Writing outside and elsewhere - A writer’s apprenticeship

The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Writing outside and elsewhere
A writer’s apprenticeship

Years ago I had a student in a beginning memoir class whose work took place on Fire Island. The memoir she’d begun described her complex relationship to her mother, and was potentially fine apprenticeship work, but it could have taken place anywhere. The impact of living on Fire Island on her, her mother, and their relationship—a fascinating subject—was missing. A mother and daughter had to relate to one another differently there, I told her, than in Manhattan.

This student also had great difficulty writing in her apartment. She’d do laundry, mop floors, talk on the telephone and her precious writing time—she worked part-time while attending classes—ebbed away.

“What can I do?” she asked during a conference.

“Get out of the house,” I answered. “Write in a café. And take your notebook, go to Fire Island, and write there. See if it helps you remember what happened.”

I told her to try writing elsewhere because I remembered what a boon leaving the house was when I was a beginning writer. Like her, I’d find any household task I ordinarily despised—cleaning the bathroom, scraping sludge off the inside of the oven—became more compelling than the chapter I was writing.

I never would have finished that first book had I stayed home. I wrote most of the first draft sitting at a table at the Ramapo College library, overlooking a stand of evergreens during fall, winter, and spring. During summer, I wrote sitting on a lounge chair at our local pool as my kids swam, on a park bench near my house, at a bistro table under a huge shade tree. When I wrote outside, I focused only on my work. After a year, I wound up with a very rough first draft that I later refined. I never would have gotten that far had I stayed home.

When I began teaching, if I found that students were having difficulty working, I suggested they work outside their homes. I’d describe how Ernest Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises (1926) sitting at a table at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris, the “nearest good café” to where he lived on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, with the “afternoon light coming in” over his shoulder.

When I left the house to work, writing didn’t seem as scary as it did at home. I was often surrounded by people, which somehow made my project seem less daunting. The work seemed improvisational rather than something very serious and important. I didn’t yet know that improvising is a far better way to begin a work than aiming for perfection from the start.

I continue to write outdoors. If I only write at my desk, my work becomes too reflective and introspective. Writing away from my desk feels different from composing inside, either on a computer or by hand. Time slows down. I pause, stop, gaze at my surroundings, and consider what I want to say next. I don’t feel as if I’m rushing pell-mell through my work. I find myself inspired by my surroundings rather than oppressed by the solitude of my study. And often, when I’m away from home, my writing feels like sheer pleasure.

On a holiday to Mexico, I took my notebook to the veranda of a hotel overlooking the Pacific. I could see whales breaching, fishing boats, speckles of light shining on the surface of the sea, waves pounding a rocky escarpment. As I tried describing what I saw, I realized that when I write indoors, I rarely pause and look up from my work to see what’s around me—my study is too familiar for me to take notice of it. But when I write elsewhere, I notice where I am, and that act of witnessing my surroundings slows me down and enriches the act of writing without taking me away from my work. Sometimes I pen short descriptions of what I see for a few minutes. But sometimes what I see inspires me to think about something in my work in progress I would have otherwise ignored.

As I wrote about the way the ocean looked, I began thinking about the chapter I was writing about my father’s stay on a Pacific island during World War II. I realized I needed to learn more about that island—how hot it was, what the Pacific looked like, what the sand on the beaches was like, what the vegetation was like, whether there was potable water available, and so much more. I realized I needed to try to reimagine my father’s experience on that island—not only to retell what happened to him there but to try to re-create what it must have felt like for him to be there. I doubt I would have understood that locked away in my study.

D. H. Lawrence often wrote by hand outside. When he and his wife, Frieda, lived in a humble cottage in Higher Tregerthen in Cornwall, England, Lawrence wrote outside when the weather was fine. He’d brace himself against a pale gray outcropping of rocks facing the sea and write with his notebook on his knees. Writing outside, he said, made him feel “safe and remote.” He wrote, too, under a tree looking at the distant mountains in New Mexico, under a tree to escape the scorching sun in Mexico, sitting in the shade in the countryside in the English Midlands, even sitting outside in the snow in Germany. Writing outside soothed Lawrence’s restless spirit.

Each novel he wrote incorporated the landscapes he’d lived in, wrote in, and studied. The Abruzzi in Italy of The Lost Girl (1920), the Australia of Kangaroo (1923), the New Mexico of The Woman Who Rode Away (1928), the Mexico of The Plumed Serpent (1926). Had Lawrence written indoors exclusively, could he have penned those exquisite descriptions of place in his novels? Could he have represented so tellingly the relationship between his characters and their environments?

My student did go to Fire Island. She learned that the island had gotten its name because fires were set on its sands to warn ships away—the barrier island was a great hazard. And she wrote there and recalled the look of the island on the day of a great fire that became the climax of her memoir, a fire that claimed the life of her mother. That visit prompted an extraordinary breakthrough in her work and enabled her to write a sophisticated first effort.