I was at a book club recently and someone asked me a question that no one has before. How, she wondered, was it possible that it took me seven years to write my first book? What did I spend my time doing?

So, this is the answer.

I started off as a short story writer and spent ten years doing that, and when I decided to work on a novel, it took a while to get the hang of prolonging a story from chapter to chapter. It took a lot of reading of novels and outlining and thinking to figure all that out.  (I probably could have saved myself a lot of time by enrolling in an MFA program, but I had too little money and too many kids.)

So, after a while, about a year, when I had one hundred pages written, I went to a conference, met with an editor and she said, Your writing is good but your main character is boring. She needs a job. Unfortunately, I had written one hundred pages of a character sitting in her house and thinking.

So I gave her a job (piano teacher) and spent another year rewriting the novel and went to another conference and this time it was voted best novel there and the prize was an agent. So I was delighted and she said this novel is great, but you need to rewrite it because you need more conflict. Plus, I hadn’t actually finished it yet.

So, that took a year of going back and forth and then it was done, or I thought it was done, but one unhappy thing led to another and at the end of the day the agent and I parted ways and I needed to find a new one. By now I was four years into this.

So I set about finding a new agent and that took some doing, but I did, and she loved my book, but thought it should be rewritten. Of course at any point here I could have said, no. I don’t want to do that, but the fact is this agent, like many of the people in publishing that I’ve dealt with, was very smart and very generous with her ideas and the fact is, I thought she was right. The flaws she saw were real and I wanted the book to be as good as possible.

Anyway, after some more revising and submitting and rejecting, I started a new novel and, after four years, that went in a similar direction and then one miraculous day, I sat down and began thinking about The Fiction Class. My experience with The Fiction Class was completely different than all the previous years of aggravation. I found an editor and agent who loved my book more or less as it was and it was published, etc. And instead of taking me seven years to write, it took about a year.

So, what do I take away from that? You have to love what you’re doing and take pleasure in the writing and hope that everything else will fall into place. How about you? How long have you been working on your novel/short story?