APPENDIX
1. WORK CHART OF A NOVEL
It was suggested to me that it might be interesting to some of the book’s readers, and useful to those readers who are also writers, if I tried to determine the exact number of hours and/or days the various stages of my novel The Prize consumed of my working time.
After agreeing to attempt such a breakdown, I found that it was anything but easy to do. Few writers keep records of how much time they spend on the individual stages of a novel. For myself, I had only one exact record, and that was of the number of days I spent in the actual writing of The Prize. For all the other steps—the research, the rewriting, the revisions, the proofing, the checking—I had no records, beyond such dates as I could find in my correspondence and Journals, and on some of my notes.
As I have pointed out in the preceding pages, I conceived the idea of a novel about the Nobel Prizes in Stockholm during 1946, and I finished my last work on the novel itself and saw it published in 1962. The novel was a part of my life for sixteen years. Yet, in those sixteen years, how much real working time had I given it? I could only approximate the days and the hours, although I suspect my totals may be fairly accurate.
There was just one continuing phase of the act of creation that I could not even approximate as to time spent. That was the time I had expended, during sixteen years, imagining, daydreaming, thinking about aspects of a book about the Nobel Prizes and finally about the book I came to write. As for this part of it, the Muse proved an uncooperative statistician. Yet it is this exact part, the make-believing, that may be the most important stage of all in developing a novel. For people who are not writers, this is difficult to understand. I am reminded of one motion-picture studio head who complained to his story editor about the writers they had under weekly salary. “Whenever I look up at the Writer’s Building,” the executive said, “I find half of them staring out of their windows. Why in the hell aren’t they writing?” Nothing could convince him that staring out the window was more often than not a vital part of creative writing. I cannot begin to calculate the productive time I spent staring out the window.
So the time estimates that follow are those that could be either calculated or safely guessed at. What I have set down is actual working time, omitting Sundays, holidays, sick days, writer’s-block days. Here, then, are the working days:
GENERAL RESEARCH
This includes work time in Stockholm in 1946; in Los Angeles during 1947 and 1948; on the Collier’s magazine project (much of which later proved useful for the novel) in 1949; in Los Angeles, London, Paris from 1950 through 1959; in Stockholm again, and also Copenhagen, Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice in 1960 …
260 Working Days and 857 Man Hours
FICTIONAL STORY NOTES
This includes development of characters, scenes, main plot and subplots, preliminary outlines, and continuing research done in Los Angeles in 1960 …
36 Working Days and 288 Man Hours
FIRST COMPLETE WRITING OF NOVEL
The writing of the first draft covered a period of 107 days in 1960 and 1961. Not all of these were working days. The actual working days add up to …
94 Working Days and 752 Man Hours
REWRITING THE FIRST DRAFT
I did three more drafts in 1961, before I had the final draft to submit to the publisher. Gathering together suggestions and comments from my wife, my research assistant, specialists in various fields, along with my own notes made after reading and rereading the first draft, I wrote new scenes; rewrote old ones; revised, corrected, edited both dialogue and narration; checked facts …
84 Working Days and 672 Man Hours
WRITING THE FINAL DRAFT
Using suggestions from my editor, publisher, Swedish experts, and medical specialists, and incorporating new ideas that I had had, I worked in Los Angeles, Paris, Vienna, Florence, Venice, Zurich in 1961 to produce the final manuscript version …
82 Working Days and 328 Man Hours
CHECKING COPY EDITOR’S QUERIES
These were queries sent to me which brought up points involving factual accuracy, fictional consistency, word usage, grammar, foreign phrases, all submitted late in 1961. My work consisted of double-checking my research and making decisions for literary improvements …
6 Working Days and 54 Man Hours
LEGAL REVISIONS
The publisher’s attorney submitted comments and questions, and I checked them and made my last changes before the book went to the printer …
3 Working Days and 14 Man Hours
CORRECTING GALLEYS AND PAGE PROOFS
Not long after the book had gone to the printer in 1962, I received first galley pages. I read these carefully and caught typographical errors, found mistakes I had committed, and whenever possible I still sought to improve the style. I penciled all of my notes in margins of the first galleys. Later, I received final page proofs, and in these I was permitted to make but few changes, since major revisions would have required costly resetting of the type and disruption of printer’s and publisher’s schedules …
17 Working Days and 136 Man Hours
TOTAL WORKING TIME ON NOVEL
582 Working Days and 3,101 Man Hours