How Long?

A friend recently inquired about my writing. I’m always happy to be asked how my writing is going and on this day the work had gone especially well and I was excited to share that news. I had started a new chapter in my Armenian family memoir, a chapter that, for a few years, consisted only of a page of notes. That morning pondering that page, I found a way in. I saw how the previous chapter did in fact transition into this new one and how this new chapter wasn’t the digression I feared it was but rather moved the story forward. With all that fresh insight the new chapter unfolded before me; how long it would take me to get all that onto the page was another question.

My friend asked, “About how long does it take you to write a chapter?”

I paused.

My husband quipped, “Years!”

I laughed and agreed—last month marked six years since I started on my investigative journey into my ancestors’ lives in Turkey and the mystery of how they survived the Armenian Genocide. But I also gave the question serious consideration and replied, “A week. I should be able to write a first draft of a chapter in a week.”

The next day, I thought about that conversation and looked at the commitments already on my calendar. I considered that I am a slow writer, I get distracted by research, I get distracted by life. I can do this, I told myself. I will ignore the research impulse, which is a necessary but huge time suck, and just leave myself notes to follow up on in the next draft.

If I can write a chapter in a week and there are roughly fifty chapters, how long until I have a complete draft of this manuscript? Don’t do the actual math. Actual math and everyday time don’t compute for writers.

Think about football and time. (Yay, Seahawks! Woohoo, Bad Bunny!) Time in football can be stopped. Only five minutes left in a quarter? You think you know how long five minutes are? No, these are five football minutes. Minutes that are stretched by incomplete passes, timeouts, penalties, replay reviews, and player injuries. The time used for those stoppages doesn’t affect the total gameplay time.

I wrote the first draft of the new chapter in four days. The math is immaterial because in writing, the clock never stops. Pivot from writing and do some research? Time rolls on. Read through notes and scanned letters to pick out relevant quotes? Hours slip by. Scroll back to an earlier chapter that introduced my great-aunt’s deportation story (she was here on a student visa but no longer a student) to pick up the threads that need to be continued and resolved? Tick-tock.

And on it goes: move paragraphs around within the chapter, move paragraphs to another chapter, delete paragraphs. Prune back the abundance of quotes—I find my aunt to be witty and clever and always want to include more quotes than is necessary to flesh out the chapter. Scene or summary here? Consider word choice. There is no timeout for all these decisions. The days spool away.

I wrote the first draft in four days. I’ve been revising for eleven days. No football minutes for me. Or is it all football minutes, everything taking longer than it should?

At some point I’ll deem this new chapter ready enough for my critique group. After I receive their feedback, I may revise again or I may let the chapter and the feedback rest while I work on the next chapter. Revision is an ongoing process that ceases only with publication.

All I can do is keep working, keep pushing the football further down the field, further toward completion.