Novel Advice From the Sauna: 6 Writing Lessons I Learned From Building My Own Backyard Sauna

When we moved back to Maine last year, priority number one was making sure my Californian wife wouldn’t freeze over the winter. We ordered an electric barrel sauna kit, the kind of thing I naively believed I could put together in a weekend or two. 

Around the same time, I was finishing up revisions for my debut novel, The Great Transition. As our DIY sauna project became more and more involved (weekends turning into weeks, weeks turning into months) it dawned on me: Building my first sauna was a weirdly similar process to writing my first novel. Here are six writing lessons that my backyard sauna taught me:

1: Ignore Deadlines

A freight truck delivered our sauna as an 8×4 crate on our driveway in early September. The instructions promised that two people could assemble the entire sauna in a “matter of hours.” I needed a matter of hours just to unpack the crate.

Between weather, work, mosquitoes, dwindling sunlight, and the hundredth trip to the hardware store, our sauna took me four months to finish. At many points, I wanted to give up. I wished I’d never started it. I was certain I was clueless, incompetent, wasting my life…

I had similar thoughts and feelings during the five years it took me to write The Great Transition. If I’d been prepared from the outset to take much (much!) longer than I’d anticipated, I would’ve spared myself loads of self-abuse. For any project, be prepared to blow past whatever deadlines you, society, or the instruction manual, has set. The sauna, the novel, will be done when it’s done, not a moment earlier.

2: Foundations Matter

I was eager to start swinging a hammer, raising planks, and build the sauna. But the only thing worse than spending four months on a sauna, would be completing the thing only to find it crooked, or sinking into a water-logged pit. First came the inglorious work of cutting out turf, digging a drainage ditch, building a 4×4 frame, shoveling gravel, and leveling the foundation.

Foundations are equally important for novels. The author Edward P. Jones spent 10 years mentally planning his award-winning book, The Known World, before writing the novel in a few months. In preparation for The Great Transition, I committed four months to research before starting. I set up my writing area (a finished basement room) and a realistic writing schedule (45 minutes before work). 

Once ground had been broken, so to say, the foundation set, I knew I’d be less likely to jump ship to another project, or watch the novel, half-built, collapse. Now I was ready to write.

3: Trust your Gut

The sauna kit instructions were 10 measly pages, tiny font, sparse to the point of poetry. One grainy image required magnification to determine which screw to use. Some instructions were contradictory. Others, clearly intended for a different model. Inconceivably, nobody had uploaded a single how-to YouTube video. To call this discouraging would be an understatement. 

But taking a step back, I realized I didn’t need step-by-step instructions. I could see, in a basic way, how the parts should fit together. Following my intuition, going piece by piece, something resembling a barrel sauna began to emerge.

Novel writing can be a similarly overwhelming experience of conflicting advice, seemingly-missing instructions, and hopelessness. But novels, at heart, are just very long stories, and we all know how to tell stories; we’ve been listening to them for our entire lives. 

The parts are always the same (characters, desires, struggles, obstacles, etc) but there exists no master step-by-step manual for how to put those parts together. If stuck, or doubting yourself, take a step back. Trust your gut. Tell the story in a way that you know how.

4: Ask for Help

My father drove over to hold the large end pieces in place while I screwed them down. A neighbor helped me install the heavy glass door. My mother’s boyfriend talked me through tricky electrical work over the phone. My wife helped guide the key center plank. The town permitting officer patiently explained which type of direct-burial wire I needed, and how to set a PVC expansion coupling. 

I built 90% of the sauna on my own, but the other 10% would have been impossible without help. I’d estimate the same ratio goes for writing novels. Writing is solitary, yes, but without my early readers, my writing group, my cheerleaders, my book never would’ve made it over the finish line.

5: Keep the Faith

I finished digging the electrical trench in December, just before the ground froze. For the final steps, I had to snake a 100-foot wire through conduit and into the basement electrical panel. Outside, as the first winter storm was landing, I connected the red wire, the black, the neutral, the ground. I threw the circuit breaker and ran outside to see the results. 

After four months of labor, working weekends and after work, and thousands of dollars, I had no idea if the sauna would actually work. I ran through the rain to open the glass door and saw it: the heater coils, glowing red. The air, already tasting of warm cedar.

Writing a novel—especially your first—is an act of utter faith. You have no idea if anyone will ever read it. You don’t know if it will “work.” Before The Great Transition, I wrote two books that went nowhere. You might need to do the same. Most authors do. But that’s no reason to quit. One of these days you’ll flip the switch, and the coils will burn red hot.

6: Accept Imperfections

Despite the foundation, our sauna isn’t perfectly level; the door swings open if unlatched. The heater isn’t flush against the wall. The benches aren’t braced as solidly as I’d like. Lying in the sauna with my wife last winter, the imperfections of my handiwork were glaring. At the same time, it was below freezing outside, sleeting, snowing, yet we were warm, sweating, cozy.

Your novel will never be perfect. Imperfections will inevitably arise, shouting for your attention. My novel went through rounds of revisions, editing, and professional copyediting, and I can still open a finished copy and cringe at sentences where I wish I’d chosen different wording. 

In writing, as with so much in life, perfection can be our greatest enemy. Your novel may never—will never—be perfect. But it can be good enough.