Bringing it into focus

I’ve writ­ten a new book—at least one-each year for the past thir­ty-five years. I have, I know, a rep­u­ta­tion for being pro­lif­ic. And it’s true I have pub­lished some­thing like sev­en­ty-three books. Oth­ers are wait­ing in the wings. Why then, does it always feel as if I am writ­ing very slow­ly? I sus­pect it’s very much what my friend, the writer Bet­ty Miles, once said to me: “I work on a book for six months before I feel like a writer.”

If you are a read­er of my pub­lished books—and you enjoy them—you may find it dif­fi­cult to believe that my ear­ly drafts are real­ly bad­ly writ­ten. But by the time you, the read­er, get your eyes on them, they have been rewrit­ten, six­ty, seventy—if not more—times. Think of look­ing through the view­ing lens of a cam­era. Every­thing is out of focus. It comes into focus only incre­men­tal­ly. Some­times, if I am lucky, I make a change that alters every­thing, and I make a leap for­ward. It hap­pens, but rarely. There is that slow, day by day, eight or more hours a day, going over the work again and again and again and…. Slow it may be. And it isn’t always sure. For me, how­ev­er, it’s oblig­a­tory. In short, I work slow­ly, fast.