When someone finds out that I'm an author, a question often crops up that I've never found a good answer for. People want to know how long it took to write the book. Although I've come up with a reply in order to sound competent and capable, the real answer is, I have no idea.

Is the time it takes to write a book that initial few months when the ideas come so fast and furiously that I barely have time to write one scene down before the next one starts pushing its way into my head? Is it that time plus the "rest period" I've learned to give my work once I've got the story recorded? When I go back I see obvious faults: plot problems, huge gaps in character development, weak dialogue, and incomplete scene description, so the book wasn't "done" that first time through. Of course there's the edit after I've had someone else read it and tell me what she didn't get or what doesn't ring true. Then there's the five --or ten --edits that I do to get it ready to send an MS out to an agent or publisher.

Does the questioner mean for me to include time for editing that my agent, my first editor, and my second editor did, each time sending it back to me for another read-through? How about the years of college and of teaching language arts that prepared me to tell a story well? And of course there's that awful time between, when all that I can do with the book is done and I still have to wait months and months for it to have its turn on the publisher's schedule.

How about the fact that I'm usually working on at least two manuscripts? Or the time that it takes to format the dumb thing so that some reader, somewhere, will not reject it simply because the widow/orphan control was left on?

So how long does it take to write a book? A long time. And I know from past experience that once it's in print, I'll see things I'd like to change, in fact, things that drive me nuts because I can't change them. How long does it take? A lifetime, and I'd never call it done.

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