This is a guest post from poet, essayist, and playwright Alison Luterman.
I was walking with a novelist friend in the woods the other day and she was telling me about how she’d had to tear apart the structure of her draft (which I’d read and loved), change the point-of-view of several characters, eliminate some extraneous material, and was now, basically, rewriting a very different book. I asked how she was feeling about it all.
“Oh, you know,” she shrugged. “At first I was pissed at my mentor for telling me my structure wasn’t working, and then when I accepted that she was right I was sad that I’d wasted so much time polishing that early draft, when I should not have been polishing it at all, I should have been restructuring it. Then I was overwhelmed with how much work I’d have to do to make this new draft work, and feeling doubtful if I could even pull it off. But now I’m into it, and one of the main characters is emerging as more twisted and interesting than he ever was before, and I’m enjoying getting to know him. This new book is going to have a very different tone than the draft you read. It’s going to be much darker. Actually, I'm loving working on it."
I did know. My dear friend Leslie Absher just published her remarkable memoir Spy Daughter Queer Girl, a book she worked on for more than sixteen years. The layers of living and feeling and research and growth really show in the story. Sure, she didn’t think it would take that long when she embarked on this project, but she stayed with it and she stayed with herself and her own changes and the work shows the benefit of that patience and care and earned wisdom.
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| Alison Luterman |
I’ve got students and writing clients who are concerned about this. They ask, How long does it take to get a book out? The answer, infuriating as it is, is “It takes as long as it takes.” Each of my books of poems has taken years longer than I thought it “should.” I always fondly imagine things are ready long before they are. I’ve sent out so many manuscripts to contests only to realize, five minutes after paying the thirty dollar entry fee and hitting Send, that it was really just a lump of raw dough rather than a fully baked loaf.
On the other hand, sometimes lightning strikes and a poem comes out whole. The writer Ruth Stone contended that her poems came to her whole, like tornados on the horizon. She would sense one coming and run as fast as she could back to her house, in order to grab a pen and scribble it down. If she didn’t outrun the poem it would blow right past her.
And Bob Dylan sometimes wrote three songs a day at the height of his powers. There was apparently a conversation between him and Leonard Cohen about writing. Cohen confessed it had taken him seven years and zillions of drafts to write “Hallelujah.” “How long did it take you to write ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’?” Cohen asked Dylan. “Ten minutes,” Dylan replied. So, there you have it!
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Alison Luterman’s books include the poetry collections In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press), Desire Zoo (Tia Chucha Press), The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State University Press), See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions); and a collection of essays, Feral City (SheBooks). Luterman's plays include Saying Kaddish with My Sister, Hot Water, Glitter and Spew, Oasis, Touched; and the musicals The Chain (with composer Loren Linnard), The Shyest Witch (with composer Richard Jennings), and the song cycle We Are Not Afraid of the Dark (with composer Sheela Ramesh).
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s memoir about his father, the writer Lee Rogow: Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Other posts of interest:
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
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