The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Apprenticeship
A writer’s apprenticeship
Many beginning writers expect miracles; they plunge headlong into composing a long work before learning the rudiments of their craft, expecting themselves to complete a work in a year or two.
Beginning writers with unrealistic expectations might profit from reading Howard Gardner’s Creating Minds (1993) that states a decade of concentrated study and practice “heightens the likelihood of a major breakthrough” in our work. It takes time to learn the language of our art, perfect our craft, harness our skills, and develop our own particular form of expression. Because we’ve used language since childhood, it might seem no apprenticeship is necessary for writers before we begin our first full-length work. But that’s not the case: it takes time to learn our craft, and it’s time well spent. Studying the early lives of famous writers and patterning an apprenticeship upon theirs can help us achieve success.
Before I started writing, I studied Virginia Woolf’s apprenticeship and fashioned one for myself by imitating hers. I learned she kept a journal in which she summarized the day’s events, her reflections upon her reading, descriptions of people she knew. When she traveled, she practiced writing by composing sketches of people, places, and conversations. As a mature writer, she used her journals as a source for her work—she used notes from a trip to Greece for her third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922). So I, too, began keeping a journal. My first entries were nothing more than lists. But in time they became full reports of the events in my life. Like Woolf, I used them as an invaluable resource for, say, describing my sister’s suicide and my mother’s death in my memoir Vertigo.
Woolf improved her prose by setting herself reading programs. She didn’t just read; she read with pen in hand to improve her work. She read to learn how to write scenes, describe landscape, construct image patterns, depict the passage of time. She kept notebooks in which she evaluated what she read and copied passages that helped her learn her craft. In one, Woolf describes what she learned about form from reading the novels of Ivan Turgenev. So I, too, set myself reading programs.
My first reading program was studying all Woolf’s works. (My most recent, and most enjoyable, was studying novels of the 1940s while I was writing about World War II.) I learned how to write prose by hand-copying more than a thousand pages of Woolf’s drafts of The Voyage Out (1915), her first novel. This taught me to slow down to see how a writer at work constructs sentences, paragraphs, and scenes. I learned how to revise by studying what Woolf deleted, added, or changed. I never before understood how much published writers revised. The earliest draft of that novel, originally titled Melymbrosia, is vastly different from the final version, and so I learned how we can think about the effect we want to achieve—Woolf describes this in her diary—and drastically change our work over time. But perhaps the most important thing I learned was that Woolf’s first novel took seven years to complete.
By studying Woolf’s apprenticeship, I learned about her work habits and daily routine. I learned to treat a writing apprenticeship like any other job by going to the desk regularly. To make learning to write an essential part of our lives. To enlist the support of loved ones. To join a community of artists. To exercise daily before or after the day’s work.
Zadie Smith has written that it’s necessary for writers to have a model throughout the apprenticeship period to keep them focused on their work. Smith thinks of John Keats “slogging away, devouring books, plagiarizing, impersonating, adapting, struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him.”
Henry Miller’s apprenticeship before he wrote Tropic of Cancer lasted for years. Still, he knew he had to learn about Paris, which would figure importantly in that novel. He set himself the task of learning all he could about the city by walking its streets. He took a notebook with him, and later wrote sketches of what he saw and experienced (including his sexual escapades). When he began writing, he was prepared and he had a wealth of material to draw upon. Like Woolf, he read to improve his art; the books that most influenced him—among them, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862) and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924)—are discussed in The Books in My Life (1969). He studied vocabulary and made lists of words to use in his work. Before he began the novel, he made outlines, charts, and graphs of characters and events. Tropic of Cancer, which seems to be a quickly penned free-for-all, was meticulously planned and carefully prepared for by Miller’s long apprenticeship. His spontaneity was born from years of apprenticeship and preparation.
But some promising writers might keep themselves from engaging in this preparatory work because they don’t think of themselves as gifted enough to warrant the time it takes to learn to craft a book. The Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields, author of The Stone Diaries, stated she thought it was “a very presumptuous thing” to think about becoming a writer. “Why would anyone care about anything I had to put on the page?”
Although Shields was encouraged to write, she had “very little mentorship.” Like Woolf and Miller, Shields’s reading was “very tightly bound up” with her writing; the authors of the books she read—particularly Jane Austen—acted as mentors as she studied their works, to learn her craft. Once, when she was writing a series of poems and wanted to perfect her work to enter a competition, she asked herself, “Is this what I really mean?” This single question—one that she continually asked herself throughout her career—was the method Shields devised to develop her singular voice.
I like to remember that someone as supremely gifted as Luciano Pavarotti knew he had to engage in a long apprenticeship because he wanted to build his career upon the firmest possible foundation. He eschewed early success by postponing performance, but he gained something far more important: a stellar, long-lasting career.
Writing for publication is a kind of performance. And expecting to perform too soon might be as risky for writers as Pavarotti believed it was for singers. Like Virginia Woolf and Henry Miller, too, we writers can construct our own apprenticeships; a period of apprenticeship is as necessary for us to learn our craft as it was for Pavarotti to perfect his talent. And like Shields, we can work to perfect our art even if we worry that doing so might be presumptuous.