Avi

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Q&A: “How long does it take you to write one of your books?”

There are two extremes:  Bright Shad­ow took four­teen years to write from the time I began it until I had the pub­lished book in hand. S.O.R Losers was writ­ten in two days. The rea­son for both pro­vides an answer to the question.

When I was in high school, I was on the soc­cer team, a team cre­at­ed by the school for boys who were not par­tic­u­lar­ly ath­let­ic. There were twelve of us, only one of whom had ever played soc­cer before. I was not even on the start­ing team of eleven.

On the day of our first game, our goalie quit the team. Our coach, when he belat­ed­ly heard the news—just as we were head­ing for the field–looked around, point­ed to me and said, “Avi, you’re the tallest. You’re play­ing goalie.”

Need­less to say, we lost that game, and went on to lose every game (two sea­sons) we ever played.

Years lat­er, my boys (who were soc­cer play­ers) loved to hear how bad a play­er I was, and how bad my team was. That’s to say I rehearsed the sto­ry (with embell­ish­ments) a fair num­ber of times. When I decid­ed to write the sto­ry, it was all in my head, and life. It was exceed­ing­ly easy to write.

By way of con­trast, Bright Shad­ow entered my thoughts, not as a sto­ry, but as a riddle.

When bright, it’s dark, when dark­est, it’s gone. When gone for good, so are you. What am I?

I don’t know where this came from, or why, though I do like rid­dles. Per­haps I had recent­ly learned that Anglo-Sax­on cul­ture con­sid­ered rid­dles a form of literature. 

The point is, I liked the rid­dle. I then went on to try to cre­ate a sto­ry that fit it. That’s to say that the plot of the book was in itself a kind of rid­dle. It took a very long time to fig­ure it out.

The point is that the two books were cre­at­ed by dia­met­ri­cal­ly dif­fer­ent meth­ods: S.O.R. Losers came out of per­son­al expe­ri­ence. Bright Shad­ow was an intel­lec­tu­al exercise.

My own sense is that cre­at­ing books are best writ­ten by a mix­ture of both—experience and intellect—which in my case means it takes me about a year to write most of my nov­els. Some­times a lit­tle more. Some­times a lit­tle less. But to answer the ques­tion, How long does it take you to write one of your books?—a year is average.

1 thought on “Q&A: “How long does it take you to write one of your books?””

  1. Avi, thank you so much for this insight­ful response. It sounds fas­ci­nat­ing and log­i­cal at the same time. As an aspir­ing mid­dle grade nov­el­ist, I very much look for­ward to read­ing those two books you men­tioned and many more of yours.

    Reply

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