Article: WRITING CAN BE FUN I...

I think the most remarkable thing about writing Beginner's Greek for me was that I enjoyed it so much. Even at my best, I have never been a fast writer and for most of my life I have procrastinated badly. If there has been any possible reason to avoid sitting down to write, I have tried to take advantage of it. Certainly, while writing this book I experienced periods of frustration, but overall I had a lot of fun. In the morning I would actually be eager to get to work. In fact, I might have finished the novel much sooner if I hadn't enjoyed writing it so much. The original manuscript was probably two-thirds again as long as the book and the reason the manuscript was so long was that I would get an idea and just write and write even when I knew that there was very good chance that it would have to be cut. But I couldn't resist (and while it is true that a great deal was cut, some of these digressions did provide ideas or even whole characters that I never would have thought of if I hadn't taken the detour).

One reason I think that writing this was more pleasurable than writing magazine pieces is simply that I didn't have to start over and over again. I have always procrastinated about starting something, but once I got rolling it was fairly easy. In this case, I was already rolling when I began to write each day, and I always had a pretty good idea of where the story was going. I also think that writing a novel was more fun than journalism simply because it's more fun to make things up than to have to stick to facts (of course, journalists have been known to make up the occasional fact). I have a friend who is an experienced editor and journalist who also writes novels and he once said, "I like writing fiction so much better than work," and I feel the same way. However, I do think that in my case having experience in journalism was essential for my ability to write a novel. Working in journalism affected the point of view and the content of the book, and it also forced me to develop certain crucial writing muscles. At Time, I had to face serious deadlines each week, both as a writer and as an editor, I was forced to learn how to get something on the screen. I never became fast, but I became a lot faster, and I got used to producing a draft even if it wasn't perfect. That's the approach I took with the novel-to keep going no matter how bad I thought it was.

I have always had two grades for my work: NGE, "Not Good Enough," and NNGE, "Not Near Good Enough." For this book, though, I was willing to give myself a new one: CBW, "Could Be Worse," and maybe another reason I enjoyed writing Beginner's Greek was this slightly more benign view of the results.