Slow writers and one-book wonders

Harper Lee only ever wrote one novel, 'To Kill a Mocking Bird'. Donna Tartt took ten years to write her second book, 'The Little Friend', and her third is out later this year, another decade later. I don't think it matters really, so long as the books are good, although if you're a big fan I imagine it's frustrating, like waiting for Radiohead to release a new album.

My take on it is that every writer has a team of story-writing goblins in their heads that dine on the buffet of words & emotions & qualia & experiences the writer encounters on a daily basis. It's science. Sometimes those goblins digest things really slowly (or subsist on a diet that requires them to do so) — maybe they're goblin cows — and they can't shit out the words you need all that quickly. That's not a bad thing. Cow poop is very fertile.

Or maybe the writer needs to take a break and let those goblins out to... go goblining. Can't judge. The passion for writing doesn't always burn so brightly. My fiction-writing goblins came back from vacation just a week or so ago, for example.

But if one writes slowly because they don't feed their goblins, or because they feed them nothing but candy and soda — and their poop isn't fertile and mostly has to be thrown out — well any knowledgeable doctor would agree that that's bad.

I know that there was a gap of about 15 years between Joseph Heller's first novel, Catch-22, and his second book (title escapes me).

I don't have any thoughts... I know it's hard to come up with something complex in a short period of time. It took me one year to finish a definitive outline for my novel. It's just a way to write. As long as the books are getting done, for me it doesn't matter if it takes a decade or a couple of months.

Every writer has a different set of personal circumstances, a different level of drive and energy fluctuation, a different learning curve for the craft, a different tolerance for distracting activities, and a different overall mentality when it comes to writing. Each writer has a different level of creativity and a different ability to translate that creativity into written pieces.

I could write a killer book on dieting, but no one would buy it because it would have two pages--page 1, decrease caloric intake; page 2--increase caloric expenditure.

Similarly, an equally brief take on writing "speed" would have two parts--decrease the writing distractions you can control, and increase the efficiency of the time you have to write. How one accomplishes these two things will be different for each writer. However, the underlying mantra related to quantity-based productivity should always be, "Different is not synonymous with bad."

If we can look in a mirror and honestly say we have done our best (efficiency-wise and quality-wise), who cares about the rate at which we complete our projects.

I also think about Thomas Harris. His original copyright dates:

1975 Black Sunday
1981 Red Dragon
1988 Silence of the Lambs
1999 Hannibal
2006 Hannibal Rising

And that's all the man has written. Taking time and putting out a high quality product doesn't seem to have hurt his career much, eh?

Some writers can produce a quality product very quickly. Some take longer. Publishers would like to have as much quality product as fast as possible--it's how they make money. However if you have a quality product they want, and it takes you longer to create it, they'll wait.

William Styron, whose novels are as follows:

1951 Lie Down in Darkness
1956 The Long March (serialised 1952- a long novella rather than a novel)
1960 Set This House on Fire
1967 The Confessions of Nat Turner
1979 Sophie's Choice

And that's it, other than a short fiction collection, a book of essays and Darkness Visible, a memoir of his experiences with clinical depression, which is if anything shorter than The Long March. I don't know if depression did impact on his creativity, but I have to wonder. Note the increasing gaps between publications. Apart from The Long March, his novels are all pretty long, and for years he was apparently working on another long novel set in the Korean War. But he died in 2006 at the age of eighty-one and so far there has been no sign of it.

As Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize and Sophie's Choice the National Book Award (and became an Oscar-winning film), I suspect he wasn't in a position of needing to churn out a novel a year to stay afloat.

I think I remember Donna Tartt mentioning Styron as an example when the subject of her one-a-decade novel rate came up in an interview.

aikigypsy said:

Just now, the "churners" thread made me wonder what we might miss by focusing on the methods of fast writers.

There are novelists who take a decade to write a single book. I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that they're being inefficient or wasting their time, especially if the product is a great novel.

Any thoughts on slow writers?

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I don't think slow writers are inefficient or wasting their time. I think some 'fast' writers are more efficient and waste less time. People write at the pace they decide to write at, based on preference and RL circumstances. And while I would like to have more than one book published before I hit the road, I would consider even one a great accomplishment.

Speaking of slow writers, I have been 'working' on my book idea since I was about 14 (I'm now 34). For the majority of those years the core idea was just a seed with no real story, just something I wanted to one day write about. It developed and changed over time in my head, but the core idea is still there and now 20 years later I'm finally putting words down on paper. *slowly*

I'm of the opinion that it doesn't matter how long it takes as long as you are true to your own dreams. I like what shadowwalker said about being published:

shadowwalker said:

...I would consider even one a great accomplishment.

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Margaret Mitchell only wrote book because she told the story she wanted to tell (She wrote other stories and novellas growing up, but just one novel).
Some writers have one story, some have many. Some write fast, and some write slow. I don't think it matters, as long as they get there in the end.

People write as fast as they write. I know fast writers and slow ones. The process is very different for everyone, and is yet almost the same. You sit down, you write until the words are gone and then you sit down again when the words reappear. It's all good.

