"How long it takes to write a book depends on its length"
About this Quote
The joke lands because it wears the costume of hard-won craft wisdom while delivering a smugly obvious tautology. In a creative industry addicted to hacks, habits, and guru-grade metrics ("write 2,000 words before dawn"), Walter Jon Williams offers a deadpan answer that refuses the premise. Of course the length matters. That is precisely the point: the question itself is usually a disguised plea for reassurance that art can be converted into a predictable production schedule.
Williams, a working genre novelist with a long, pragmatic career, knows the pressure behind the inquiry. Writers ask about speed the way precarious workers ask about overtime: not out of curiosity but because rent is due, deadlines loom, and comparison culture is brutal. The line punctures the fantasy that there is a normal timeline that will certify you as legitimate. If you want a short book, it will likely take less time than a long one. Anything more granular is theater.
Subtextually, it is also a quiet defense of variance. A book's "length" isn't just word count; it's scope, complication, revision depth, research load, emotional difficulty. By pretending to answer only the simplest variable, he sidesteps the messy truth that two books of identical size can consume wildly different amounts of life. The humor is prophylactic: it protects the writer from being pinned to a number, and it protects the craft from being reduced to a spreadsheet.
It's an anti-productivity mantra disguised as a dad joke, and it works because it leaves the listener holding the real question: why do we want writing to behave like assembly-line output in the first place?
Williams, a working genre novelist with a long, pragmatic career, knows the pressure behind the inquiry. Writers ask about speed the way precarious workers ask about overtime: not out of curiosity but because rent is due, deadlines loom, and comparison culture is brutal. The line punctures the fantasy that there is a normal timeline that will certify you as legitimate. If you want a short book, it will likely take less time than a long one. Anything more granular is theater.
Subtextually, it is also a quiet defense of variance. A book's "length" isn't just word count; it's scope, complication, revision depth, research load, emotional difficulty. By pretending to answer only the simplest variable, he sidesteps the messy truth that two books of identical size can consume wildly different amounts of life. The humor is prophylactic: it protects the writer from being pinned to a number, and it protects the craft from being reduced to a spreadsheet.
It's an anti-productivity mantra disguised as a dad joke, and it works because it leaves the listener holding the real question: why do we want writing to behave like assembly-line output in the first place?
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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