Writing a Book is Like Building a House

People often say that writing a book is like giving birth. I disagree.  

I think it’s a lot more like building a house with your own hands—you hammer in every nail. You lay every floorboard. You choose every fixture, every color, every dimension and corner and window and treatment.

And every day you show up at the job site and begin work again. It’s good work, but it’s not passive. Your brain has to be engaged in it every second. You have to decide every single day that you write to sit down, think, feel, begin again, try harder, make it right.

And like building a house, writing a book has so many phases, so many sections, so many waves of work. I keep telling people, “I’m almost done! I’m just this close to being done!”….and what I mean is, I’m this close to having the essays themselves done. Or I’m this close to having the first wave of edits done. Or I’m this close to being finished with the first round of recipe tests.

It’s sort of like saying that construction is done, in that there are floors, not in that there are doorknobs. This part is done, and we’re moving to the next part.

Now we’re in the editing phase, but, just like a house, sometimes a discovery—good or bad—in one phase sends you back to the phase before. Along the editing process, for example, sometimes we find a story that needs more backstory, or a hole that needs to be filled. So then it’s back to writing mode.

Adding in recipes is a whole new adventure for me, and a whole new level of complexity. We thought the recipe list was set, but then my editor felt that one of the essays really does beg for a recipe. So I had to find one. Then I had to test it.

So that’s why Friday night we had a last minute dinner party, because I remembered this recipe for butterflied pork loin with balsamic-soaked prunes and olives, and I remembered it being really really good…but I needed to try it again, and I needed some feedback, stat. Good reason as any for a dinner party.

Paul and Blaine and Margaret and Ruby were willing recipe testers, and after dinner we walked to the park, then back to the house for dark chocolate mousse, another recipe for the book—one of my favorites, really.

The writing I do is about daily life, and if I spend too much time writing, there’s not enough time for living—for dinner parties and walks to the park, for being a friend and wife and mother and daughter. My living time to writing time ratio is very, very heavily weighted toward the living, and that’s just exactly how I like it. Another person would build a lot more houses in the time it takes me to hammer away at one, but that’s the way it works for me.

So now today: back at the job site, and by that I mean kitchen table. My editor Angela is going through the whole manuscript one more time, and then she’ll send it to me. I’ll go through it again, then send it to Carolyn, my other editor. When she’s finished with it, it goes to the copy-editor, while we work on more recipe testing. 

I know there are people who crank out a manuscript in six months and let then editors have at it. I’m not one of those. It takes me ages to write essays, and then I want to be involved in every step of the process—every word change, every comma.

So here I am again today, with my hammer and nails, working steadily, building a house.