Many, many decades – The esteemed Elizabeth Bishop, on one line of poetry, the comma moved back and forth.
25 years – Steven Spielberg, on his latest film “Red Tails.”
30 years – Frank McCourt on Angela’s Ashes.
2 months – Richard Paul Evans, author of eleven New York Times best-sellers, including Finding Noel and The Christmas Box. Average number of revisions once the first draft was done: 800 per book.
6 weeks, or 4 years, depending upon the source – Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol.
10 days – George Simenon, lunch delivered on a tray to his closed office door, no interruptions tolerated. Creator of Inspector Maigret. Author of 200 novels, 210 novellas, several autobiographical works, dozens of articles, and scores of pulp fiction written under twelve pseudonyms.
5 days – Dame Barbara Cartland, resulting in some 623 best-sellers in her lifetime.
4 days – Samuel Johnson, Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia
A single 12-hour transatlantic flight – Dr. Richard Carlson’s wildly popular Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.
Are you glacial? Or do you like your latté hot, so make it quick!
Make peace with yourself. That’s how the best work happens.
Comments welcome and edited to include first names only, and website, if provided; never your email. Photo by K’vitsh.
Oooh, wow. Makes me feel so very normal!
Normal? What’s that when it comes to timing how long a decent sentence takes? You notice I didn’t put my own stats up there. Boy, some projects . . . ! I could get old waiting to get it right. / Thanks for writing.
wow, I don’t feel so bad now! It took 4.5 months to finish a project that was supposed to be completed in 2. Someone asked me to add 10,000 (my biggest project so far) words to a book, thankfully, they were very laid back about the dead line! I can’t imagine taking several years………
Several years is something I know very well. And also, I know a deadline. If it’s on deadline, it has to be there, end of discussion. But if it’s personal, well, this could take a while. / Thanks for writing. And congrats on the project. Adding 10,000 words is no easy feat.
Thank you! 10,000 words is alot more than I thought it would be. I still can’t get over the thought of decades going into a poem. It just seems like too much time to invest in one little ‘ol comma.