Writing Time
“But a story was invisible, infinite, it had no size or shape. Information. It could fill the world or fit inside a fingernail.”
― Jennifer Egan, Look at Me
I remember learning in college that author and journalist Jennifer Egan had spent six years writing the novel Look at Me — a freaking masterpiece and National Book Award Finalist — and being utterly horrified.
How the fuck could writing anything take that long? That was more than a quarter of my life so far! And if it took all that to get a book into the world, why the hell would any writer bother?
To calm myself, I resolved to be a faster kind of writer, more devoted and thus more prolific, rendering the mad proposition of writing for a living defensibly worthwhile.
Now, I’m a middle-aged writer struggling to get a few incredibly long-lived projects out the door, and when I recall Egan’s half-decade in the trenches, I’m like, “Damn, she’s fast!”
Now, I understand intimately why one novel might require six or 10 years to finish, even if you chipped away at it daily.
I also understand how some folks can write and publish 100 books in the same span of time.
Both outcomes are possible and acceptable.
Some people write as fast as others write slow. Some people can buckle down and do a great story justice in a matter of a few heavy-handed weeks or months, but most of us can only get the thing done by walking away 1,000 times and coming back 1,001 times.
The thing is, most writers aren’t just shuttered away, banging out their masterpieces. We’re doing lots of other essential stuff, like teaching and editing for others and copywriting and working totally unrelated day jobs and making casseroles and raising families and traveling and researching and getting sick and getting well and moving house and thinking and gathering and editing and revising and editing more and revising more and throwing it all away and starting over again, again and again.
In the eyes of most emerging writers, time appears an enemy to be bested: we battle with punctuality, deadlines, advances, progress, regress, etc., etc. We’re rushing to start, then scrambling to finish.
And the questions! The great, baffling metaphysical questions! Is it too soon or too late to write this or publish that? Is the time ripe? Am I falling behind? Are others moving ahead? Will I ever get There?
In the long term, writing turns out to be a many-legged race, a plodding and infinitely indefinite haul. It takes most of us decades— maybe even lifetimes— to get really freaking good at writing, and then published, besides, even if we display early talent, even if we practice lots, even if we lovingly carve out time to work amidst the clutter of our otherwise ordinary lives.
Given those constraints, it’s perfectly reasonable to require a solid stretch of years to finish a 500-some-odd-page book with a complex and elegant and delicately interlaced plot.
And there’s this other final thing I’ve come to understand about writing and time – this maddening, salvational thing about it — the writing takes as long as it takes, and it takes whatever shape it needs to take, and that’s all you need to know or can know.
Stride is mysterious, ineffable and unique to each writer. And mostly, it controls you; not the other way around.
Lucky thing about time, though, is you almost always have enough. Because unless you are dead or about to die, it hasn’t run out on you yet.
Six years from start to finish for a novel? Perfectly respectable, even admirable. Well played, Egan.
