'Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere' took me six years to write.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If I had killed Crow off I can think of least six novels I would never have written, 400,000 words' worth of very necessary experience.
It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer.
And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
I took two years away from making films to write a novel.
It took me a long time to learn how to write a good song.
'Love Story' I wrote on my bedroom floor in about 20 minutes.
After these three novels I gave up writing novels for a time; I was dissatisfied with romantic doom, yet didn't see much way around it.
I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.
I wish I could spend six years writing one novel.
I think I wrote 'The Trysting Place' in about three weeks. But it was inexperience that made me have to do that. I didn't feel good about the book all the time I was writing it. It felt a bit like wading through molasses.