Staying on Track

In The Writing Life, her collection of essays about what it means to be a novelist, Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard contends that it generally takes between two and ten years to write a book.

It took me three years and eight months to write Dicing Time for Gladness. (I started it on Monday, March 8th, 2010 and published it on Wednesday, November 6th, 2013. See How It All Began .) So what makes me think I can write the sequel, Crass Caualty, as well as the conclusion, Hate's Profiting, in one year each? Well, that's a question I keep asking myself.

The main reason is that both books are already semi-written, although that can be a deceiving idea. The proportion of completeness is a notoriously tough thing to estimate. In shipbuilding or novel-writing, the last 10% seems to take 90% of your total time. You have what looks like a mostly finished structure — it has the overall shape of a boat — but the detail work is endless. With a boat, you're never truly finished; even long after you sail away, you're fixing, refitting, fine-tuning and tweaking things forever. With a novel, at some point you have to give up and call your last rewrite your final one, or else your manuscript will languish unpublished until the universe reaches a uniform temperature of absolute zero. (I've already found several profoundly embarrassing errors in Dicing Time for Gladness, and believe me, it does keep me up at night. One of these days I'm going to release a second edition with all the mistakes fixed.) So it's hard to say whether Crass Casualty, which I am in the middle of right now, is 23% or 52% finished in any meaningful sense.

I have days when I can hardly type fast enough to keep pace with my brain as the ideas come blasting out. I have other days when I spend an entire afternoon wrestling with a single problematic sentence. (I once inserted, deleted and re-inserted the same word, "golden," eleven times.)

All that having been said, I still feel reasonably confident I can get Crass Casualty finished to my satisfaction in time for my self-imposed release date of November. Progress is slow and uneven and my writing schedule is erratic and irregular, but I have allowed for that in my planning.

Stephen King said, "Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work." I'm not as prolific as King, nor even .0000001% as successful, but I do have a slightly modified version of that ethic. When I'm feeling creatively fluffed up and productive, I write the fancy stuff — the bold, sweeping strokes, the exciting scenes, the bright, memorable, significant things. And when I'm not feeling enthused, I grind away at the mundane (but equally necessary) stuff, the carpentry and masonry that holds it all together. This dialogue transition needs to be smoother; I already used the word "lugubrious" earlier; this description of the background scene needs to be cleaned up; this explanatory passage is clunky; this entire paragraph is useless and self-indulgent and ought to be culled. I have the luxury of dipping in and out of the project from high above because I always start with a detailed outline. (See My Process .)

Meanwhile, I go on seeking that elusive, properly balanced internal state conducive to both the intense concentration and disconnected, free-associative wandering of the mind that are equal requirements of novel writing. And the train continues to roll, although not swiftly and with numerous stops along the way.