Emma Pattee: On the Journey to Truer Identities, Handwriting Drafts, Asking for Help, and her Debut Novel ‘Tilt’

When you’re pregnant, your body becomes a landscape prone to natural disaster. Your core stretches up and out. New cracks emerge. Your center of gravity shifts. You know what is coming. But you don’t. The pregnant woman is told to take breathing courses, to pack herself a go-bag and stock up for a life after-birth as if she’s preparing for the end of the world. 

In Emma Pattee’s debut novel Tilt (S&S/Marysue Rucci Books, 2025), we follow Annie, who is nine months pregnant, as she escapes the dangers of Ikea’s self-serve warehouse and waddles into the detrimental aftermath of the Cascadia earthquake that she’s just survived. Waiting to bring a new life earthside can make any woman feel as though the world is crumbling around her. Waiting to bring a new novel earthside can have a similarly destabilizing effect on a writer. Much like pregnancy, writing a novel is a very delicate balance between surrender and control. There is only so much one can know or plan for. Tilt captures the paradoxes of life’s beginnings and endings (and all the convoluted messaging that accompanies them) with such clever and honest precision.  

I spoke with Emma over Zoom about pushing past ambition, losing control, when to ask for help, and her debut novel Tilt.

Ashley Rubell: Tilt takes place over the course of one day, with some flashbacks. The pacing felt genius to me, having this stress build fast and slow at the same time, just as an earthquake would. Did you read other books that took place over twenty-four hours while you were writing? Was it at all intentional to structurally replicate the model of a quake or faultline? 

Emma Pattee: At the time I was really taken with stream-of-consciousness, which has to happen in real time. The writing begs to have a container of time in order to accurately do stream-of-consciousness. I spent years trying to figure out how to structure the book. An earlier version was timestamped every fifteen minutes, and there was no back and forth [between present and past]. Another version was marked by miles and the number of steps based on a FitBit that Annie, the main character, was wearing. But the thing that was so captivating to me about stream-of-consciousness and the central fascination I had [with it] was this idea that right after you almost die you get really clear. And you also think really absurd things like, I’m hungry for pizza. The things you think about in the worst moments of your life, or in the scariest moments of your life, are often very profound and very banal. That’s what I wanted to capture. 

I read a book that really influenced me called Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann. It’s a woman just standing in her kitchen, I believe, for the entire book of four hundred pages. She spends the whole time cooking and thinking. Another book that really influenced me was The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, which takes place on an escalator. I was very taken with that idea of stretching out these moments of time with Annie walking. I did not think about mirroring a faultline or earthquake as much as I really wanted to show a person who was very stuck and had the chance to unstick themselves.  

AR: Being stuck makes me think of all your characters in Tilt. They all have this tension of longing for something—for children, for a career, for safety. They all seemed motivated to force their missed opportunities back into existence. How did your own longings while writing the book directly or indirectly influence your characters?

EP: I started writing this book when I was five months pregnant with my first kid. I was very much of the mindset that that was sort of the end of any shot at a writing career I had, and that any chance to write a novel had passed me by. It’s been a very surreal outcome to write a novel about a woman making peace with giving up the thing she wants most and then for me to make peace with giving up the thing I wanted most, and in the process of doing that, giving myself the thing I wanted most. It’s been a pretty bizarre ride. Because I really did make peace with giving it up. And I believe in the book that Annie makes peace with that, too, and connects, I think, to something bigger than ambition. And I don’t mean motherhood, but I mean some form of connectivity and spirituality. A cosmic understanding that’s bigger than becoming rich and famous. 

I found myself—when I was pregnant, and in my work writing about climate change—at this intersection of longing for what could have been, what hopefully still could be, what was. I have this overwhelming sense of longing when I find myself in places like Target or the airport, longing for something that feels a bit more real, more rooted to the natural world. When I was pregnant I felt disturbed by how commercial pregnancy is and how being a pregnant woman is a consumer identity. I started to think about it more and I realized being a wife or a married person or a millennial is a consumer identity. There are all these interpretations of identity that were created for commercial purposes. I felt this longing for something truer. The experience of giving birth is not artificial. It feels bizarre and otherworldly, but it’s actually the most worldly thing. All the other stuff we’re doing is otherworldly. What we conceive as regular life is very alien, and the most natural things to us we perceive as the most alien. 

The beginning of the book starts off with Annie as a consumer identity. She’s a pregnant woman shopping for a crib in her pregnant clothing making consumer decisions. And by the end she’s [much more primal]. For me, this book is her journey from consumer identity back to an animal shape. 

AR: How has the experience of motherhood influenced your ability or inability to finish a novel that’s so much about the end of a pregnancy during this end-of-the-world type event? 

