The long and winding road
Why it sometimes takes 10, 20, or even 30 years to write and publish a book
Last week I went to Kansas City for the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) conference, which may sound like a dream come true or a nightmare, depending on your perspective. For me, it’s a little of both. When you’re with 20,000+ other writers in an enormous downtown convention center, there are moments of inspiration, desperation, and terror. So many writers! A vast book fair of small presses, literary mags, and MFA programs clamoring for attention! And so many panel discussions—more than 300 over three days, not to mention all the offsite readings, panels, and gatherings. It’s a lot.
For me, the hour that resonated the most this year was a panel I almost bailed out on, because I’m a late-blooming author, and sometimes I don’t like to be reminded of it. Called “The Long and Winding Road: How to Persevere When Your Book Takes Forever,” it featured five writers whose books came together very slowly—for five different sets of reasons.
If you’re a writer, bear with me; at first glance, these authors’ stories seem discouraging, but ultimately they inspire.
(NB: If you’re reading this as an email, it may get cropped; click here to read.)
Sari Botton
Many of you know Sari Botton from her wonderful newsletters Oldster Magazine, Adventures in Journalism, and Memoir Land. But the process of writing her own memoir And You May Find Yourself: Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen X Weirdo (Heliotrope, 2022) was a long one. “The biggest obstacle was me, and the sense that I didn’t have the right to write,” Botton said. But there were other, more practical obstacles: she was working full-time as a reporter, and though she started MFA programs (like a semester at Sarah Lawrence), she didn’t have the time or money to finish a grad program. And she struggled with this key question for memoirists: “How do I do this without having everyone in my life hate me?”
Whenever she lay awake worrying in the middle of the night, she gave herself permission to quit, or at least permission not to publish. Then, in the morning, she’d give herself permission to keep writing.
Botton decided to start an interview series with other memoirists, and over time, she began to develop her own perspective on issues like writing about the people in your life. “I realized that I needed to write the ugly vomit draft that I had to get out of my body, and look at what I had. Then I could blur, pull back on the details, so no one else would know or recognize the characters.” And whenever she lay awake worrying in the middle of the night, she gave herself permission to quit, or at least permission not to publish. Then, in the morning, she’d give herself permission to keep writing.
She also noted that turning point in her writing life came during the pandemic, when she suddenly had more time to write. At the time she was in her early 50s, and the knowledge that both her grandmothers had died in their 50s compelled her to keep writing.
Susan Ito
“I never dreamed (or had a nightmare!) that it would take me this long, but ultimately the book, I Would Meet You Anywhere (2023, Mad Creek Books), came to life this past November,” Susan Ito said. “I wasn’t sure whether to be proud, or embarrassed. Who takes three decades to write a 275-page book? Apparently, me.” The book began as her MFA thesis, and took many forms—essays, stories, a one-woman show—before it became this memoir.
Ito felt the push and pull of time spent writing and not writing, facing a mix of internal and external factors keeping her from writing. But those years also gave her time to improve her craft, think about the long arc of her memoir, and build her writing community. “I cheered other people on, believing it could happen to me, too,” she said. And her writer-reader community was there when she published the memoir: At her book launch this past fall, 240 people showed up.
“I cheered other people on, believing it could happen to me, too,” Ito said. And her writer-reader community was there when she published the memoir: At her book launch this past fall, 240 people showed up.
Sejal Shah
Sejal Shah’s first book This is One Way to Dance (2020, University of Georgia Press), an essay collection, took her 20 years to write. “Now I realize that I needed time to become the writer I needed to be to write the book,” she said. She also had to cope with the expectations of her immigrant parents, ADHD and anxiety, and the work of a full teaching load. In those years, she said, “I just couldn’t hold a whole book in my head,” and eventually she moved home to her parents’ house for a time to focus on writing.
Her first book was originally a hybrid of nonfiction and fiction that she ended up breaking into two: The first half became her essay collection, and the second half a story collection, How to Make Your Mother Cry (May 2024, West Virginia University Press).
Terry Tierney
Terry Tierney’s first book, a poetry collection, came out a week after his 71st birthday, and he’s published three more books since then (including two novels, The Bridge on Beer River, 2023, and Lucky Ride, 2021, both from Unsolicited Press).
But for the forty years before that, he wrote poetry and fiction in bits of free time as he worked in various careers, including in Silicon Valley. It’s a challenge to re-enter a story world when you only have a small amount of time to write and you have to leave projects unfinished, he said. “But over the years, getting back into a story got easier. Ideas never go away, they’re just waiting for the chance to emerge.”
