In 1955, responding to a Life magazine article that explored the problem of underachievement in American children’s literacy rates and a book published soon after titled Why Johnny Can’t Read, then Houghton Mifflin education director William Spaulding reached out to an old friend with a challenge.

Theodore Geisel thought it would take him at most a month or two to use a provided list of 348 words every six-year-old should know, whittle it down to about 225 words, and shape them into a story that, at Spaulding’s insistence, “first graders can’t put down.”

It’s been a few years since our household has contained a first grader, but this is still in the collection because you never know when one might pop by for a visit.

It turned out to be a much taller order than the beloved Dr. Seuss, who was accustomed to making up silly words when he couldn’t find a rhyme, first assumed. At one point, he claimed he looked at the list and determined that the first two rhyming nouns he found would be the subject of his book. When he put a striped hat on a naughty cat, children’s literature was changed forever. He ended up using 236 unique words to write his The Cat in the Hat. It took him a year-and-a-half to do it.

I can sort of relate. I’m in the middle of a second draft of what I hope will someday be my fourth historical novel. That is, by the way, the best of my many excuses for not being super consistent on my blog lately. Also travel and the chaos of summer and life in general, but mostly it’s the novel thing. I’m fairly certain the novel won’t delight many first graders, but I would like to think it may someday be a book readers won’t be able to put down.

It’s a long way from that right now. A good portion of the book is still in that terrible rough draft stage in which the plot contains holes, the research has thin patches, the word choices are sloppy, the pacing is erratic, and the irresponsible characters are largely calling the shots. At this stage, I’m still hoping someone who loves me would have the good sense to destroy it if anything should happen to me before I’ve had a chance to clean it up.

Slowly but surely, I am working my way through the second draft. This is when I consider the rhythm of the story. I might move things around a little, adjust the pacing, fill in some background information, answer a few more targeted research questions, rein in those rambunctious characters, and start to play more intentionally with language. And like Dr. Seuss writing The Cat in the Hat, I’m finding that the whole thing is taking a lot longer than I thought it would.

Fortunately, I have not been tasked with changing the face of children’s literature and the landscape of early literacy education, but I do have approximately one million words in the English language I can choose from. I will not be trying to figure out how many unique ones I end up using, but my goal is somewhere in the neighborhood of 90,000 words or so, which does require some whittling.

For right now, most of that whittling needs to happen in chapter eight, which is where the pacing of this story really went off the rails. I must have been on a roll when I got to that part of the rough draft because I threw everything in there, including something like a quarter of the book’s major plot points.

It’s a monstrous hot mess that will eventually become at least five chapters, if not more, in the second draft. The problem is that it’s hard to convince myself I’m making much progress when, after days and days, I’m still trying to shape chapter 8d.

I’ll get there. Eventually. In the meantime, it does help to recognize that while I’m struggling with a process that is taking longer than I expected, the Greats have struggled with this, too. It also helps that even though my ninety-ish thousand words probably shouldn’t be made up, very few of them have to rhyme.