Preface

The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014


Preface

It’s late April and I’m sitting in my office at Hunter College in New York City, talking to a student writer about her work in progress. I’ve witnessed this writer’s struggle to get to the heart of her story—a memoir about how her family was affected by her father’s experience as a first responder to the Twin Towers tragedy. She tells me she’d like to finish her book by the end of the summer. She has a fine first draft in hand. But this is a big subject; its significance can’t be plumbed quickly. My job, now, is to help her realize it’ll take time to achieve the complexity she desires. On the bulletin board behind my desk, I’ve posted lines from the poem, “A Lazy Thought,” by Eve Merriam: “It takes a lot / Of slow / To grow.” And by the end of our meeting, she understands that, yes, her work is too significant to rush.

Beginning—and even accomplished—writers often expect to complete an essay in a few weeks, a book in a year. As Roxane Gay has written in Salon, we have a “cultural obsession with genius.” Yet the best writing grows by accretion, over time. As John Updike said, “I try to be a regular sort of fellow—much like a dentist drilling his teeth every morning—except Sunday.…” Taking time prevents us from writing knee-jerk responses to challenging material. It encourages us to reflect upon, and express, the complexity of our subjects. It allows us to understand that creating fine work can only be achieved by a slow, consistent dedication to our craft.

The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity is based not upon how I believe writers should work, and not upon how I work, but upon decades of research into the writing process and the work habits of real writers. If we understand the writing process, learn how real writers work, and use that information to develop our unique identity as writers, we’ll transform our writing lives. In reading the letters, journals, and interviews of well-known writers, I learned that virtually all described the process I refer to here as “slow writing,” one that paradoxically allows us to take risks and make intuitive leaps in our work.

In The Art of Slow Writing, you’ll find slow writing anecdotes from writers of classic works like D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, and John Steinbeck. But I also include reflections from contemporary writers—Jo Ann Beard, Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz, Jeffrey Eugenides, Mary Karr, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie, among others.

The Art of Slow Writing begins with an introduction articulating how I developed the slow writing concept. Part One, “Getting Ready to Write,” explores the beginning stages of the writing process, how we find our authentic subjects, how we discover our way of working. Part Two, “A Writer’s Apprenticeship,” examines how long it takes us to learn our craft or develop a new project. Part Three, “Challenges and Successes,” addresses learning patience, overcoming a fear of failure, and cultivating determination. Part Four, “Writers at Rest,” rethinks writing blocks as moments when we step back and regroup before resuming our work; it discusses, too, writing when we’re ill. Part Five, “Building a Book, Finishing a Book,” illuminates the hurdles we encounter and surmount to successfully complete our work. An epilogue suggests how we can begin the process of writing our next work.

The reflections in The Art of Slow Writing are an invitation for us to think about specific techniques we can use to enter the slow writing life; find ways to deal with the emotional pitfalls—fear, anxiety, judgment, self-doubt—that inevitably accompany our work; delve into what it means to live a healthy and productive creative life; and celebrate our tenacity and our accomplishments. In our rush-rush world, if we allow ourselves to slow down our lives and our writing process, we’ll discover that we’ll connect—or reconnect—with the wellspring of our most profound work.