A turning point in his writing life came when he learned that his chapbook had won a contest. He was at the Kansas State Fair with his family when he got the news. “I broke down crying,” he said.
Susanne Pari
Susanne Pari’s second novel, In the Time of Our History (2022, Kensington/John Scognamiglio Books), came 25 years after her first. In the Time of Our History is a family drama about an Iranian-American family, and a daughter returning to her NJ parents’ home, a year after her sister’s death. It got plenty of acclaim—an Indie Next and Buzz Books pick, and was blurbed by Amy Tan.
Her first novel, The Fortune Catcher (1997), was similarly acclaimed, but didn’t sell well. And, she said, “it took me ten years to get over the shock of having a book not sell much.” During that decade, she tried not to write, then slowly began to write again. “There are so many fears, including the fear of your own writing,” she said. She went on to spend ten years writing the next novel. She had to get a new agent, who took this new novel to auction, but the novel didn’t sell. After another five years, the agent tried again, and this time the novel sold.
Are you a slow writer too?
I’m a slow writer—I spent five years on the practice novels that will never come out of the drawer, seven years on my (unpublished) Emily Sargent novel, four years on The Wrong Kind of Woman, and four years so far on this next novel project, which is nowhere near finished.
Here’s some advice from these panelists, and from me, for persevering with your writing, and keeping the faith:
—From me: Find the writer friends that you can commiserate with (yes, it can take time to find those writer friends, and yes, there will be writers in your life who write and publish much faster and more often than you—it can sometimes feel like every writer you know is moving faster than you).
—From Sejal Shah: If you’re submitting stories or poems to literary magazines, or if you’re querying agents or publishers, use your tracking system, your spreadsheet or list, not just to keep track of submissions, but also to remind yourself that you’ve been working steadily, even when it feels like you have little to show for it.
—From Sejal Shah: Keep a process notebook, where you can write about writing—you’re both the worker (writer) and the manager (the one keeping the writer going).
—From all the panelists: Make time for long walks, runs, or other kinds of movement, and of course, make time for reading.
—And a reading suggestion: The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft and Creativity, Louise DeSalvo (St. Martin’s Griffin), which argues for slow writing. She describes slow writing as a meditative act, one that acknowledges that we are all beginners. And, she notes, we need to cultivate empathy for ourselves because writing isn’t easy.
In the book’s introduction, DeSalvo notes: “I write about that major challenge affecting all writers: the need to slow down to understand the writing process so we can do our best work….finding our way as writers is a daily, ever-changing process. As soon as we’ve figured out how to work, something happens and everything falls apart and we need to learn how to work all over over again.”
In the book’s introduction, DeSalvo writes, “Finding our way as writers is a daily, ever-changing process. As soon as we’ve figured out how to work, something happens and everything falls apart and we need to learn how to work all over over again.”
Two more AWP-related items
I took part in an offsite reading at AWP, with three other women, novelist Dawn Reno Langley, and poets Anne Myles and Cathy Barber, all of us alums of the same grad program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, though from different years and decades. The reading was just right: a welcoming coffee-shop setting, interesting and varied readings, and a lovely group of attendees, many of them other VCFA alums who I’d never met.
I also moderated a virtual AWP panel, “Writing the Resonant Recent Past,” with four other novelists who’ve written novels set in the late 20th- or early 21st century: Karen Dukess, Daisy Florin, Ava Homa, and Jennifer Savran Kelly. It was a great discussion that got into the many considerations for writers working on stories that aren’t quite contemporary, but not quite historical fiction, either. If you registered for AWP, you can see all the virtual AWP panels here, for the next month. (The number for this panel is V122, if you’re looking.)
I’ll leave you with two photos from the past week or so—we finally got some snow, then it melted away, and then we got a little more. This winter’s weather in New Hampshire continues to be abnormally mild.
Thank you, as always, for reading!
Sarah, this was just what I needed to hear this morning. Or, read, I guess. As someone beginning her third year working on a memoir and getting closer to 60 every day, I take comfort in being reminded that I'm not alone. I try to remind myself that if I do the work, everything else will follow. Or not. But at least I'm doing it. And so are you.
Let’s hear it for slow writing. I don’t do vomit drafts because ugly writing discourages me. If I can write one true paragraph that makes me proud, I can write another. Some of these true paragraphs will eventually have to go, but they serve a motivational purpose.