EP: Birth was a very profound experience. It was very humbling to learn how little our ambition matters or our aesthetic matters.  A lot of life is very much out of our control and I threaded that into later drafts of the book. When my second kiddo was eight weeks old—I had an agent by that point but hadn’t finished or gone out on submission yet—I came back and rewrote the whole book. 

AR: You sat down and wrote it all out from beginning to end?

EP: Yeah, only because at that point I could. I hadn’t figured out the flashback piece. There was a lot about the book that needed to change. It took place in a different part of the city. It had a very different tone and pace. So I’m sure that experience is definitely threaded into the book. 

AR: Hearing you say the words “out of control” has me thinking about the use of language from the very beginning of the book when Annie, our narrator, is reflecting on how all pregnancy advice starts with the words “Just wait.” Or how her reason for dropping out of school was the excuse of “due to unforeseen circumstances outside of my control.” These minor moments used language that felt so heavy and really worked to allude to this impending sense of doom. 

EP: Yeah, life has really happened to Annie. It’s a part of her character that I don’t relate to at all. I am the complete opposite of that. I’m a very intentional, sort of forceful person, and that hasn’t always worked out great for me. Annie is somebody whose life has really just happened to her, and has resentment toward these two core characters, her husband and her mother. Her mother also has had life happen to her, but really has made her peace with it. Her husband is out there chasing it. And she can’t. She ping-pongs herself against both of them because she can’t see how stuck she is. 

AR: Talk to me more about being stuck. What has that looked like for you? How have you pushed through those moments, as a writer, and found the hope or discipline to stop bullshitting yourself and do what you wanted to do? Are you officially unstuck now? 

EP:  In a writing sense, yes, very much so. I was so stuck with this first book. I didn’t know how to write a book. I was paying for childcare costs every hour that I was writing and it was brutal. I wrote a draft of the book and nobody got what I was trying to do. There was this thing I was feeling and trying to say but couldn’t really say it and kept not being able to do it. I was so blocked. I couldn’t write. I hired a creativity coach to help me be able to write and get unstuck. Sometimes we wrote for five minutes at a time and that was a writing day. At one point I threw the book out completely and started over handwriting it. Handwriting has been my salvation. You, too? There are a few of us, or maybe a lot of us but no one says it, I don’t know. 

AR: Handwriting is a gateway for me. I sit down with one thing to say and write something else. Then when I type it, not word for word, it ends up being an entirely different thing all over again. 

EP: Totally, I rework as I type. There must be some proven science behind handwriting and why it’s so different. It’s hard to explain to people [who think] it must be slow. It’s not slow. It’s literally different words than I would be able to type. It’s two different things. Two different parts of my brain. 

So I rewrote [the book] handwritten and got stuck again. I didn’t know how to write a book. I didn’t understand how many drafts you have to do. I was about to give up and I got pregnant again. I thought, I have to put this thing down; this isn’t working. It was so painful. I had an idea for the next book I wanted to write so I thought, I’m done with this. Then I went to BreadLoaf and this woman was like, Emma, this is a book, you need to meet with an agent, pitch it to an agent as is. So a few weeks later I hired an agent as a consultant and asked, essentially, should I put this down or should I keep going? And she said, I want to be your agent.  

I felt intuitively that I could not go anywhere with this book and I was ready to put it down. I was pregnant again. I was that close [to giving it up]. 

AR: Do you think that having a respected peer and fellow writer and/or agent tell you that it was worth continuing with were the words you needed to hear from outside of yourself in order to keep going?

EP: The reason I’m not stuck anymore is because I just didn’t believe in myself. I did not believe my artistic intuition. I’d think, oh [this person] thinks it’s this, so maybe it’s this. I don’t have that problem anymore. It’s not like every book I’m going to write is going to be amazing and I’m going to sell it. I don’t think that. I just fundamentally believe in my artistic vision now, and I fundamentally believe that whatever I think this thing should be is at least as good of a vote as what anybody else in my life thinks it should be, and that’s right up there with my agent and my editor. I did not back myself one hundred percent. I was too embarrassed and afraid to tell people, No, I’m trying to write a really dark stream of consciousness book set in the earthquake. I know what I’m doing. So what I did was I stopped taking workshops. I stopped taking writing classes. I stopped showing the book to anybody. That’s how I write now. I don’t show the book to anybody and I do what I set out to do. If I get stuck, sure, I’ll bring in help. But the vision of what I’m trying to do is no longer up for discussion or debate. If you’re trying to do something different, or even a little bit weird—something that’s not like a romance novel [which] follows a pattern—do not get feedback until you are pretty far along. That’s what I think. 

AR: You’ve used the phrase “how to write a book” a few times now. I’m curious, especially in regard to writing something that doesn’t follow a calculated narrative pattern, what does the day-to-day drafting process look like for you as someone who now knows how to write a book? How do you know when to stop for the day, or where to pick things up? 

