Dispatch from Paris: Why Writing a Book Takes Time

Finding an ending on Avenue Percier, Five Years After the Book Began

I wrote the first two paragraphs of this post several days ago, while I was still in Paris, finishing unfinished business. Now I’m home…picking up where I left off. If you like this post, you might also enjoy reading Waiting for Words: Why Patience Matters More Than Habit.

I arrived in Paris last week after an overnight flight from the West Coast. I breezed through passport control, stepped out of Charles de Gaulle into a surprisingly short taxi line, and was at my airbnb on rue de Seine before noon. But after several failed attempts to reach my airbnb host, I finally received word from the host that they didn’t have a key, they weren’t sure where it was or how they might procure it, neither the cleaners nor I could get into the apartment, and “why don’t you go sit at a cafe for a while.” This is easier said than done when you are carrying luggage around Paris.

On my last night in Paris, I walked through my beloved Parc Monceau

Fortunately, at the last minute back home I’d imagined this scenario and had switched out my suitcase for a carry-on. I found a cafe just a couple of blocks away, which was easy enough to walk to but, if you’ve been to Paris, you can imagine how happy the waiters are to watch you trying to squeeze a carry-on suitcase and backpack in between your tiny table and the tiny table right next to you.

Now, back home in California, picking up where I left off…

The thing about Paris is it is distracting. Every time I was sitting in the airbnb writing, I thought, I should be out seeing the city! And every time I was out seeing the city, I thought I should be back in the airbnb writing. This was true when I lived in Paris, too, from 2018 to 2020. It was a constant push-pull: either I was cheating on the book-in-progress, or I was cheating on the city. Maybe, for a writer, the hidden benefit of suburban life is that you feel perfectly fine being at home, working on your book; you don’t feel that you’re “missing something” every time you stay home and write.

I went to Paris, in large part, to get my head around a memoir-in-essays I started there when my family moved to France in 2018. (Since then, I have written a novel set in Paris, but this is different, more personal and therefore, to me, more challenging. What to reveal? What to conceal? How to tell my story without telling all of it? How to write about my own experience while protecting my family, particularly my son, who never signed up to be the son of writer?)

It is rather alarming to me now to realize I started the book five years ago. I thought it would be finished by the time we left (at the end of 2020), but it wasn’t. Then I thought it would be finished within a few months of moving back home to California, but it wasn’t. And each time a new season rolled around I thought it would be finished by the end of the season…yet it never was.

The longer we were back home in California, the more Paris receded in my mind, and the more difficult it was to wrap my head around “the Paris book” and bring it to a conclusion.

(If you like the idea of taking your time to write a novel, join me for the nine-month novel writing course, Novel in Nine, which begins on Feb. 5th 2024.)

So, in October, I spent ten days alone in Paris, walking and wandering. I ended my time there at the least glamorous place you can imagine, the Pret on Haussmann Blvd, right around the corner from my old apartment. I used to often go to Pret to write in our final months in Paris because it was one of the few spots that served a coffee-sized coffee, and because it was quiet. For several months before our departure, the apartment directly above ours was under construction—the workers were using jackhammers to break up the concrete that had been inexplicably poured over the parquet floors. The jackhammering was so deafening that no sound-cancelling headphones could drown out the mind-rattling noise. It also caused our entire apartment to vibrate from 8:00 every morning to 4:30 every afternoon. So Pret became an unglamorous refuge, a place where I could get my head together and write.

On my last evening in Paris, I walked the long way home from Parc Champs du Mars, where I had spent many hours during our Paris years, and I stopped at Pret. It was quiet as always. I ordered a coffee and took it up to the second floor, and sat in my usual table facing Avenue Percier, and watched the workers rushing home in their coats and mountainous scarves (Parisians in the fall and winter wear ginormous scarves). I took out the tiny notebook I’d purchased at Musee D’Orsay and wrote. I only wrote four pages, which I would transcribe later, but I sensed as I wrote it that I was finally bringing that book to an end. That I had found the words with which to end my memoir-in-essays of the Paris years.

Prêt on Haussmann, and the view of Avenue Percier from my table

For most of us, a book is not a speedy undertaking. When you begin, you think it will take a year or two. After a year two, you think it will take a few more months. At some point you look back and realize you were actually quite a bit younger when you started this book than you are now, your life has changed dramatically in that time (my son, then in middle school, is now in college, and we live 5,563 miles from where we lived when I started the book), the world itself has changed, and the things you know now—about a place, about your life, about the story you want to tell—are different from the things you knew when you began.

How does one reconcile a book over time? How does one handle the evolution of both the life and the book, and how does one balance the vagaries of time in a manuscript that will, once published, be a finite thing, beginning at one particular point and ending at another particular point—neither of which is the necessary beginning or the necessary ending—both of which are merely moments you have chosen as the beginning and the end, because you must choose something?

I don't know the answers to those questions. I do know that going to Paris helped me find some closure to a strange time in my life and the life of my family. And I have this feeling that my final night in Paris, perched over Avenue Percier with my notebook and my coffee-sized coffee—gave me an ending to the book. Certainly it isn’t an ending I could have envisioned when I began. Nor is it the only possible ending; with any book, there are thousands if not millions of possible endings. But at some point you must choose one way to bring a book to an end, leaving all the other possibilities behind.

The writing challenge: This week, think about a writing project that has been long in the making, something that is taking much longer than you imagined it would. Be kind to yourself. Remind yourself that books usually take a long time. Then ask yourself: what would it take to find an ending for this book, this essay, this story? Not the ending, for there isn’t one: but an ending, the thing that will allow you to send that book/story/essay out into the world.

Notes on November: if many of your writing friends and frenemies seem to have mastered the marathon of drafting a book in a month, or a book in three months, or whatever… don’t despair. The fact is, a book takes time! In this time of frantic typing, you might take some consolation in The Joy of Writing Slowly.

And if you like the idea of taking your time to write a novel, the 2024 cohort of my nine-month novel writing course, Novel in Nine, begins on February 5, 2024.

Thank you for reading The Caffeinated writer. If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my stories about walking, wandering, and writing in Paris over at The Wandering Writer.

Learn more about Novel in 9—an inspiring, supportive nine-month writing program designed to help you complete a draft of your manuscript the slow and steady way. (It also works for memoir!)