The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Introduction
A writer’s apprenticeship

One false assumption many of us have about published writers is that they were gifted from childhood and in maturity used their innate ability to write their works. But not every famous writer showed early signs of talent. And literary history is filled with stories of writers investing years of apprenticeship before completing a successful work. The more we learn about how long it takes published writers to achieve their first success, the better we’ll understand the slow process of a writer’s apprenticeship and the more patient we’ll be as we begin learning and perfecting our craft. As Margaret Atwood remarked, writing is “acquired through the apprentice system, but you choose your own teachers. Sometimes they’re alive, sometimes dead.”

The Brontës’ childhood work was poorly written, filled with misspellings and syntactical errors. But the brilliance of their published works came only after many years of constant writing practice. As children, they created Glass Town and wrote, in tiny handwriting in handmade books, about it in tales of magic, mystery, and political intrigue, often modeled upon their reading. Near adolescence, the Brontës wrote melodramas about romantic love. As they aged, their work became more sophisticated. Yet, until each found an authentic voice, their work remained imitative—in 1831, Charlotte’s characters were “dark-eyed beauties” and “amoral male characters” borrowed from Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron.

W. Somerset Maugham in his preface to The Painted Veil (1925) describes the “laborious days” he spent in Florence in a room on the via Laura overlooking the Duomo preparing himself to be a writer. He began each day by translating a few pages of Ibsen “so that I might acquire mastery of technique and ease in writing dialogue.” He stated few people understand how long it takes to become a writer.

When Henry Miller moved to Paris in 1930, he took carbons of two novels he’d written in New York to revise his manuscripts Moloch (about his first marriage to Beatrice Sylvas Wickens) and Crazy Cock (about his second marriage to June Miller). He’d been writing seriously for six years, had published a few small pieces, and yet hadn’t fulfilled his dream of becoming a “working-class Proust.” He also had an outline of a magnum opus recounting his tortured life with June; he’d drafted it when he was thirty-six and working in the parks department in Queens. Miller always wanted to be a writer, but he thought he lacked talent: “Who was I to say I am a writer?”

While he was living a poverty-stricken life in Paris, cadging lodgings and meals when he could, living rough when he couldn’t, Miller began writing Tropic of Cancer (1934), the first novel in his own voice, using “the first person spectacular.” It took him two years to complete and he published it privately because he feared it would be declared obscene. The novel had a small but steady readership during and after the war. But it wasn’t published in America until 1961, twenty-seven years after it was published in France. Another writer would have become discouraged, but not Miller. He continued writing nonstop despite the attacks on his work.

Nor does our apprenticeship end after we’ve penned our first full-length work. When we embark upon a new project, or try a new structure or style, we once again become students as we learn what we must for the next phase of our work.

Although Mary Karr was a published poet, when she decided to write her memoir, The Liars’ Club, she had to begin afresh and learn the memoir form. As she prepared to write, she engaged in a self-designed tutorial. Reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) was a revelation because Karr learned that writing about ordinary folk was important. She read Harry Crews’s A Childhood (1978), which became a useful model for describing a rough place and a difficult childhood.

Karr knew it would take time to master the memoir form and find an appropriate voice to describe her girlhood in an East Texas oil-refining town, “our little armpit of the universe.” During the two and a half years it took to write her memoir, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 1996, Karr developed a voice combining poetic diction, a tough-minded Texas vernacular, and a brutally sardonic sense of humor. She found the work so “physically enervating” she had to nap each day.

Jennifer Egan, author of the Pulitzer Prize—winning A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), has reinvented herself with each book. To develop a new design, Egan must distance herself from her previous work between books, “a severing of contact with the approach and voice and mood and tone of the previous project.” During this interim, Egan reenters a period of apprenticeship and becomes a novice again, rethinking her craft and learning what she needs to know for her next novel. It’s as much a process of forgetting what she’s learned as it is a process of learning what she needs to craft the next work.

While reading Marcel Proust, Egan was also watching The Sopranos. She asked herself “how to technically accomplish what Proust accomplishes but in a different and, most importantly, compressed way.” For A Visit from the Goon Squad she also decided to use “some of the techniques of a series like The Sopranos,” in which a minor character becomes a major character, disappears for a time, then reappears in another guise.

The crime novelist Sue Grafton has stated that far more writers would achieve success if they developed their capacity to endure. “[S]o many people have the ability but they can’t withstand the long apprenticeship that every artist must go through,” she remarked. Too often beginning writers “get discouraged and disheartened and give up way too prematurely.” But “if they … can hang in there long enough to learn their craft, they might be fine writers.” Grafton’s advice is worth remembering as we engage in our apprenticeships.