My first novel, Buffalo Jump, took four years to complete, from the first notes scribbled on the back of an envelope to the final manuscript accepted by Random House Canada. Four years of researching, outlining, writing, knock-'em-down and tear-'em-up revisions, fussing, fretting, buffing, polishing, editing, i-dotting and t-crossing.
And then, in a moment of madness the likes of which Charles Manson probably never imagined, even while carving a swastika in his forehead, I told my prospective publishers I only needed a year to write the second.
This was at the Beer Bistro in Toronto, where my agent Helen Heller and I were having lunch with the publishers of Random House and Vintage Canada, Anne Collins and Marion Garner.
They told me how much they liked Buffalo Jump, a mystery featuring a young Toronto investigator named Jonah Geller who teams up with a reluctant hit man to prevent the slaughter of a local family. Then Anne said, “Do you have a second book on the go?”
I said I did: a sequel that brought back most of the characters from the first book. The plot, I said, revolved around construction and development in Toronto's portlands. That's as much as I told them – because that's about all I knew at that point.
“When do you think you'll have a draft ready?” Anne asked.
Feeling my oats, or perhaps the Belgian beer, I replied: “When would you like it?”
Anne explained that many mystery writers opt for being book-a-year writers, while others issue one every 18 months to two years. (Never mind Jeffrey Deaver, Nora Roberts and Robert B. Parker, who somehow write two or three a year.)
“A book a year,” I said. “That's me.” I meant it too. I'd been writing professionally for some 25 years at that point. Starting as a journalist, with stops in television, sketch comedy, improv and corporate communications, I'd always been known as a fast, sometimes furious writer.
High Chicago, by Howard Shrier, Vintage Canada, 336 pages, $19.95
Maybe because a book deal seemed achingly close – or maybe God was just punishing this Jew for ordering the pulled-pork sandwich – the fact that Buffalo Jump had taken four years to finish seemed to have slipped my mind.
Granted, I had been holding a full-time job in communications the first three of those years, working on the book in the early mornings, evenings, weekends, holidays and subway rides. I'd since left the job to finish Buffalo Jump and now had nothing but time on my hands. Twenty-four hours a day to spend on the sequel. I even had an office of my own, a bright room above a café in the Annex near Honest Ed's.
Piece of cake, right?
More like a cake of soap under my feet.
There was a reason Buffalo Jump took so long to write. Yes, I worked quickly when it came to news writing and corporate work. What I had forgotten, in my pork-induced haze, was that fiction is decidedly different. I have always needed incubation time when writing fiction, going back to my earliest short stories. I have to read and research and absorb information and let it all sit and stew until ideas start to bubble. And no amount of pressure, self-induced or otherwise, can rush that process. With Buffalo Jump, I'd been working entirely on my own schedule. I made notes for a solid year before I entered the first line of text into my computer. I worked for 18 months on the first draft, another 14 on the second.
