I've picked up on an interesting pattern from the author events I've attended over the past year and a half. It seems many of the authors I've seen in person thought about a book idea for quite a long time before starting to write the book (1).
The first time I noticed this was at Colson Whitehead's Boston Book Festival appearance last October. He talked about wondering in grade school what it would have been like if the Underground Railroad was literally an underground railroad. Decades later, he published The Underground Railroad to great response.
Appearances by Min Jin Lee and George Saunders this past February produced similar revelations. Lee spoke to her audience about how Pachinko took over fifteen years (fifteen years!) to finish (2). Saunders first conceived the idea for his 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo sometime during the 1990s.
The more I think about this, the more it makes sense. As I read in one of Anne Truitt's journals, a project started prematurely risks the final product skewing too far in the direction of raw emotion. Such art lacks the correct balance of feeling and understanding. Given the charged emotional content of what these authors wrote about (oppression, discrimination, loss) I sensed Truitt's insight explained the extended 'incubation periods' of the novels these writers discussed during their appearances (3).
I realized just the other day that, were I ever to publish a book, I could possibly experience the same situation (4). Put another way, any book ideas I come up with now might become the books I write in twenty years or so. I put my brain to work and came up with a few unlikely ideas...
Each Tuesday over the next few months, I'll share a description of such a book I'm currently NOT working on. If you like the idea, let me know and maybe I'll write it during my mid-life crisis.
To keep things from spiraling out of control around these parts, though, I'll try to limit it to one book per 'genre' (a word I'm going to interpret very loosely).
Enjoy!
Footnotes / imagined complaints
0. By the way...
Feel free to steal any or all of these ideas coming up over the next few weeks.
1. I don't know what I was expecting, I guess...
Although I cannot remember exactly what I thought about an author's 'incubation period' before going to these events, it must have been shorter given my surprise.
2. Fifteen years! The Big Dig moved faster, I think.
At one point, Lee revealed to us her decision to throw away an entire draft of a finished novel for something vaguely resembling Pachinko.
3. In the case of TOA, it's actually just true.
My experience with this blog confirms the idea as well. I have close to one hundred ideas, outlines, or half-written drafts for future blog posts. A lot of the time, I start writing only to admit I am not actually going to complete the post.
Again, the idea of balance comes into play for these blogs as they might have for the books referenced above: topics written about too soon tend to come out distorted in the direction of raw emotion, stubbornly refuse to consider other viewpoints, or overlook simple but crucial details (like maintaining verb tense correctly through a sentence).
4. Because fortune cookies never lie...
A fortune cookie once revealed my future to me: 'you are a lover of words and someday you will write a book'. So that's settled, right?
I've been patiently waiting for this book to appear ever since.
