The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Learning how to learn
A writer’s apprenticeship
Ira Glass, creator, host, and producer of This American Life, has spoken eloquently of how we can learn to become storytellers. When he began, Glass wished he’d known that those of us who want to write, want to write because we “have good taste”; we’re avid readers; we know what a good piece of writing looks like. Yet when we begin, in the earliest stages of our apprenticeships, what we produce won’t be “that great,” and because we know what constitutes a good work, we realize our work isn’t very good, and that’s “a disappointment.”
Many beginning writers, Glass says, “never get past that phase”; it’s when many quit, but shouldn’t. The secret that would have helped him is that when we begin, we’ll have to go through years of working while knowing that our work isn’t as good as we want it to be. That’s the reality of a writer’s apprenticeship. Getting to the point when we produce satisfying work takes patience, and it takes a long time. Everybody who eventually succeeds in becoming a writer “goes through that.”
The most important way to learn how to learn our craft, Glass says, is to do “a huge volume of work,” putting “yourself on a deadline, so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story.” You don’t think about writing a good story; you think only about finishing one. Although thinking about a deadline might seem antithetical to the process of slow writing, having a self-chosen deadline doesn’t mean we need to rush the process, and deciding when we want to complete a work might provide the necessary creative energy we need.
Literary history is filled with tales about how published writers penned several unsuccessful works before the first work that launched their careers. These so-called failed apprenticeship works were necessary; they taught their creators how to work; they taught them what didn’t work and what did; they taught them how to fail, and so taught them how to succeed.
Peter Carey, author of The Chemistry of Tears (2012), never published his second novel. When he reread it, he understood why the publisher didn’t like it because he didn’t like it either. He was already working on another novel, “a wildly difficult, odd book about a bureaucratic investigation into a man’s life.” After he finished it, Carey said, “It was rather loveless—like dragging your tongue over a gray blanket.”
He’d begun writing each new novel “with high hopes.” But when he finished, he knew “there was something mistaken, misshapen, wrong in their DNA.” Learning how to write a misshapen work, though, eventually taught him how to write a superbly crafted piece of fiction. He’d learned, through writing convoluted, complex works (the novel about the bureaucratic investigation reproduced “sixty-five newspaper photographs of car accidents”), to try, instead, to work in “a simpler form.”
Even though he’d written two novels that he knew didn’t work, Carey didn’t give up. He turned to writing a story a week. By now, something had changed, and he knew he was “finally a writer.” What helped him was his constant reading. In reading Jorge Luis Borges, Carey learned that “it might be possible to reinvent the world in just a few pages.” He decided, instead of building “grand palaces” of fiction, to build “little sheds and huts” of stories. In time, he collected and published those stories, then wrote another book of stories, and then turned to writing his novel Bliss (1981), about a bourgeois man “who thinks he’s died and gone to hell and hasn’t.” All his work in the short form of the story paid off.
Colum McCann, author of TransAtlantic, tells his students in the MFA Program in Fiction at Hunter College that he “can’t teach them anything at all.” As Carey’s experience demonstrates, McCann asserts that becoming a writer is “all about desire, stamina, and perseverance.”
Writers, in effect, must teach themselves how to become writers. This is both terrifying and exhilarating. As Jo Ann Beard, author of The Boys of My Youth (1998), has written, “Writing is about doing something new.” That’s why each writer, even those who attend formal writing programs, must teach themselves how to learn and what they need to learn.
Beard’s early work, like Carey’s, wasn’t successful. Her first story was “set in a post-apocalyptic Iowa City, about having to put your dogs to sleep”; other characters were King Tut and cavemen. Her second story was about “a very wealthy little girl who poisons her grandparents … it had lions in it.” In describing these apprenticeship works, Beard said, “You can understand that I didn’t publish for a long while.”
Still, Beard believes that having her work rejected helped her find her way. It’s important for writers to know that “nobody can help you, it’s your path, your valley of the shadow, and you have to walk it alone.” And even after completing successful works, Beard says we must understand that we’ll “always be just starting out.” Beard’s suggestion for beginning writers is to learn what it means to be an artist (Beard recommends watching documentaries like Alice Neel), to immerse ourselves “in literature, and in the constant practice of writing.”
My son Jason is a jazz bass guitar aficionado. He’s learned how to play the instrument, researched the history of guitar making, listened to recordings of jazz greats, attended performances, interviewed some of the most accomplished bass guitarists in the United Sates, made friends with many performers, collected guitars, learned about the woods used in handmade guitars, met and interviewed the finest makers of handmade jazz guitars in the United States, gotten involved with a community organization called Jazz House Kids. He’s currently learning how to make a guitar by hand and studying with a famous jazz guitarist. He works long days but still practices daily, awakening before his wife and their children to give himself the gift of playing music, and he’s begun to compose. Recently, he’s been struggling with learning improvisation, the heart and soul of jazz.
Jason says he learned how to learn from my father, whose formal education stopped at the end of eighth grade but who continued to teach himself many disciplines—working in stained glass was one—throughout his life. When I asked Jason how we writers could learn how to learn the craft of writing as he learned about jazz bass guitars, Jason described the principles of his self-created, self-directed apprenticeship.
Practice daily. Expect to fail for a long time. Be patient. Read widely in your field and learn about antecedents and contemporaries so you’re not working in a vacuum. Seek out the finest examples and learn from them. Find out how other people in other fields create and make a habit of learning something you can apply to your work or your process from each encounter. Seek out and talk to writers. Learn how books are made—learn about publishing and self-publishing. Learn how long it takes to become proficient, how long it takes to write a book and get it published, so you don’t have false expectations. If you choose to, and can afford to, find the best teachers and listen when they critique your work, though this isn’t essential—many successful writers never had formal training in their craft. Join a community of practitioners and give back—pass on what you know. And finally, echoing Ira Glass, don’t give up too soon.