1. The Choice to Be Strong and Weak
We tend to think that strength is [a] static, constant quality. We think that if somebody is strong, they are always strong. This comes up a lot with black women, especially. In books or on TV, we often see the portrait of the Strong Black Mother, an iron-willed figure who never suffers. This is a kind of stereotype, I think, and a limiting one.

Real strength is not the absence of weaknesses or fear. It’s not the absence of doubt or anger. Real strength includes all of these emotions. It’s when you’re afraid and risking something, not when you’re afraid or risking something. For example, the main character of my novel, Hattie, is deeply flawed. She’s afraid; she is wounded; she’s prone to fits of rage; she doesn’t necessarily understand how to raise her children, but no one would deny that she’s strong. 

When you see someone as a person with no weakness, you deny her her full humanity. Nobody goes through life never being afraid, and never doubting, and never being angry. 

2. The Choice About Algebra
When I was in high school, English came pretty naturally to me. Math, on the other hand, didn’t. My senior year, I was having trouble with elementary functions—which is some kind of advanced algebra—and basically I said, “I hate this; this is useless for my life; I really don’t need to be bothered.” I was in [a] very angry phase and instead of dealing with my difficulties, I told myself I was not interested. 

So...I was failing the class. Luckily, I had an incredible AP English teacher, Ms. Johnson. One day she called me into her classroom and told me to close the door. “Look,” she said, “you need to get yourself together with your elementary functions or I will fail you in my class too.” “But you’re my English teacher,” I said. “You can’t fail me in math!” “I can and I will,” she said.

Ms. Johnson was an amazing woman but not somebody you wanted to mess around with. She scared the bejeebers out of me—so I started working on my math grade. It was a great lesson. Life isn’t only made up of the stuff we’re good at. At some point we have to decide to tackle the difficult and the trying or we’ll remain stuck. (By the end of the semester, I had pulled my grade up to a B.)

3. The Choice to Keep Going
In Catholicism, despair is considered a mortal sin (I’m not Catholic or necessarily Christian, but I read a lot of theology) because it implies that God is powerless to effect change. Religion aside, the concept is still a good metaphor. If you’re in a state where you think even the gods can’t help you, it’s very, very difficult to recover. True despair is an absolute and utter bleakness. This state is different than the various darknesses that most of us experience over time. It’s not just sadness or discouragement or even mild depression. Despair implies a kind of ultimate emptiness, something like a grave—its opposite is life. Triumph over despair is survival. 

In my novel, Hattie enters into some very trying places. Her children die. There’s really not a darker place than that, but she chooses to keep going, to keep living, to be among that first generation of people who migrated North and raised their families.

1. Sometimes You Need a Manual
A really incredible book—even if its subject matter has nothing to do with your situation—can help you to understand your life and circumstance more clearly. For me, one of these books will always be Toni Morrison’s Beloved. While working on The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, in fact, I used it as a kind of manual, to instruct me as a writer. For example, I was struggling with the use of time. Toni Morrison is a master at moving between the past and the present in brilliant leaps that never confuse the reader. Her novel became a teacher to me, demonstrating how what has happened to a character 10 years ago factors into what is happening right now. This is something characters do on the page, but people also do it in real life. We are all an aggregate of our past and present, of personality and upbringing, race and class, the list goes on. Understanding the ways in which these things impact our present situation is crucial to getting by and getting through.

2. When in Doubt, Cook Italian
When you’re working on a project for months and months—whether it’s a book or anything else that requires a sustained effort—it’s easy to get discouraged. The rewards are few, and you feel as if it's never, ever going to be done. At the end of particularly trying days, I head into the kitchen and cook something that’s fast, delicious and not particularly hard to make. Spaghetti alla bottarga is a slightly obscure but amazing dish I've made over and over. You sauté some garlic and cherry tomatoes in olive oil, toss in cooked pasta and grate the bottarga (fish roe) while everything is piping hot. In about 20 minutes, I can see (and eat!) the fruits of my labor, which makes facing the next day’s long slog so much more endurable.

3. Friends Make Everything Easier—and Smarter
A few years ago, I met a writer named Justin Torres in a creative-writing class. The evening of the second session, he read a story called “Niagara.”Listening to him, I thought, “My God, who the hell is this guy?” I was gob smacked. The story was shockingly good. (Several years later, he published the brilliant We the Animals.)

Over time, Justin and I became very close. We can talk about anything from, say,Friday Night Lights on NetFlix to the particular challenges faced by writers of color. Having friends who are just a little smarter than you or a little further along in their goals is crucial when you’re trying to do something difficult. These kind of intimates set the bar a little higher. It isn’t simply that they inspire you, it’s that their example makes you aspire to do better and be better.

4. Accept the Fits and Starts
One the most challenging things in life is learning a new language. I lived in Italy for five years in my late twenties and early thirties. I wasn’t writing during that period. I got a job with a tour operator in Florence—and I had to learn Italian. The interesting thing was, there were days when I could chatter on about anything under the sun, only to find that the next morning, I couldn’t even order a coffee. Acquiring any skill is like this: You make a little progress; then you lose ground; then you make a little more progress. Accepting the fits and starts is the only way to keep yourself from giving up.