[Many of us are caught in the following predicament: we have tremendous pent-up wanderlust, but we don’t feel that it’s quite safe enough to travel yet. So, let me present you with some excerpts from my book A Writer’s Paris to help slake some of that wanderlust, while at the same time providing you with lessons of values to writers and all creatives. These essays also connect to my recent book Redesign Your Mind, as they present new ways of thinking about the creative process and the writing life.]
Georges Simenon, the Belgian novelist of Inspector Maigret fame—who lived and wrote in a Place des Vosges apartment—has always fascinated me, though a writer friend of mine dismisses him out of hand: “He was insane! And his daughter committed suicide because of some Electra thing.” Both accusations are open to debate, as is Simenon’s own claim that he slept with ten thousand women (the majority of them prostitutes, which must tarnish his boast anyway). What’s not debatable is that Simenon wrote hundreds of novels, many of them in three-weeks’ time. Three weeks! The concept of the three-week book fascinates me almost as much as Simenon’s oeuvre does.
Simenon’s slim psychological novels like Sunday, November, and Monsieur Monde Vanishes are tight, terrific investigations of human nature. Conceived to be slim, they’re less than two hundred pages each. Simenon’s habit was to check with his family doctor to make sure that he was fit for hard labor, then lock himself away for a disciplined, breathless three weeks-only, if his boast is to be believed, taking time out for sex. In those three weeks, he would exhale a draft.
No doubt a majority of the books—even the slimmest ones—that any author pens will take months or years to write. Simenon’s feats, though, prove that there is no ironclad rule about how long writing a book must take. Therefore, it is entirely within reason to believe that you might go to Paris for a month, write up a storm, and depart with a complete manuscript. Isn’t that something?
One year I was invited to give the keynote address at the Jack London Writers Conference. In preparation, I began making a list of the “wrong” things that writers say to themselves and the better things they might say instead. In essence, I prepared a short course in cognitive therapy for writers. I began writing my talk on a Tuesday and completed it that Friday. In the back of my mind an idea began to percolate: I’ve spent a mere four days on this talk, which is already the nucleus of a nice, slim book. What if I commit to spending two more weeks on it—could! complete it in three weeks’ time? Years before, I’d had a small ghostwriting career. I’d written each of five books in two months’ time or less. That had proven a snap. How much harder could writing a slim book in a mere three weeks be? A few thousand words a day, twenty-one days, and voilà.
The keynote address went well. Several literary agents in the audience approached me afterward, wondering if I intended to turn the talk into a book and, if I did, whether I had agent representation for it. Their reaction confirmed what I already suspected—that the material was marketable. I finalized the decision. This would be my first three-week book: conceived and completely written in three weeks’ time.
For the next two weeks, I worked on the book, and on a Sunday it was done. It came in at under 25,000 words—extremely short, not really a book at all, but functionally close enough—designed in such a way as to fill up 165 book pages. I sent the manuscript to one of my editors, someone who’d purchased books from me before but who’d also turned proposals down. She was not someone to buy just anything. She called a few days later to say that this was her favorite of my things. Write Mind: 299 Things Writers Should Never Say to Themselves (and What They Should Say Instead) had taken three weeks to write and a week to sell.
It is fruitless, guilt-producing, and counterproductive to imagine that you can write a book in three weeks’ time if that book must take three years to write. You can’t compose War and Peace in a month. But isn’t it an open question how much more quickly we might complete things if we challenged ourselves? Might not there be a split second at the beginning of a project when we have the option of telling ourselves three weeks instead of two years? Aren’t there tipping-point moments in the lives of our books when we might opt for a little more hare and a little less tortoise?
Simenon, asked repeatedly if he would ever write a “big book,” always replied, “My big book is the mosaic of my small books.” Maybe the big book that you’ve hoped to tackle is actually a series of smaller books, each one ready to fly off the spindle. Maybe this is the moment to think small and quick. There is as much beauty in slim books crafted quickly as in chubby books written over years. Paris might be the perfect place to try writing one.
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