On book writing time and timing
What's on my mind 17 days before a big deadline
As I scramble before my first book deadline, I find myself thinking a lot about time and timing in book writing. Specifically debut book writing and nonfiction book writing. It is such a confusing rollercoaster of cadences. First, the agonizing waiting periods for agents to respond to your query or publishers to the submission. Time stretches and stretches, and the work is just sitting there, waiting for a traffic light answer: yes, no, maybe. Your email inbox burns, you speculate about the effect of summer Fridays in publishing on response rates. There’s no predicting how this will go. For me, the agent part was super slow, the publisher part super quick. For some of my friends, it’s been the opposite.
Then, if things go well, you get the deal. You sketch out a timeline. I thought a year wouldn’t be enough time for the scope of my project and the amount of reporting that still had to go into it. 18 months? No problem. In retrospect, this way of thinking about time was like playing with Monopoly money. I had no idea how long anything would take. More than a decade’s worth of journalism, including many months-long projects and some years-long ones, did not prepare me at all. I knew the reporting would take time, as would the research. But these tend to multiply as you go in ways that are very difficult to curtail. And the length of a book adds the pressure of “if I miss this, it will be embarrassing and forever there, sitting on bookshelves for the world to see.”
As I’ve said here before, I worked on one chapter — chapter one, actually — for many, many, many months. It was probably something I had to do, both because of how far back into history it reaches and because I had to get into a writing groove. But as I now try to make up for that time, I’m beating myself up over it. It was that Monopoly money understanding of days, weeks, and months at work: oh, my deadline is so far ahead, I’ll be fine. The thought that I had 14 more chapters to go just wasn’t top of mind. I had to get this one chapter right.
Well-meaning friends and family keep asking “How is writing going?” And the only answer I can really come up with is “slowly.” It’s the season of
’s 1000 Words of Summer project, and I keep seeing posts about it. Writing 1000 words a day for a sustained period seems unfathomable to me right now. There’s so much to grasp, so much to construct, so much to think through. A lot of writing is deciding what to keep and what to leave out — and it’s also what is most exhausting. I want to write about all of it! It’s all fascinating!But there’s reader time to think about, to put at the forefront. Writer time doesn’t matter much in the end. The contrast between the weeks or months it takes me to write one chapter and how breezy I want the reading experience to be is hard to wrap my mind around.
Everything becomes measured in book writing time. Every activity comes with a book writing time opportunity cost. Every writer talks about these sacrifices, but it doesn’t fully hit you when you’re in it. The FOMO works both ways — you’re sad about missing a trip with friends, but if you’re out for too long you start feeling like you should be at your desk, typing away. It’s not just guilt, it can also be a sort of longing. I try to grasp moments when I feel like I miss working on my book because it’s a reassurance like no other. A reminder of purpose.
I thought I couldn’t comprehend how people could be years late on their book deadline. Now I can. That won’t be me — my book is on too timely of a subject matter, and to be honest, I can’t afford not to get paid. But I get it. I could be writing forever.
Perhaps the biggest mindfuck is that I’m scrambling so much now, and yet, my book won’t be out until more than a year after my deadline. That’s simply insane. Production — so all the work that happens after all the writing and big-picture editing is done — takes something like nine months. You know what else takes nine months?
Another mindfuck? Here I am trying to focus through 25-minute Pomodoro sessions and this whole process, from ideation to publication, will have taken nearly seven years.
I have 17 days until that first big deadline, to submit about 40,000 words. That’s terrifying. This is already after a six-week extension. I don’t plan to ask for another one. I have a ton done, but I’m still waiting for some people to get back to me, and other people’s schedules is another — painful — dimension I have to operate in .
My ADHD has made a lot of this all the more difficult, from time blindness to scheduling to distractiblity. But I’m counting on its other facet, hyper-focus, to kick in shortly. Perhaps this is foolish, but it’s always worked before.
Wish me luck.
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Hanje, you're close to the finish line. Keep going -- cheering you on!
I see from your bio that you've written many different things for other outlets before. I have not written a book, but I have, like you, had to write completely new things. Even though I do not know how I'm going to get through it I know I've done new things before, so I can do it again. Again, in my own experience when I've gotten stuck, its usually because I've put on my editor's hat too soon. I'm a very tough critic, but that is of no use to me until creative madness has held sway for a while. That's what has helped me. Good luck to you!