Before The Kite Runner became a global bestseller, it was a 25-page short story a working doctor had left in his garage. Hosseini finished the novel in the dark hours before his hospital shifts, one small session at a time.
It Started as a 25-Page Short Story
In 1999, Hosseini read that the Taliban had banned kite flying in Afghanistan. The detail stuck with him, and he wrote a short story about two boys and a kite in Kabul, roughly 25 pages long. He sent copies to Esquire and The New Yorker, and both turned it down.
The pages sat for about two years. In March 2001 he found them again in his garage, and a friend suggested the story had a novel in it. He agreed and began expanding it, and by his account the book grew much darker than the original sketch. He has said he even worked out plot pieces by drawing them, including the decision to make Amir and Hassan half-brothers.
He Wrote Before His Hospital Shifts
Hosseini was a practicing internist while he drafted the book. He has said he woke around 4:30 to 5 a.m., wrote for about three hours in the quiet, then got ready and drove to the clinic to see his first patients before 9. The discipline that ran his medical days is the same thing that kept the writing sessions going, morning after morning.
I woke at 4:30 a.m. daily and spent three hours alone in the early morning darkness with Amir, Hassan, Baba.
Khaled Hosseini, Literary Hub
He kept practicing medicine well past the book's success. Hosseini has said he left his medical career in December 2004, more than a year after the novel came out.
Rewriting Did the Heavy Lifting
Hosseini doesn't outline. He starts with an image or a line and follows it, then rebuilds the draft through heavy revision, which is where he says the real writing happens. His editor, Cindy Spiegel, helped him rework the last third of the manuscript, something he has noted is common for a first novel. Riverhead Books published The Kite Runner in 2003 with a first printing of about 50,000 hardcover copies. For more on his habits, see the full Khaled Hosseini writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Start smaller than the finished thing. A novel can begin as a short story you nearly threw away.
- Guard one quiet block a day. Three uninterrupted hours before the world woke up added up to a book.
- Let the first draft be rough. Hosseini treats it as a sketch and does the real work in revision.
- Keep the day job as long as you need it. He stayed a doctor through publication and beyond.