This Is Taking SO LONG!
What We Can learn from writing a book that refuses to come together quickly.
I have grown accustomed to writing books quickly. My full-length novels were written on a work-for-hire basis and had strict tight deadlines. My Christmas novella, Gifts, grew out of a short story I had published years before with the hope of turning into a book someday, so it came together fast. The first draft of Suddenly Single Mom had a sixth month deadline so the publisher could get it out in time for Mother’s Day.
So I’m sure you can imagine my outrage when I set out to write a new novel and, six months later, didn’t have a completed draft. It is just now taking shape in a way that doesn’t feel like a complete mess. I stopped feeling like a failure as an author when I remembered…
Each book is different. I am writing this book from scratch. No contracted chapter-by-chapter synopsis, story development sheet, proposal, or previously-published story to work with, only ideas jotted down in notebooks.
The longer I work as an author, and the more genres I add to my repertoire, the more convinced I am that there is no set formula for completing a book. At least not every book. Many seasoned authors have a system, but It’s usually for a specific genre and took years to perfect.
Writing feels similar to the realization that what worked with one kid causes the next to snort-laugh and look at us like, “What are you doing?”
The need to pay bills takes priority. Very few of us have the luxury of devoting full time to writing a book that isn’t under contract yet. I earn my living doing freelance work, work-for-hire, coaching, and editing. If I must choose between spending the bulk of my day on a job with a payment attached to it or on my own project, I wisely choose the paid job.
You most likely do not flake out of your day job or family responsibilities to work on your book.
Having fewer hours to work on a dream project means it takes longer to write.
Quality takes time. I often enjoy an author’s first book the best. That is the one that took years to develop, write, and rewrite while working full time and getting up at 4:00 a.m. to meet a word count goal before the kids woke up. My last work-for-hire novel would have been awful if not for extra time offered to work in suggested changes.
Writing a book quickly is possible, but a rush job rarely results in our best work. And we want the books we feel most passionate about to reflect our best, right?
What have you learned from allowing a project to take time?