Many first-time authors believe that writing a book will be a breeze. They’ve read a lot of books and their own favorite authors make writing seem effortless. Sandra Griffith, whose first book, One Beautiful Year of Normal was recently published, has just two words for you: “It’s hard.”

She laughs heartily when she says that, but it is a laugh earned through nearly a decade spent bringing her book to fruition. “When you read someone who is a good writer, they make it look easy,” she says. “It’s not--it’s a grind. For me, the story part was easy, but the actual mechanics of writing the book was a grind. I would read passages aloud and they sounded stilted. Pacing and making the dialogue flow was a challenge.”

Griffith’s finished book reads as anything but labored. One Beautiful Year of Normal hooks readers from the get-go as a woman living in Paris with her psyche-scarred mute and agoraphobic mother receives a jarring four a.m. phone call:

             “This is Daniel Grant, an attorney in Savannah, Georgia. I’m sorry to wake you at such a terrible hour—Unfortunately, I’m calling about your aunt Helen.”                      

             “But, she died,” I said, almost choking on the words.

           “Oh. You already know?” he answered gently, clearly relieved that I had served the punch line. “If that’s the case, that just leaves my second reason for calling. I need to let you know a memorial service has been scheduled for your aunt this coming Saturday. If you’re able to make it, we could settle her estate while you’re here.”

           “Mr. Grant, I’m very confused…I don’t understand why you’re just now settling my aunt’s estate after all this time… My aunt died fifteen years ago….”

             There was another long pause. A nervous laugh. And then the words that knocked the air from my lungs and made the world spin faster….

           “Your aunt Helen didn’t die fifteen years ago. She died fifteen minutes ago.”

One Beautiful Year of Normal is not autobiographical (although Griffith shares with the aunt Helen character a rich and robust southern accent). “I had the most normal, boring childhood imaginable,” she says.

But she is a licensed psychologist with more than 25 years of clinical and forensic experience and brings keen psychological insight to her work. She is the CEO of Diversified Assessment and Therapy Services, a licensed behavioral health center that provides services to children and adults with developmental disorders and coexisting conditions. It is based in Griffith’s hometown of Kenova, WV with branches in several counties across the state.

Her book was shaped, in part, by the hundreds of patient evaluations she has conducted. “I’ve seen the family struggles that arise because one person has issues,” she says. “People struggle to reconcile with someone else’s mental illness. If it doesn’t affect them personally, they believe it is something that can’t be helped and is out of their control. But when it does start to affect them personally, that’s when they start questioning whether it is willful. This is the daughter thinking about her mother’s mental illness and balancing this with the anger that her mother has ruined her life.”

Griffith did not grow up in a literary household. Her father was a factory worker and her mother a social worker. But they did encourage her reading. “The library was 10 minutes from our house,” she says. “My mother took me at least twice a week. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were favorites, but I read anything I could get my hands on.”

She majored in English literature before ultimately earning her masters and doctorate in psychology from Marshall University. The inspiration to write a novel came years later when she discovered Jonathan Kellerman’s books. “He is a psychologist and a writer,” she says. I thought, ‘I could do the two things I love.”

Write what you know, goes the axiom, and Griffith had years of experience evaluating “just about every psychological disorder,” she says. “I wanted to write about one that wasn’t as well known to the general public. I became interested in delusional disorder; you can be talking to someone and suddenly one thing comes out of left field. In the case of my story, the mother has a delusion that something bad will happen to her if she uses her voice.”

Griffith says that she initially wrote the first and last chapters. The story in between went through many changes—characters sharpened, motivations refined and misunderstandings made clearer. Whether or not her muse was with her determined her writing routine. “Somedays I would write 12 hours a day and some days I couldn’t make myself write 12 minutes a day,” she says. “I just went with whenever the urge was there. I know not to try and edit more than 15-20 minutes at a time—I wouldn’t have the attention span to catch mistakes.”

She did not join a writer’s group or share her book in progress with anyone. Not even with her husband? “He still hasn’t read it,” she says with a laugh. “He’s a non-fiction kind of guy.” She credits her editor at She Writes Press with helping her shape the finished novel.

As the book progressed over the decade, she never once considered quitting. “There was never a question I wouldn’t finish the book,” she says, but she put the book on the back burner while she opened and grew her behavioral health center. The building next door houses the pharmacy—Griffith & Feil Drug— that her husband’s family has owned since 1940 (a Kenova institution, it was founded in 1891). “We added a soda fountain with all authentic features that we purchased from soda fountains across the country,” she says.

Griffith, 60, still lives in Kenova. “If I look out my front door, I can see Kentucky, if I look my side door I can see Ohio,” she says. She and her husband, retired, also spend time in Tybee Island, Georgia. She has three stepdaughters and six grandchildren. The eldest stepdaughter operates the pharmacy, another is her chief financial officer at the behavioral center and the other is a speech therapist.

She is not a full-time writer, but she is currently in the process of editing her second book, a “straightforward” thriller (psychological, of course) about a psychologist whose newest patient is a traumatizing figure from her past). It took her eight months to complete.

As for the publication of One Beautiful Year of Normal and holding a physical copy, Griffith says it was an unexpectedly emotional moment. “I’m not a very demonstrative person,” she says. But I almost started crying.”

To other first-time writers, her advice is, “Don’t be afraid to discard. Keep redoing, keep rewriting.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer who is published on vanityfair.com and in the Washington Post and other outlets.