How long does it take to write a book?
I started my current WIP twelve years ago. It was started, put aside when life got busy, picked up again, worked on, I lost confidence, did some courses, realised that maybe I should just get on and do it (I even realised that by now I might even know what I was doing), then lost a bit more confidence and put it aside once more. As it is historical fiction, there was always the worry that there wasn’t enough period detail in it, or even worse, that it would become a text book with just a few fictional characters interspersing the narrative. So I did another course.
In the meantime I wrote and published books of other genre, just to delay the inevitable decision, was this book going to be written or not?
Two weeks ago I decided to complete the book and cast it out into the wide world to it’s fate, whatever that might be, and always being a fan of a deadline I looked around for a competition to enter to bring the situation to a head.
The Richard and Judy book club competition was two weeks away (closes midnight this Friday), so I decided to aim for that. Could I take all of the scattered, revised and re-revised chapters and combine them into a book before then? Yes I could. Would the book be completely finished? Probably not. But it would be a perfectly readable book. I might know that the description of the medieval guildhall wasn’t quite finished. Or I might realise that I hadn’t described in full, the altercation that Benedict and some French trouveres have. They delight in telling him where his father had run away too, when John deserted Benedict who was just a boy, leaving him alone to fend for himself in a 13th century castle?
But it is a good book, one that has twelve years of research, learning, angst, soul-searching, procrastination and love as it’s foundation, and two weeks worth of writing as the result.
Janet Stock 