I Blame Nancy Meyers for the Write-It-at-the-Beach-House Fantasy
I blame Nancy Meyers.
As much as I love her interior design and her fun, frothy movies, Nancy Meyers may be responsible for a generation of writers harboring a very specific fantasy — writing a book at a dreamy beach house with a perfect kitchen.
You know the one. That bucolic house where Diane Keaton, as Erica Barry inSomething’s Gotta Give, slips on her white turtleneck, and turns heartbreak into a Broadway play. Words pour out of her, along with tears. Within a few screen minutes, she types the words "The End” and in another few scenes, she is in New York watching rehearsals of her play.
For the male version of this scenario, reference Love Actually and Colin Firth writing (and finding love, actually) at a quaint French villa.
It’s so hard not to aspire to the same scene in our own writerly lives. As opposed to the one where we stumble to our desk at 5 a.m. to get a few hours in before we start work or open our laptop on the subway to get a few more paragraphs written. All the while, our ideas, internal deadlines and self-doubt build up like an ever-growing pile of stuff in our metaphoric garages.
And still we are no closer to the beach house. Because if you are like me, you don't want to be slogging through the hard stuff while you pay for the beach house. You want to be enjoying that final scene where you write "The End," lean back and throw your arms up in air in triumph, right?!
But then the overwhelm sets in and we are defeated by our own best intentions.
It just takes a shift in mindset to make sense of all the clutter.
📌 Here are my three favorite ways to control the overwhelm no matter what you are writing.
1️⃣The Decade Method
Break your story into decades. Then within each decade, sort by major project, moment, or lesson.
Example:
1990s: Starting a business, a move, a divorce
2000s: Business success, burnout, breakthrough
2010s: Reinvention, legacy work, clarity
You don’t have to write the whole decade — just sketch it. These “containers” reduce emotional overload and help create structure.
2️⃣The Sticky Note Sort
One of my favorite methods.
Write one story, moment, or memory per sticky note (or index card).
Use different colors if you like (happy, hard, lesson, personal, etc.).
Spread them out on a desk or wall.
Let patterns and clusters emerge.
This turns a mental mess into something visible, flexible, and freeing.
Bonus: You can literally pick up a note and write from there. No more wondering where to begin.
3️⃣Chronological First, Theme Later
Sometimes the best way to get unstuck is to just write what happened — year by year, moment by moment.
It's the same as writing your crappy first draft. Don’t worry about meaning yet. Don’t edit as you go.
Just move forward.
You can always shape it around a theme later. I promise you, a theme always shows up!
Give yourself grace and start here:
One Small Step
Set a timer for 15 minutes.
Write down everything you think you want to transfer from your mental garage to the page.
No censoring. No organizing. Just list it.
This is your inventory.
From there, the structure can begin.
You don’t have to clean it all today — you just have to unlock the door.
Photo from Something’s Gotta Give: Courtesy Architectural Digest