How's Your Book Going?

At some point, every writer has probably had to answer the question "How's your book going?" I wonder, however, if other writers have had as much difficulty as I have in coming up with an honest answer.

For me the process of writing a book begins some time shortly after birth. It is the direct result of my collected life experiences, some large and meaningful, others seemingly insignificant, which together point me toward an interest in arcane subject matter. Sprinkle in some day dreaming and extended periods of self doubt. Then write. Read what you've written. Try not to throw up. Rewrite. Read again, preferably after hiding all sharp objects in the vicinity. Repeat this process one hundred times and you might end up with a first draft.

What is a first draft, anyway? Or more precisely, what is a draft? When I write a novel, I try to move logically from point A to point B and somehow always get waylaid at point Q and a half. I attempt to flesh out one character, only to discover that as I learn more about who she is, I learn that her interactions with my only fully realized character in the novel make absolutely no sense. And just how many rooms does Mrs. Hinckel's apartment have? Was the picture in her living room of a landscape or a naked woman straddling a unicorn? What does the interior of the synagogue on Rykestrasse in Berlin look like? What magazines would you find in the waiting room at a German doctor's office? Answering burning questions like these, that's the romantic life of a writer.

Right now, I've written and re-written the novel I'm working on so many times I've lost count of all the pages I've typed and torn up. My main character has gone from the age of 37 to 23. Her husband has changed careers several times (he's now an international lawyer specializing in real estate, and let's hope he sticks to it). Her boyfriend has changed nationalities several times and gone back to his original origins as of this writing. The book's length has gone from 160 (handwritten) to 350, streamlined down to 200 (a bit of a starvation diet), and now is hovering at a reasonable 250, where I hope it will linger.

It's a fine piece of work, but I'm the last person to know anything about it. Now is the stage when I begin passing it around to critics I trust so they can tell me about the holes I can't see because I've had my nose rubbed into this story for too long. I'm waiting for the advice I desperately need to bring this book home.

"I'm closer to the end than to the beginning," that's how my book is going. How much closer, I'm not sure yet.