For some, the story develops very quickly. For others, they have to let the idea marinate.I'd rather have a quality work that took time to create the details than a half assed work. Not saying if you write quickly it's half assed, but you all know what I mean.

I've been thinking about this since the other thread too. There's definitely life circumstances, and personality traits, and other non-writing projects and passions that the writer pursues. There's also the way different people approach things. I know I personally can be very creative and insightful, but I need time. I can only get to something creative and insightful if I've actively thought about the topic, then set it in my subconscious to marinade for some period of time, then come back and thought about it again. When good ideas strike me seemingly out of nowhere it's really because they'd been marinating. Other people can be faced with that same topic and come up with something creative and insightful on the spot. (I am very jealous). Novels for me are hundreds of these things, that have to get their time to get to their best point. Then I have to work through them and explore them and put more things aside to simmer. Even with perfect life circumstances I'm not going to be able to write anything good fast. I don't work like that, in any aspect of my life.

I also think it matters what kind of stuff one is writing. Most of my personal favourite writers averaged probably 2-4 years per novel, often plus short stories (which seems prolific enough to me!). My favourite writers fall more into the "literary" camp, with character driven novels full of psychological complexity. I think it would be very difficult to "churn out" those kinds of books, no matter your personality and circumstances. I consider Margaret Atwood tremendously prolific for an internationally acclaimed literary writer, and her average seems to be one book every 2-3 years (though she also writes tons of poetry and non-fiction, so maybe a bad example that way).

I write as much as I can, but I have a stressful day job, a chronic illness that sometimes knocks me for a loop, and during the spring and summer, I need my weekends to work in my garden. It keeps me sane.

My first book took about 9 months to write, with a bit more polishing after the fact.

The one I'm trying to sell now I started in very early 2010, and I've done 20 rewrites. It may yet experience another.

I've also got 5-6 others in various states of production right now. When I come to a dead-end on one, I pick up another and keep going. I have to. It's just what keeps me happy, creative, and normal.

SomethingOrOther said:

My take on it is that every writer has a team of story-writing goblins in their heads that dine on the buffet of words & emotions & qualia & experiences the writer encounters on a daily basis. It's science. Sometimes those goblins digest things really slowly (or subsist on a diet that requires them to do so) — maybe they're goblin cows — and they can't shit out the words you need all that quickly. That's not a bad thing. Cow poop is very fertile.

Or maybe the writer needs to take a break and let those goblins out to... go goblining. Can't judge. The passion for writing doesn't always burn so brightly. My fiction-writing goblins came back from vacation just a week or so ago, for example.

But if one writes slowly because they don't feed their goblins, or because they feed them nothing but candy and soda — and their poop isn't fertile and mostly has to be thrown out — well any knowledgeable doctor would agree that that's bad.

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Just had to quote this and give it the props it deserves. Which is a lot

aikigypsy said:

Just now, the "churners" thread made me wonder what we might miss by focusing on the methods of fast writers.

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I don't think you can make any connection between quality and writing speed. I've read some very fine novels that had to have been churned, because the writer may have put out four to six novels a year for several years.

Likewise, a novel doesn't necessarily get better for having taken a long time to write. After all, everyone changes on the time scale of decades, and the writer who began a novel in 2003 won't necessarily present us with a masterpiece today.

"Slow" writers often write just as fast as "churners", they simply don't write as often.

Oscar Wilde wrote epigrams, poems and plays, and one novel: The Picture of Dorian Gray. I guess it depends on what the writer wants to say and be remembered for. As for me, I'm glad Wilde wrote only one novel. He would be a different author if he churned a sequel.

The Bobblehead of Dorian Gray?

aikigypsy said:

I guess I think that focusing too much on word count can get you into trouble. Somewhere (and please, if you know who said this, let me know, because I forget), I read: "Word count is meaningless unless they're the right words."

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I remember reading an anecdote about James Joyce, and it was something like this: before his wife went out early one morning, Joyce told her that he had finally found the right words for a sentence he was struggling with. When she returned in the evening, he was still writing the same sentence, having apparently made no progress. When she asked him what the problem was, when he had had the right words only that morning, he replied "They're the right words. They're in the wrong order".

Phaeal said:

The Bobblehead of Dorian Gray?

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Dorian Gray in the Garden of Good and Evil,
Interview with Dorian Gray,
Amazing Adventures of Wotton and Gray,
Fifty shades of Gray,
Gray diaries,
Dorian Gray and Zombies,

The list goes on. Too late for Oscar Wilde, but with so much stuff to write, I'm amazed no one jumped on the bandwagon yet.

Chekurtab said:

Dorian Gray in the Garden of Good and Evil,
Interview with Dorian Gray,
Amazing Adventures of Wotton and Gray,
Fifty shades of Gray,
Gray diaries,
Dorian Gray and Zombies,

The list goes on. Too late for Oscar Wilde, but with so much stuff to write, I'm amazed no one jumped on the bandwagon yet.

Click to expand...

I claim dibs on "D.G. and Zombies."