When I tell people my forthcoming debut novel took 10 years to write, many look at me in awe. Wow, you labored for so long.
The truth is, I did labor for a long time. But what’s also true is that for the first six years of the process, I wasted mad time laboring on words that weren’t worth the effort. You see, I kept combing over the same 150 pages I initially wrote after college because I had fallen in love with little moments buried in them—characters, action, dialogue, plot points, little turns of phrases, metaphors. Because I was in love, I imagined a future with this early draft or something that resembled it pretty closely.
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