"Burger's Daughter" took Gordimer four years to write, starting from a handful of what she called "very scrappy notes", "half sentences" and "little snatches of dialogue". Collecting information for the novel was difficult because at the time little was known about South African communists. Gordimer relied on clandestine books and documents given to her by confidants, and her own experiences of living in South Africa. Once she got going, she said, writing the book became an "organic process". The Soweto riots in 1976 happened while she was working on the book, and she changed the plot to incorporate the uprising. Gordimer explained that "Rosa would have come back to South Africa; that was inevitable", but "here would have been a different ending". During those four years she also wrote two non-fiction articles to take breaks from working on the novel.