure is one of the reasons I abandoned The Mother Act before I was halfway through the first draft! I believed I’d set myself an impossible challenge and that the story as I’d conceived it just wasn’t viable.

But whenever I talked about my failed manuscript, it was that very structure that people found compelling: the entire novel takes place on the opening night of a one-woman show. The mother, Sadie, is onstage; her estranged, now-grown daughter, Jude, is in the audience. In acts that alternate between each of their perspectives, the answers to two questions gradually unfold:

1) What exactly happened on the snowy February day when Sadie abandoned 18-month-old Jude?

2) Since Sadie has long since come back into Jude’s life and rebuilt their relationship, why are they estranged now?

But I couldn’t make it work! I gave up. For two years I considered it a failed experiment. Until the day I was driving to pick up my kids from school and happened to catch Sheila Heti on the radio talking about her novel Motherhood. I recognized many of my own themes in the questions her novel was asking. By the end of that day, I’d pulled The Mother Act out of the drawer and had begun actively working on it again. Sadie and Jude were still utterly captivating to me, but I realized I’d chosen the wrong parts of their story to tell. I kept the opening-night framework and the first act, chucked two others, and started over.

I was plunged into the world of theatre when I fell in love with an actor. I’d studied and written about Shakespeare myself, but our relationship gave me access to Shakespeare off the page, to the green rooms, dressing rooms, stages, and post-show pub sessions of actors who brought his work to life.

By the time I was halfway through the first draft of The Mother Act, my now-husband had become the artistic director of a summer Shakespeare Festival. He’d chosen The Taming of the Shrew and hired a feminist woman director to create a sensitive production of this problematic play.

My reaction to Shrew was pretty much like Sadie’s in the novel: It triggered every wound of a patriarchal upbringing in which I was implicitly and explicitly taught that because I was female, my God-given role was to listen, follow, and obey.

Female friends saw the production and were agog: this is supposed to be a love story? The female lead, also a playwright, had once been so infuriated by the play that she’d written her own in response, and the Festival held a staged reading of her version. I went out with the actors afterward to ask about and listen to their complicated feelings about taking part in a story whose plot is, at least on the surface, about taming a woman. They had all thought hard about the play, its subtexts and deeper messages. I still hated it.

Since both my main characters are actors, my vision for The Mother Act was to build each act around a play or other work of art. The Taming of the Shrew, clearly, had to be in the book.

It wasn’t until I was deep in revisions that I realized that Sadie’s own story mirrors Kate’s in The Taming of the Shrew. Like Kate, Sadie starts out a firecracker and is gradually tamed into a version of a woman more palatable to society—in Sadie’s case, by marriage, by motherhood, by the necessities of keeping a home and making a living.

But she doesn’t stay that way.

And though I didn’t consciously plan this, as the novel progresses, its acts move gradually from the plays of a dead white male to the creative work of the novel’s two female protagonists as they claim their own agency.

I do love Shakespeare, to be clear—but The Mother Act is in part about women centering their own stories, from their own points of view, which I think here in the twenty-first century is still a radical act.

Years ago I heard the novelist Tayari Jones say that she knew she had a story when she hit upon two characters who were on completely opposite sides of a question or situation…and who were both completely right.

That’s where fiction is interesting to me—not when we’re adjudicating whose side is more correct, but when we’re exploring deeply the nuances and contradictions of being a human in relationship with other humans.

There’s a point in The Mother Act where Jude says that her father can’t choose sides in the war between her and Sadie. “It’s the actor in him,” she says. “No one’s a villain; everyone’s their own protagonist. He has to be able to understand and inhabit the perspective of any character.”

That’s kind of how I feel when I’m writing…and I how I hope you might feel while reading.

Writing started to work for me when I found a balance between structure and freedom. Before this, I swung between two opposite extremes: 1) rigid and rule-bound, 100% analytical mind, and 2) all-intuition, all-play, all confusing aimlessness on the page as I refused to impose any kind of restrictions on my work.

The magic, at least for me, is in the middle path. Harnessing structure might mean using a story model or outline, or it might mean adopting systems, schedules, a consistent writing practice, and accountability that help you show up to write. When you have at least a few parameters to work within or guidelines to follow (or rebel against), when you make and honor a commitment to your work and your writing practice, you can start getting traction.

But don’t get too rigid! Because the paradox is that creativity also wants freedom. To stumble into something surprising and fresh, you can’t start out 100% certain what the result will be. To write a novel that’s sparkling and alive, you want to drop into something deeper, more mysterious, and more true than what your analytical brain can come up with. The right amount of structure can help you open up to that place, but you also don’t want to get in your own way with a list of structural or other rules.

Because the other part of the freedom key is to be willing to write badly, especially in the first draft. Focusing on process rather that product—as long as you’ve got a bit of a framework in place to hold you through the confusion—frees you to write with vitality, presence, and flow.