{"id":5501,"date":"2019-04-04T22:52:09","date_gmt":"2019-04-05T02:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/?p=5501"},"modified":"2019-04-04T22:52:09","modified_gmt":"2019-04-05T02:52:09","slug":"what-we-dont-know-about-writing-a-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/what-we-dont-know-about-writing-a-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"What We Don&#8217;t Know About Writing a Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/IMG_3158-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-5504\" src=\"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/IMG_3158-1-450x550.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"275\" height=\"336\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/IMG_3158-1-450x550.jpg 450w, https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/IMG_3158-1-300x367.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/IMG_3158-1-250x305.jpg 250w, https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/IMG_3158-1.jpg 491w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px\" \/><\/a>If you knew before you started a novel that it would take you over a year to produce a decent draft, would you begin? Would you keep working on it, week after week, devoting every spare hour to it, even if you couldn\u2019t tell whether it was going to be a good novel in the end?<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes I\u2019m glad I can\u2019t see the future because the work of writing can seem endless, but after a point, the issue of time hardly matters. If you\u2019re like me, working steadily on a long, intricate project, let us pause to remind ourselves of two key points:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>The time is going to pass anyway. We might as well reach that day a year or more into the future and have a novel to show for it.<\/li>\n<li>Each hour of work isn\u2019t lost. It\u2019s an hour spent intensely alive, creating, puzzling and exploring.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Writing a novel isn\u2019t completing a thing that gets checked off a list. It isn\u2019t a race. Writing a novel becomes a life, and life turns into a novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you knew before you started a novel that it would take you over a year to produce a decent draft, would you begin? Would you keep working on it, week after week, devoting every spare hour to it, even if you couldn\u2019t tell whether it was going to be a good novel in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-5501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5501"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5506,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5501\/revisions\/5506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}