I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.
Reading the final copy of my book was like walking down memory lane all over again. Sure, the writing process was emotional, but when I had the final copy in my hands, it was a completely different feeling.
When I finish a book, I'm so exhausted that I'm sort of letting myself think that this could be the end.
You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.
I'm not a massive reader, to be honest. I try and fill my time with other things. But I remember getting halfway through a book once. It was 'The Client' by John Grisham, which was quite interesting.
Louis Brandeis really inspired me to write this book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet]. It was a crazy deadline. The editor said I'd miss the hundredth anniversary unless I pumped the thing out in six months, because I'd been delaying and dilly dallying for so long. So he both inspired me to get up early and write.
Master storytellers like Jeffrey Archer and Arthur Hailey use simple language. But they manage to grab the attention of the readers right from page one. I'll consider myself a good storyteller the day people believe it's OK to be late for work or postpone deadlines just to finish reading my book.
It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
People are used to juggling multiple jobs and multiple responsibilities and multiple things on the home front, and sometimes you get a day off to read, and you just want a book that feels complete and that you can get through it on a rainy day on the couch.
Three months seems to me quite a reasonable time to complete a book, if one can get right down to it.
When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.
When I started working on 'Stay With Me,' I thought it would take two years to complete the novel.
Yeah, I just finished a novel. Man those things take forever to read.
Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'
I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
Every time I get through the work on a book of nonfiction, I say I'll never do it again; it takes so much out of you.
I was swimming in my swimming pool when 'The Secret Lovers' popped entire into my head. I got out, dried off, went upstairs, and finished the book in about 50 days.
I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
A book is not completed till it's read.
For an author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written.
I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.
Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.]
My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!
