When people ask, they don’t do so maliciously, but what the writer hears is impatience, criticism, and judgment. The question I’m referring to?: “So, how’s that book coming along?”
Whenever I get this inquiry, a slew of AKAs run through my head:
– What the hell is taking so long?
– Is this the same freaking book you were working on last summer?
– Are there 2,000 pages to this tome or are you just incredibly slow?
– This writing thing is a joke, right?
Novelist Amy Wallen put it best when she compared asking a novelist about the state of her work to asking a woman struggling to conceive how the babymaking is going.
Generally, I like to assume people mean well. They’re just making polite conversation, showing they care about something that I care about immensely. That’s nice and all, but I’d prefer to talk about what I’m reading or what TV shows I’m watching. Oh hell, I’d prefer to talk about the weather.
Novel-writing is kind of a private journey–and by private journey I mean private hell. I don’t really discuss it in depth with people who are not writers themselves. I know “my process.” I know I may have months of not writing at all–only thinking about writing. And that’s okay. I don’t really have a deadline in mind for publishing a book. Pre-humous would be nice.
In recounting the ten years she spent on her first novel, Susanna Daniel says:
“I thought about my novel all the time. Increasingly, these were not happy or satisfying thoughts. My “novel” (which had started to wear its own air quotes in my head) became something closer to enemy than lover. A person and his creative work exist in a relationship very much like a marriage: When it’s good, it’s very good, and when it’s bad, it’s ugly. And when it’s been bad for a long, long time, you start to think about divorce.”
Yeah, I understand that.
But, she did publish her book (Stiltsville), eventually. And I think I’ll publish a book someday, too. When that happens, I’ll actually look forward to someone asking me, “So, how’s that book coming along?” so I can say, “That shit is published.”