The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Raw material
Getting ready to write
Writers have their own ways of beginning projects. Some may favor planning beforehand and making detailed outlines; others prefer plunging into the work without knowing very much, trusting that, in the process of writing, a subject will reveal itself. Still, virtually every writer I know doesn’t start from scratch. Many collect material before they know what to do with it; others go in search of material once they’ve begun to work.
Elizabeth Jolley, who wrote about life in Western Australia in novels like Foxybaby (1985), never began by writing “a synopsis or an outline,” fearing she might have forced her work into too rigid a scheme before she even began. She needed, instead, to discover “the energy and rhythm” of the particular language she required for a particular story through trial and error.
The beginning of Jolley’s process was “a ragged and restless activity” during which she accumulated the raw material for her work—“scattered fragments” of writing. Moving from that initial stage into the process of making a book involved Jolley taking those bits and pieces and piecing them together “rather like a patchwork quilt.” After, there was a lot of rewriting. And she often wrote “the first pages last and often put off writing the end for a long time.”
Jolley’s way of producing the raw material that became her novels involved risk taking—keeping herself free enough to witness the work that was emerging, keeping herself open to decide upon the design of the work after she accumulated much writing, keeping herself from even considering the beginning and concluding pages of her books until the end of the process.
Norman Rush, author of Mortals, refused to serve in the military during the Korean War when he was a young man, and he spent two years in a minimum security prison. There, any writing would be confiscated, so he wrote a novel in secret “on onionskin, jamming tiny letters onto both sides of each page.” He built a chessboard with a hidden compartment in the prison’s wood shop in which he stashed half of his novel. He secreted the other half in the “cardboard tube of a roll of toilet paper” for a friend to smuggle out of prison. When he was released, he assembled the novel.
Rush called it an absurd first effort, “set in a mythical South American dictatorship, involving a peaceful uprising organized by three smart people” against a fictional dictator named Larco Tur. Rush never published that work; he didn’t publish his first book until he was fifty-three years old after a Peace Corps stint in Botswana with his wife, Elsa. Still, the subject of insurrection continued to fascinate him, and he drew upon the subject matter of that first novel in Mortals.
When Rush was in Botswana, he “carried a spiral notebook everywhere,” capturing everything he witnessed; he collected “school journals and periodicals, newspapers and bureaucratic papers”—the raw material for Mortals about an insurrection in Botswana involving a local leader, a contract CIA agent, and an idealistic physician. When Rush returned to the United States, he had “cartons of material” that he would draw upon for Whites (1986), a story collection filled with “expatriate intrigues—sexual, political, and folk-medicinal”; for the National Book Award—winning Mating (1991), about a woman graduate student “who crosses the Kalahari alone to find a secretive utopian village”; and for Mortals. While Rush collected that raw material, he trusted he would one day put it all to good use. And he did.
Rush’s example illustrates the virtue for writers of carrying notebooks everywhere and recording whatever seems important at the time, even without knowing its potential use. Isabel Allende keeps a notepad by her bedside to collect material that comes to her in dreams. Margaret Atwood thinks writers “should carry notebooks with them at all times just for those moments because there’s nothing worse than having that moment and finding that you’re unable to set it down except with a knife on your leg or something.” Atwood also loves “sticky notes,” and she, too, keeps a “bedside notebook” for gathering material that she might use in her work.
Many writers describe how some of their best ideas for a project, or the inspiration for a project, occurs when they’re away from the desk. We get a gift from our subconscious writer’s mind, and our obligation is to record it. This is raw material we might not yet know how to use in our work but that we might, one day.
I once went into New York City to see a rerun of the film Breathless. I was preparing to write Breathless, a book about my life as a person with asthma. As is my habit, I arrived at the theater early—I like to have quiet time in public places before a meeting or a movie or a meal.
The theater was dim. The seats were cushy. I was relaxed. I sat there, happily occupied with the pleasure of doing nothing, when, out of nowhere, I “saw” the entire book I was writing. It came to me as a diagram, and I fished out my pen and my notebook and drew a diagram of the book that I would subsequently write. I included that diagram in the book. It was one of those moments of insight I couldn’t have anticipated. That moment provided me with all the raw material I would need for my book. But if I didn’t have pen and paper, I suspect I would have lost much of that immensely detailed flash of insight, because I never could have remembered it in its entirety. So I consider it to be part of my job as a writer to be ready to collect the raw material for my work wherever I am and whenever an idea comes to me.
Alice Munro has described how, after writing about her childhood for years, she decided to move on to writing “stories that are more observation.” To write about lives other than her own and her family’s, Munro says she waits for material to turn up, and it always does. When she settles on a story, she often has to search for raw material to transform in her work. Once, when writing a story about a Victorian woman writer, she searched through newspaper clippings, getting “very strong images of the town” where the writer lived, which she called Walley. When she needs specific material to draw from—finding “out things about old cars or something like that, or the Presbyterian church in the 1850s”—she engages the help of a librarian to gather material she can transform in her stories.
When Margaux Fragoso was writing her memoir Tiger, Tiger (2011) about her sexual relationship with Peter, a man far older than herself, she realized that the work was too unclear and that it didn’t represent her life as she was living it as a child and adolescent, moment by moment. Because her memories were unclear, and because she wanted “to have a lot of real detail,” she decided to draw upon the material she’d collected for years: her old journals and the man’s letters to her that she’d saved. She went back to the place where the events occurred with a notebook in hand and wrote down “everything to capture the feel” of the place.
Fragoso then went back to her draft and she began to re-create what had transpired from the point of view of the young child who had experienced them, basing the voice upon the material she discovered in her journals. In one sense, having all this information complicated the process because, as Fragoso says, “it takes a lot of work to decide how you’re going to shape the material.” Without her journals and Peter’s letters, though, it would have been impossible for Fragoso to recapture the voice of the child who had experienced sexual abuse for so many years, who nonetheless loved her abuser. The material Fragoso saved helped her decide to reveal she “loved and had affection for Peter,” an admission that radically complicates the portrait of her as a young girl.