You Need A Book For Your Book
The one for Sudan got lost when we moved from Surrey to Buckinghamshire. But I remember it. It had a soft, brown leather cover. Dignified, befitting the seriousness of the subject matter. The rest didn’t reflect the content, though. They were just cool books.
That’s the first thing I do when I start a novel. I go out and buy a Book For My Book. No, not Novel-Writing for Dummies, a book with no words in it at all. Because over the course of the next four to six months, I’m going to fill it with words, dates and numbers. Lots of them.
Every one of my novels has had one. As you can see from the picture, they are all different, though at the time, I always thought that the Book For My Book for the novel I was just starting was the prettiest one I’d ever seen. And it needs to be something that strikes your fancy because you’re going to be looking at it many times a day for many months. I spare no expense—meaning I don’t settle for a spiral notebook with Justin Bieber’s picture on the front, the kind used by junior high kids in English class. But I don’t go looking for a diary made out of yak leather with hand stitched parchment pages, either.
The reason getting a Book For My Book is the first thing I do when I start a novel is that I keep track of my time from the very beginning, and that’s what the book’s for. It’s to keep track of your time—or your word count, whichever side of that coin you happen to land on.
Anybody can eat an elephant. You just have to take one bite at a time. Writing a novel is an African elephant, a bull elephant, an overweight bull elephant. On steroids. The spoon you’re going to use to eat that puppy one bite at a time is the Book for Your Book.
Writers fall into two categories when it comes to tracking or measuring their writing. Some have a daily quota of words. They sit down at their writing desks, or stand as I do, and they won’t allow themselves to leave until they’ve written X amount of words. That method is particularly attractive because it allows you to plan with some degree of accuracy when the book will be finished. If you write 1000 words a day and you’re shooting for a 100,000-word manuscript, then you know it’ll take you 100 working days.
That method never appealed to me. I tried it, but found myself stretching paragraphs out unnecessarily just so I could make the daily word count. And I find I need to go back and read at least some of what I’ve already written—to get me back into the world of the book–before I start every writing session. In the word-count method, that time doesn’t count. Neither does the time it takes to edit while I’m reading what I wrote the day before, because there’s no way to read it without seeing immediately something that needs to be changed.
So I opted instead for a time book. I have determined that I will work for eight hours every day. Period. I clock in like a factory worker in my Book For My Book: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.—four hours; 7- to 9–two hours; 11 to 1–two more hours. I picked that method in the beginning because I wanted to know how long it took to write a novel, so I timed the first one to give me some kind of road map for the second.
I also like this method better than the word-count method because I really don’t care how many words the novel is. Yeah, publishers want between 80,000 and 100,000 for your first novel. Hover around 100,000 and it’ll keep them happy for subsequent novels. But I learned as a journalist that a story has to be like a woman’s skirt—long enough to cover the subject and short enough to keep your interest. So my novels have varied considerably in word length. Sudan was 120,000 words, The Memory Closet , Five Days in May, Black Sunshine and The Last Safe Place have all hovered around 105,000 to 108,000 words–not by design, it just worked out that way. Home Grown was 115,000.
When I tracked the time it took to write each draft of all my novels, I discovered there was no consistent “normal” time there, either. The CFD (stands for Crappy First Draft; most writers call it the SFD) of Sudan took 650 hours. But it was the first and I was learning on that one. The CFD of the next book, The Memory Closet took 260 hours. But four books later, the CFD of The Last Safe Place took 392 hours. Go figure. Total writing times were all over the map, too. The longest, of course, was Sudan at 1,070 hours. Shortest was Five Days in May at 568 hours.
The point of the Book For Your Book is that you have to keep track—of something. Hours worked. Words written. Doesn’t matter, but you must hold yourself accountable, or that great American novel floating around in your head will never find its way onto the page.
Next week, we’ll talk about what happens next. After the Book For Your Book, THEN what do you do?
