After 13 years of plotting, writing, editing, and rewriting the novel, I’ve finally arrived at that predictable point where I can no longer see the words on the page objectively. Ink just runs into more ink. Yesterday I opened my folder of past edits and was shocked to find I’d saved over 1,000 versions of the book since 2000. Is that excessive? Ha. No wonder my brain’s fried. My new myopia is making me a terrible proofreader, which is disconcerting as I claw through my final round of edits.

I read all the time about writers who somehow manage to squeeze out an artful bestseller in under a year. I don’t understand how they’re able to do it so quickly. When I took cosmology in college (thank you, Dr. Benford), I was the last student to finish the final exam because of all the math, with the quickest students finishing in just 45 minutes; I still don’t understand how they were able to do that, either.

When I think back over what took the longest during the novel’s construction, the story’s plotting stands out—I spent 3 months in a Tenderloin cafe diagramming the action’s timeline in a sketchbook with a black Sharpie (I was unemployed at the time, thank God, or it would’ve taken me a year). Writing the performance art scenes, though, took the longest. I wanted them to have the detail of real performances, but with rapid POV cuts to move a reader between the points of action in a cinematic style. Each performance piece took 2-3 weeks to conceive, then 1-2 months to actually write, which is about twice as long as I typically spend on creating a solo performance art piece I’ll perform live.

Hemingway supposedly finished draft one of The Sun Also Rises in under two months. Clearly I need a faster muse.

“The faster I write, the better my output. If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble—it means I’m pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”
    —Raymond Chandler

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 11th, 2013 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.