Writing and real life - Getting ready to write

The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Writing and real life
Getting ready to write

When I was in my thirties and decided to start writing, the only model that I had for a writer’s life was Virginia Woolf’s. Although I learned much from her example, unlike me, Woolf was a member of a privileged class. She had a cook and people who took care of her home. Her example of working during uninterrupted writing time between ten and one couldn’t help me with my fundamental challenge—how to interweave taking care of children, running a household, and teaching with a writing life—that many of my students face. For a time, I didn’t believe an ordinary person like me could find time to write; I thought I might have to wait until my children were grown, even as I knew I couldn’t—the need to write was so great.

And then I read Anne Tyler’s essay “Still Just Writing,” and a writing life became possible for me. Here was a person who’d figured out a way to write in the midst of life’s chaos.

Tyler describes how, while she was “painting the downstairs hall,” she imagined a character “wearing a beard and a broad-brimmed leather hat”—he became the central character in Morgan’s Passing (1980). She wanted to sit down and figure out “this character on paper”—she trusted “a novel would grow up around him.” But her children’s spring vacation intervened, and she had to wait.

When her children returned to school, Tyler’s dog “got worms,” and she “lost a day.” Then she lost Friday—she shopped for groceries and supplies for the gerbils’ cage, and cleaned bathrooms. Still, she figured she had “four good weeks in April to block out the novel.”

Tyler was ready to begin by May. But she had to write “in patches.” There was the dog to deal with, the washing machine repairman, the tree man, the meter reader, a baby born to her husband’s cousin, the death of a relative, shopping for a black coat for a relative in mourning. After these interruptions, Tyler “wrote chapters one and two.” Although she wanted to write until three thirty in the afternoon, that rarely happened: there were dental appointments, a cat’s shots, gymnastic meets, where Tyler tried to convince herself she could use this material in a novel some day. By the time she finished chapter three, “it was Memorial Day and the children were home again.”

In June, Tyler put her novel aside to take care of her children. By then she’d forgotten “what I’d planned to do next.” She had “high hopes for July,” but one of her daughters became seriously ill.

Tyler says it isn’t only women who must determine how to find time to write. Her husband, a child psychiatrist and a writer, faced the same challenge. Tyler says she’s learned how to write when she can, but also how to be fully engaged with the rest of her life when she’s not writing. She believes that putting work away and connecting with whatever else is happening may slow writing down. “[B]ut when I did write,” Tyler remarks, “I had more of a self to speak from.”

It helps for a writer to develop a “sense of limitless time” so that whatever happens in life can be attended to. Tyler sees herself slipping “gracefully through a choppy life of writing novels, plastering the dining room ceiling, and presiding at slumber parties.” If we imagine living “unusually long” lives, Tyler says we can write while still being fully engaged with the rest of our lives.

I seek out writers like Anne Tyler to tell my students about, who write in the midst of the clamor and business of life. A writer like Mary Karr, who was a single parent and teaching full-time while writing The Liars’ Club (1995); the memoir took her two and a half years to write; she wrote “every other weekend” while her son’s father cared for him, and during “every school holiday, including the whole summer vacation.”

Or, a writer like the Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who married at twenty, had her first child at twenty-one, published her first book at thirty-six, and who said she wrote “desperately all the time I was pregnant because I thought I would never be able to write afterwards.” But she continued to write while raising children, dealing with pets, running a bookstore with her first husband, and caring for a household.

When Munro’s children were small, she wrote while they napped—from “one to three in the afternoon.” When she wrote her second book, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), she was raising four children (her three and a daughter’s friend), working in the bookstore, and writing until “one o’clock in the morning.” That year, she was working so hard, she was afraid she’d have “a heart attack.” At times when her daughter approached her at the typewriter, Munro “would bat her away with one hand and type with the other,” about which she feels terrible. Still, it was an enormously productive time and she was proud of the work she accomplished in the midst of such a hectic life.

When Munro’s children were older, she started writing “as soon as they left for school.” She’d write until noon, when she was “supposed to be doing housework,” then she’d work at the bookstore. When she wasn’t working at the bookstore every day, she’d “write until everybody came home for lunch and then after they went back, probably till about two thirty.” Then she’d stop for a cup of coffee and frantically try to get all her housework done “before late afternoon” when her children came back from school.

Like Munro, I’ve learned there’s no correlation between the amount of time I have to write and the amount of writing I’ve accomplished. With me, there’s an almost inverse correlation—the more writing time I have, the more likely I am to worry every word onto the page, to have difficulty making decisions, to lose focus, to waste time. I wrote more, and published more books, when my kids were small and when I was teaching more classes than I do now. And the hardest writing times for me are always summers and sabbaticals. As Zadie Smith has said, writers with a lot of time “’don’t always use it well.’” After the birth of her child, Smith’s writing time became limited to “four or five hours a day,” and she learned to begin work immediately. It also changed her aesthetic: “’I wasn’t interested in 80-page chapters any more—I couldn’t stay in that mind-set for that period of time.’”

I prefer writing in real time—a day when I prepare a class, read student work, do laundry, straighten up, run an errand, organize a closet, see my family, make meals, watch a movie. Knowing there are other tasks I must accomplish helps my work. Knowing that I must write during my allotted time or I won’t get to write at all urges me to get right to work, draft a few pages. If all I have to do is write, writing becomes too fraught for me.

I can’t imagine being that writer who goes up to the desk after breakfast and emerges at the end of day, while someone else takes care of the cooking, cleaning, child rearing, and the business of life. I like to think of writing as “my work,” not as “MY WORK.” And I believe that this image of the ideal writing life—writing all day long in a room with a closed door while someone else tends to all life’s necessities, Virginia Woolf’s proverbial “a room of one’s own”—is one reason many people don’t begin writing because that so-called idyllic writing life is impossible for most of us who have to earn livings.

Munro has remarked she never understood “that you could have conditions for writing that would be any better than any other conditions.” The only time she stopped writing was when she was given a private place to work, an experience she drew upon for her short story “The Office” (1968).

“I did get an office,” Munro remarked, “and I wasn’t able to write anything there at all—except that story.… So I had all this time, and I was in this office, and I would just sit there thinking. I couldn’t reach anything; I meant to, but it was paralyzing.”