{"id":2339,"date":"2016-09-21T12:17:02","date_gmt":"2016-09-21T12:17:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=2339"},"modified":"2020-01-18T09:34:21","modified_gmt":"2020-01-18T14:34:21","slug":"im-writing-as-fast-as-i-can-sort-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/im-writing-as-fast-as-i-can-sort-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Should I Be Writing Faster?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been a member of the same health club for a long time and lots of people there read my Nick Hoffman mysteries <\/a>set in a college town that might remind them of the town we live in.\u00a0 No matter when I publish a book in the series, somebody always asks, “So when’s the next one coming out?”<\/p>\n

That could happen the same week there’s been a big article in a local paper or a couple of local radio interviews.<\/p>\n

And if there’s no news soon about another book due to appear, telling people that I recently published a book doesn’t seem to count.\u00a0 I get blank stares. The assumption seems to be that I’m lazy.\u00a0 Writers apparently should be churning out more than one book a year.\u00a0 Two or three, really.<\/p>\n

My publishing schedule has never been regular over 25 years. Some years I haven’t published anything and one year I published three different books (in different genres) just because that’s how the publishers’ schedules worked out, not because I’d actually written three in one year.<\/p>\n

My second novel took almost twenty years to finish.\u00a0 Yes, twenty–while I was writing other books, of course.\u00a0 That’s because I kept re-thinking and re-conceiving it, starting and stopping, and trying to figure out what exactly its shape should be. I’m glad I did, because The German Money<\/em><\/a> got one of the best reviews of my life. The Washington Post<\/em> compared me to Kafka, Philip Roth and John le Carr\u00e9 and I was sent on book tours in England and Germany to promote the editions published there.<\/p>\n

But some books took me only a year or even as little as six months to finish for various reasons.\u00a0\u00a0 So when people ask me “How long does it take you to write a book?” there’s no definite answer.<\/p>\n

You can’t explain that to the cheerful guys who call you “Dude!” and ask about your next book while you’re on the way to the showers just wearing a towel and flipflops. Or people who decide to chat with you while you’re sweating on the treadmill.<\/p>\n

The majority of folks seem to think that there’s a simple answer to questions about the writing life and that popping out another book can’t be\u00a0 difficult, since it’s not as if writing is a real job, anyway, right? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

If you’re a writer, what’s the question non-writers ask you most often?
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"writing<\/a>Lev Raphael is the author of Writer’s Block is Bunk (A Guide to the Writing Life)<\/a> and 24 other books you can find on Amazon<\/a>.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been a member of the same health club for a long time and lots of people there read my Nick Hoffman mysteries set in a college town that might remind them of the town we live in.\u00a0 No matter when I publish a book in the series, somebody always asks, “So when’s the next … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[592,749,292,5,767,220,198,785,197,496,501,495,766,765],"class_list":["post-2339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-author-book-tours","tag-author-tours","tag-book-tours","tag-books","tag-crime-writers","tag-crime-writing","tag-fans","tag-germany","tag-mysteries","tag-publishing","tag-thrillers","tag-writing","tag-writing-books","tag-writing-schedule"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2339"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5501,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339\/revisions\/5501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}