DON'T TELL ME HOW TO READ "WAR AND PEACE"!
Lessons in patience from Snoopy and the gang
Of all the Peanuts gags I reference routinely (and there are many), none comes up more than Snoopy reading War and Peace one word per day.
I have no idea why, as a child reading and rereading my Peanuts anthologies, this relatively low-key Snoopy plotline from the spring of ‘72 stands out to me so much. Revisiting the strips now1, I’m struck by how forgettable they are. The concept is significantly funnier that the execution and after about a week Schulz cops out and the narrative is hijacked by a neighborhood cat who kidnaps Woodstock (seriously). But for whatever reason they stuck in my brain.
I volunteered for almost a decade at a local Scout camp, where for a week every August we taught leadership and wilderness survival skills to 13-year-olds2. One of the cornerstones of the camp’s curriculum was a sort of backwoods zen koan: “How do you eat an elephant?” we would ask the children. Answers often ranged from the literal to the speculative to the surreal. Sagely we’d shake our heads and bestow upon them, in our saintly and infinite wisdom, the truth: “One bite at a time.”
For as many Goochland County youths as I infuriated with those five words, I don’t think I actually came to understand them until recently. Impatience runs in my family like doublejointedness. I’m lucky to say that the men in my family are pretty great across the board but God bless ‘em they don’t like to wait for things. As I’ve grown up and become aware of this I’ve tried not to foster this impulse in myself. We caught it early; results have been decent.
But even if I’ve learned not to be phased by red lights or traffic jams or especially slow talkers, big-picture patience has remained a sticking point. There are things in life that cannot, or should not, be rushed. Yes. Mark my words: I will still try.
I know I’m supposed to enjoy the journey, but have you seen the destination? The destination looks pretty cool. Way better than this dumb journey.
On November 20, 2024, I finished the rough draft to a ~60,000 word novel. A manuscript I started on July 2, 2023. That’s nearly 17 months, or roughly 72 weeks, or exactly 508 days.
I didn’t write on all of those days — likely not even half of them. I fell off the wagon several times during that period, and there were multiple months-long derailments where I didn’t write a word. Every time I would return to the project I would frantically start doing the math as to how long it would take me to finish it. “If I have written X pages,” I would ask ChatGPT, “and I average Y pages a day moving forward, on what calendar day will I hit 200 pages?”
Not only was it pathetic, it was pointless. I had no way of knowing how long the eventual manuscript would be. In retrospect, all my estimations were wrong. I assumed it would wind up being novella-length, maybe 180ish pages at the longest. When I dropped the last page in the document box, it was numbered 246. If, instead of shooting for an ever-increasing X pages-per-day, I had simply stuck to a boring and doable 1 page/day, I would have finished in under half the time it eventually took me3.
But I needed the encouragement of an impending finish line to stay in the race. I needed to feel like I was making progress, but more than that I needed to believe I could finish at all. After all, the growing stack of papers on my desk was all the proof of progress I could have asked for. I needed to imagine being done, and I needed to believe that day was soon.
I was aware at all times of the nonzero chance that nothing would ever come of anything I was writing. I found this alternatively comforting and disheartening. Plenty of first novels wind up shelved forever. In The Way of the Writer, Charles Johnson mentions that he wrote six full “apprentice novels”4 before he found something that worked — this from the man who wrote Middle Passage. And then there was the fact that, even if I finished the first draft, and even if I liked it enough to keep working on it, and even if I spent another year or decade or lifetime revising the thing, there was a real chance — a higher likelihood than not, even — that nothing would ever come of it and perhaps nobody would ever even read it but me and a few people who love me enough to forge ahead through 250 xeroxed pages of literary slop. Writing a book is like conducting the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment on yourself except there’s also an unspecified chance that the marshmallow is actually just a sunbleached dogturd. Nevertheless.
Ultimately, I don’t regret my “just get to the end” mindset. It drove me to finish, to do something I’ve always wanted to do and always been skeptical I’d manage to pull off. The real task of writing a novel for the first time is to prove to yourself that you can do it at all. And I had fun, I really did. But it’s odd to look back at my continual desperation to finish and realize it wasn’t even taking that long to begin with.
In five days I turn 25. What I know of adulthood at this point — real adulthood, I mean, not just “I pay my own bills” adulthood — is this: Life cannot, or should not, be rushed. Adulthood is not the realization of this but the acceptance of it. I’m going to have to go to work someplace or other5 pretty much every day until I’m very old or perhaps until I’m dead. My parents met when they were 19 or so and now they’ve been married near 30 years and each of those years was made up of weeks and days and minutes and seconds, each of those exactly as long as the one before it. Monday is my grandparents’ 61st anniversary.
If someday I want to own a home or run a faster 5k or learn a language or read all the books on my shelf or, hey, be married for 61 years, then the only way to do it is to accept that it must be done in actual days rather than hypothetical years. Put it this way: If starting now I write one page every day until I’m 40 then I’ll have 5,483 pages and frankly that’s way, way, way more than I even want to read.
Time runs its course, days become years. Life has no fast-forward button. Sometimes you’ve just got to read War and Peace one word a day. I am neither beagle nor bodhisattva, but I’m working on it.
Until today I was also convinced that, either out of beaglish anti-establishmentarianism or perhaps fear he was rushing, Snoopy eventually downshifted his pace even more to 1 letter per day. I appear to have hallucinated this: The archives contain no such slowdown.
Believe it or not it was more fun than it sounds.
Ultimately I think this is a silly way to frame things because the version of the book I likely would have written were I to have done it all in under a year would almost certainly be quite different (re: worse). Or maybe not. I like what I wound up with, and I’m not going to dwell on it.
Not drafts, whole different books! Six of them!! Though apparently he churned them all out in around 18 months total, which could be either a sign of impending genius or the root of the problem, depending on how you look at it. For his part, Johnson’s career seems to suggest the former.
(layoffs notwithstanding)
Yes!