Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

For my second draft, I wised up. Instead of treating the entire book as one humongous project with a far-out deadline, I broke it down and promised my editors I would revise one chapter a week.

Suddenly, I became far more disciplined. If I wanted to hit my goal, I had to edit about two pages a night. Translated into these smaller milestones, it was easy to see that missing even a night’s worth of writing was a big deal because I’d have to make up for it to stay on track. I made good on my word—my efficiency tripled on the second draft.

Nothing worthwhile happens overnight. Every big dream is the culmination of thousands of tiny steps forward.

One of the big turning points for this project came when he asked me to do the whole book as a PowerPoint presentation. (I think he was a little fed up with wading through my prose—one of the downsides of being a really fast typist.) The requirement to boil everything down into short presentation snippets was incredibly powerful. We got into a rhythm in which he would give me “assignments” and I would do my best to complete them, and eventually after more than a year, we had something he felt comfortable moving forward with.

Gradually, though, I found myself wanting to write a more substantial kind of novel. With the first two, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, I basically enjoyed the process of writing, but there were parts I wasn’t too pleased with. With these first two novels I was only able to write in spurts, snatching bits of time here and there—a half hour here, an hour there—and because I was always tired and felt like I was competing against the clock as I wrote, I was never able to concentrate. With this kind of scattered approach I was able to write some interesting, fresh things, but the result was far from a complex or profound novel. I felt I’d been given a wonderful opportunity to be a novelist—a chance you just don’t get every day—and a natural desire sprang up to take it as far as I possibly could and write the kind of novel I’d feel satisfied with. I knew I could write something more large-scale. And after giving it a lot of thought, I decided to close the business for a while and concentrate solely on writing. At this point my income from the jazz club was more than my income as a novelist, a reality I had to resign myself to.

I went on writing the kind of things I wanted to write, exactly the way I wanted to write them, and if that allowed me to make a normal living, then I couldn’t ask for more. When Norwegian Wood sold way more than anticipated, the comfortable position I had was forced to change a bit, but this was quite a bit later.