EP: I love granular writing process stuff. And I position it as a process, not advice, because I have no idea what would work for other people. I’ve just finished the first draft of my third book now, and this is the process that works for me: I write three handwritten pages a day. I write from beginning to end of the book. Sometimes I will write, “need a scene here that explains this relationship” and will move to the next thing. I’m typically working off an outline that is very loose, so I have the basic concept sketched out. [The first draft] ends up coming in low at around 45,000-50,000 words. It’s not a full draft. I type that up. Put it away for four to eight weeks. Then I read it fresh. 

What I realized is that the reason I was going to all these workshops is because I didn’t know you have to give your work time to read it fresh. I also have a poor memory, so if I read something four weeks ago, I have almost no memory of it. While I read it I get more body, more clarity, I’m taking notes and edits [throughout]. Then I freewrite about what I just read and all the problems with it. 

Then I stomp around for a week. I’ll pick three major things—a  major thing can be as big as an entire chapter or a whole new character. It’s huge. Five medium sized things—that could be two to three more pages, or a new scene. And then ten small things. And I’ll write them as checkboxes. And then I do it all over again. For me it really helps to think about things as passes, and to think about my draft and my outline as two completely separate docs. Next week I’m going to be reading through the first draft of my third book and at that point I will probably write a twenty-five to thirty  page outline of the book. Not with the plot that’s in the draft I’m reading, but the plot I’m about to impose upon the draft. Plot 2.0. The outline I have now is only three pages long. It’s plot 1.0. 

I do think, for me, I need to work against an outline. But I could imagine different books needing something different. I also feel a lot of urgency right now, because I wrote a full second book that I then decided to put down. So I feel this urgency to get it done. I maybe would meander at other times in my life more than I am willing to meander right now. 

AR: How often do you work with a writing coach or creativity coach? Is that something you always do while working on a book draft? 

EP: Eight weeks after giving birth, I had this list of all of [my agent’s] edits, which was like a full rewrite. I was in a panic. I was postpartum. I thought, this is my one shot at ever getting a book deal, and if I don’t make it, I’ll never have it again. 

So I found this writing coach, Margaret Malone. I showed up to her sweaty and anxious. I showed her the list of edits and the book draft. I had the baby in the car seat next to me, and I was like, Help me! And she really changed my life. I mean she is, I believe, the reason this book exists.

I sometimes feel like a lone voice saying “hire help!” and maybe that goes against my [stance on] workshopping. Margaret helped me make decisions, learn to be a better writer, and set goals. I think it’s really interesting that we rely so much on our decision-making as writers. We rely so much on creativity, which is so linked to sleep and nutrition. We rely so much on our cognitive abilities, and then we get zero help with them. If we were athletes that would never happen. That’s not how you would approach success. I worked with Margaret every week until we sold the book. 

AR: Did you freelance at all while working on the book? What other obligations did you have in the mix outside of your kids and your book draft? 

EP: I worked in journalism full-time until I got an agent. [After that,] I had a couple pieces come out but I wasn’t really pitching. I pretty much worked full-time on the book from when my kid was eight weeks old until he was nine months old, when I sold the book. I hired full-time care that I paid for out of my savings and I wasn’t making any money. I wrote every day. It was awful. I feel like I missed this huge part of his life. 

AR: Tell me about the title of the book. The word “tilt” appears a number of times throughout the story. Did the use of that word inform the title or did the title inform its frequency? 

EP: The title came very, very late. I don’t know that I realized the word “tilt” is in the book. 

AR: I noticed it much more in the second half. 

EP: Interesting! My editor came up with it. I sold the book with a different title, and I knew I did not want the title that I sold it with. I came up with probably seventy-five [other] titles that nobody liked. I got on the phone one night with my agent and my editor and started brainstorming titles and my editor came up with Tilt. I knew as soon as I heard it. It was a dream come true to have a title that felt like it fit. 

AR: Without giving away the ending, what would you say is etched into Annie at the beginning of the story that has changed by the end of it?

EP: You brought up the word longing which I really appreciate that you identified. Longing is sort of the core thread of all of the fiction that I write. All that I write. It’s kind of a central theme for me. And I think that the opposite of longing is the present moment. The narrative of Annie is that she’s a woman who wants to be anywhere but where she is, and she is so disconnected from others. She’s in this central space of longing, of wishing and wanting things to be different. And then at the end she is someone who doesn’t want anything to be different. I didn't want to remove the longings or fix the problems, because I think that is a narrative trope that we often see—person starts out with problems, problems get resolved. At the beginning of the book Annie has a thinking problem. At the end of the book Annie has the same problems, much worse problems. I don't want to say her thinking problem is solved, but she sees it all from a different angle.

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Emma Pattee is a climate journalist and fiction writer. Her work has been published in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and elsewhere. She lives in Oregon. Tilt is her debut novel.