Writing Through the Apocalypse
🎙️ New episode: Alissa Wilkinson on hope, hard times & how to write a book (even during a pandemic)
Hey Bleeders!
This week on the podcast, I’m reviving a delicious treat from the archives when I had the pleasure of talking to Alissa Wilkinson—film critic, journalist, and author of Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women. We got into the messy, joyful, and sometimes fraught realities of writing a book while juggling a demanding journalism career, especially in the midst of a global shutdown.
If you're a writer who's trying to squeeze your book project into the nooks and crannies of your already packed life, you're gonna want to hear this one. Here are some juicy writing and publishing takeaways from our convo:
🥂 Book #1 = Career boost + confidence builder
The goal with her first book? To support her academic career—and it did just that.
“It was like a main piece in my promotion packet. And so I got promoted from assistant to associate professor and that’s really what I was going for.”
But more than that, she proved to herself she could actually do it:
“I gained the confidence that I could write a book length work. Which was really important.”
Even though the follow-up project fell through when the publisher went under, that initial momentum and belief in herself carried forward—and bits of that “lost” second book ended up finding a home in her journalism.
💻 Journalism by day, book writing by night (or weekend)
Even with a full-time staff role at Vox covering film (she’s moved to The New York Times since we spoke!), Alissa has made writing books work—by sheer organization and knowing herself well.
“I have learned one thing about myself, which is that I do not write well in the mornings,” she said. “So I tend to try to reserve my mornings for meetings and… then in the afternoon kind of pick it up. Luckily I’m a very fast writer.”
That doesn’t mean she’s churning out chapters daily. It’s more like a slow burn followed by a sprint:
“If I know I’m not going to be able to get [a chapter] done, I try to get at least 400 to 600 words done in one day so that I can pick it up the next morning… And then after I write that chapter, I don’t look at it till the next month.”
✨ Salty origins
The concept for Salty was sparked by a casual chat with an editor at BEA (BookExpo America) in NYC back in 2019.
“I just love to cook, and so I love to read good writers on food,” Alissa told me.
Back in school, her advisor said, “Why don’t you take a quarter to just read food writing and write about it?” So she did, and it got her thinking about what makes for good food writing.
Eventually, when her editor asked if she had a book idea, she remembered a random suggestion from a mentor: “You should write a book called Cocktails with Hannah.” That seed turned into a centering nine revolutionary women she was fascinated by through the lens of food, art, and gatherings.
The editor was game, and the deal was sealed—literally on the world began shutting down in March 2020.
🦠 COVID wasn’t a blessing... but it did help the writing process
“I mean, I will never call COVID a blessing because it seems rude,” Alissa said, “but it did help in the writing of the book because I basically had nothing to do for a year.”
Pre-pandemic, her schedule was slammed with film festivals and evening events. Suddenly, with the pandemic grinding life to a halt, weekends were wide open—except for maybe a walk in the park or bingeing some TV. She suddenly had time—precious, uninterrupted time.
“I had all this time to read and write and that was really, really lovely for me,” she said. That unexpected pause shaped both the process and content of Salty.
“It’s a book about hope in dark times, which I think is correct. It’s also a book about just gathering and the importance of gathering, especially around food—which was a very weird thing to be writing when that was the only thing I definitely wasn’t doing.”
She didn’t start writing until September 2020, but then took a methodical approach: one chapter per month for nine months. She even booked Airbnbs to knock out the first few chapters. (Dreamy, right?)
📚 A nerdy, satisfying research process
Research played a huge role. Each chapter focused on one woman, and she committed to immersing herself in their work and lives.
“I had to sort of almost make a syllabus for myself every month... and then I would divide them up mathematically into how many pages I needed to read per day.”
One Saturday at a time, she worked through an entire Criterion Collection box set of filmmaker Agnès Varda’s work:
“That was great, you know, and I felt like I was meeting these people sometimes for sort of the first time and really getting to know them and then trying to share them with the reader.”
🍽️ Casting a dinner party (aka her curation process)
Who made the final cut?
“I just wanted to find people I wanted to spend time with who intrigued me for one reason or another… If I threw a dinner party, these are the people I would want to be there together.”
She skipped obvious choices like Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher in favor of surprising, underappreciated, or personally resonant women. And even made tough calls—like cutting Patricia Highsmith—due to a visceral aversion to creamed spinach. (Fair.)
📝 Word count & the writing mentality
The book clocks in at 60,000–70,000 words—gift-book-sized.
“Each essay in it is, I believe, somewhere between five and 6000 words long. So for me that’s like a long magazine article, which again, I knew I could write because I do it all the time.”
That mindset shift—treating each chapter like another article—made the whole book feel manageable.
✍️ The writing process
Alissa is not one of those “write 150 words a day” types. Her process is intense but highly structured. She blocked out one weekend per month to draft a chapter. That marathon-style writing means she can stay in the headspace long enough to find the shape of the argument.
“To do that well, you really need to—I don’t always know what the argument or even the thesis is going to be when I’m going into it. And so doing it all in a big chunk means that I’m like in that brain space and… I can kind of grab [the pieces] above my head.”
And get this: she retypes everything from her research that might be useful in a chapter.
“It’s laborious—like maybe too laborious, certainly not efficient—but it definitely helps with me being able to kind of pull all of the pieces together.”
📖 The book that shaped her
Her favorite book is The Supper of the Lamb, a quirky food book by an Episcopal priest that blends recipes with existential musings.
“I love this book. And every time I tell someone to read it, they come back to me and they’re like, ‘You were right.’”
That’s just a taste of what we got into! Alissa also talks about the winding path from freelancing to a full-time job as a critic, how she balances her analytical and creative selves, and a preview of her next project.
🎧 Listen to the full episode now.
Happy bleeding,
Courtney
I’m teaching some upcoming workshops you might be interested in:
How to Build a “Platform” for Writers Who Shudder at the Thought
Podcasting for Writers: How to Start, Sustain & Grow Your Podcast
Start a Newsletter to Supercharge Your Platform, Network and Business
Interested in podcasting? I’m teaching a course called Podcast Curious to Podcast Pro in Just Six Months! on my other Substack, —subscribe now to get Lesson 6 in your inbox tomorrow.
So… ROLL CALL! 🗣️
What do you think of batching big writing sessions like Alissa does? Are you more of a “slow and steady” or “cram it all in one weekend” type? Comment below and let me know.
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