It Takes as Long as It Takes
This is about writing, but probably also other things
In 2008, Christian Focus Publications published my first novel—yea verily my first book—Trees in the Pavement. (It’s going out of print, but it’s still a great story if I say so myself, so get your copy while you can!) My aunt gave me the idea to “write a story about a refugee child” in 1997, since I was working with refugees at the time. I think I started actually writing it in 2000, put it away as utterly boring, and then—maybe as a way to stay connected to my past life—when I moved back to the US I got really intentional about it and finished it.
When the book got published, somehow my elementary/middle/high school found out about it and the then-librarian reached out to me to ask if I would do an assembly talk. I happily agreed. Then she told me I should talk about my “writing process.” Probably most of the time I’m too honest for my own good. I told her I don’t really have one. I said I could talk about the plight of refugees or about the actual content of my story, but “I’m not the kind of writer who can give tips on ‘the writing life’ because mostly I’m probably the least disciplined writer out there.” Or something like that.
I never got officially uninvited, but the librarian also stopped emailing me after that, which in hindsight seems kind of unprofessional and also rude, but at the time I just kind of shrugged and figured it figured. It was their loss if they didn’t want to hear about refugees or my actual book. And it proves to have been a good thing I didn’t try to talk to kids about becoming a successful writer because if by successful you mean not just getting published but also making money—or even breaking even—I am not your woman.
On the other hand, if you mean I have a small but deeply loyal group of readers who love my stories and pass them around to their friends, I’d say I’m quite successful—and grateful for that.
I think I also started writing Favored One in London in 2000—maybe during the time Trees was languishing, incomplete, in a digital file. Favored One started out in a notebook, which ended up in a drawer after the move while I worked on Trees, and then came out again when Trees was getting near to published. In 2010 I finally decided to get serious about that one and wrapped it up, spending the next few years sporadically and unsuccessfully pitching it to publishers and agents. It wasn’t until 2019 that I decided I did want it to see the light of day, but didn’t want a traditional press to alter it, so I published it myself. Basically from the first word on the page to date of publication took nearly 20 years.
Sometimes people read Favored One and then want their friends to read it, and then have a book club about it, and then invite me to talk to their book club. I always love doing that. They might ask me about being a successful writer and then I have to disabuse them of their assumptions, but usually they also ask me about my choice to transliterate the Hebrew names or where the idea for Shlomit came from, or why Jesus wasn’t born in a barn, exactly. Those conversations are fun.
The last time I attended one of these was a little trickier because it was a bunch of lovely women who were all together in person in a state far away from me, and the mic on the one computer they were using didn’t pick up everything they were saying very well. But one thing I caught was the low-key astonishment around how long it took from story-conception to publication. (Probably, considering the book we were talking about, I should’ve made some quip about how long it took for Yeshua to get from conception to ministry, but I didn’t think of that until right this second.) Why? they wanted to know. Why does it take long? I’m not sure there’s an answer to that question. It just takes as long as it takes.
Follower, the final draft of which I am sending to my publisher tonight, was an anomaly, in that I wrote it in a couple of months, but that’s because a) I had already done the bulk of the legwork in 2019 and b) I was actively participating in
’s Tell Your Story workshop, where I had to read excerpts and stuff. So…six years all told. So speedy!Last year I thought I was going to work on a book about God’s glory. I’ve had it in my head since at least 2016, and I’ve done two Bible study series and two sermon series on the topic, so I thought it would be a quick write like Follower. I posted a couple of tentative draft chapters here and then realized I was in way over my head to serialize something like that. All the same, there’s an actual publisher interested in it, and so I fully intended to take advantage of my student and alumni access to the Wheaton College library and get to work on it, but I just couldn’t seem to get started.
Instead, a time travel novel I thought of when I was 11 emerged out of the deep recesses of childhood memories, and then began insistently clamoring to be written finally and now. If you’ve ever written fiction, you will know that sometimes your characters make choices you wouldn’t have made for them, or at least that you didn’t expect. Apparently whole books do this, too. So now before I go to bed I write for 15-30 minutes, and it’s definitely what Anne Lamott calls a “sh*tty first draft,” but I’m writing it. I don’t know what will happen to it when my doctorate starts. I don’t know if I’m telling you about it over forty years after I thought of it and it will take me another forty to finish it.
Evidently I do have a writing process, though. It takes as long as it takes.
I’ve decided to bring back my Writing About Writing segment to Substack (even though only about two people subscribe to it), and merge it with Art Spotlights, so as a little treat after reading that long post, please enjoy contemplating this Graced Object I made on a day off recently. It’s inspired both by St Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle and the Hebrew Bible’s “Mountain of the Lord” imagery which, the other day, I started wondering if it is possible to conflate in some way. Feel free to contemplate and let me know what you think.
I like the writing about writing! 😄