How long does it take? - Building a book, finishing a book

The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

How long does it take?
Building a book, finishing a book

Once, a woman writer asked me, “How long does it take to write a book?” It was a disconcerting question because I couldn’t answer it. It’s as if we think knowing how long another writer took will tell us how long it will or should take us to finish our book. I suspected she was asking me if it was all right that she was taking a long time to finish the book she was currently writing.

I could have answered that nearly ten years passed between the publication of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and The Marriage Plot, during which he’d spent “most of every day writing.” Or that Charles Johnson took six years to write Middle Passage: “I had a draft done after a year and it didn’t work. So I went back and rewrote it for five years.” Or that John Barth, author of Lost in the Funhouse (1968), takes “about one presidential term to write a book, about four years.” Or that Elizabeth Gilbert wrote The Signature of All Things (2013), about a nineteenth-century woman botanist, in four months after spending “three and a half years on research alone.” Or that Joan Didion composed The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir about her husband’s death, in three months, but had difficulty finishing because she “didn’t want to let John go.”

A big challenge writers face is not knowing how long a book will take, and becoming comfortable with not knowing. So much about writing is uncertain. And how long a book will take to write is just another uncertainty. Changing our attitude to time can be part of our growth process while we write a book. An inexperienced writer might decide to give up on a book that’s taking a long time. But it’s important for us to understand just how long it might take to complete an important work.

It took Norman Rush eight years to write his National Book Award—winning first novel, Mating, and ten years to write his second, Mortals. Rush promised his wife, Elsa, “his next novel would … take two years.” But Subtle Bodies (2013), a novel about a gathering of male friends after twenty-five years, also took ten years.

As time passed, Rush “began feeling guilty” because writing the novel “was taking time out of our life when there were lots of fun things we could do if I just stopped writing.” But “the never-giving-up part” is an important characteristic that has enabled Rush to complete books that take a long time.

In the midst of writing Subtle Bodies, Rush told Elsa, “I can’t finish this book.” She “got a yellow pad” and asked him to tell her where, in the narrative, he became confused. She took ten pages of notes as he answered, and told him his challenges weren’t insuperable: when she asked him what needed doing, he had an answer. She thought he was tired, and suggested, “Look at it again in the morning.”

Rush used the notes Elsa made, and he finished the novel.

It took Margaux Fragoso “eight years, on and off,” to write her first book, the highly acclaimed memoir, Tiger, Tiger. Fragoso began the work after Peter Curran, a far older man with whom she’d had a sexual relationship—she met him when she was seven, lost her virginity to him at sixteen—killed himself. “I needed to examine things and figure things out,” Fragoso said, “so I started writing.” She composed the first draft “that summer after Peter died,” while she also did a lot of reading—Arundhati Roy, Philip Roth, Dorothy Allison—to help her understand her experience. The draft wasn’t “organized at all—just memories all strewn together with no particular focus.” Then, in graduate school, she “started to work on carefully composing the story,” but she also wrote material—about 170 pages—she eventually extracted. She often thought she should censor herself, then decided not to: “this is the truth,… this is what pedophilia is.” There were also “five or six rounds of edits in the pre-publication state.”

Fragoso says it’s important for beginning writers to understand how long it takes to complete a book so they don’t abandon their work. She believes they might be encouraged to learn she is a working-class woman and “a high school dropout,” who nonetheless resumed her education, earned a Ph.D., and composed her first book, while she was the young mother of a young child.

So much of life today occurs quickly. All this instant this and instant that makes it hard for us writers to understand that it might take a long time to write a book, and that we often can’t predict how much time the work will take. It might make us expect to write our books more quickly than they can or should be written. It might make the people in our lives believe we should finish our work sooner than it’s possible. It might make us feel like failures because we’re taking such a long time. And it might cause us to abandon an important work, like Rush almost did.

Sometimes a book comes quickly. More often, a book takes a long time. The only way to finish is to keep working until a book is finished. Rushing through writing a book is rushing through life.

What I finally told that woman who asked me how long it takes to write a book was this: a book takes as long as it takes. And you’ll enjoy writing it more if you focus on the process rather than the product. As Leonard Woolf said, “The journey not the arrival matters.”