The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Introduction: The art of slow writing

I love visiting writers’ houses. I imagine a writer sitting at a desk; taking time to craft each sentence of a work in progress; living the unhurried, unharried writer’s life I desire, the one I try (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to enact myself.

When my husband and I planned a trip to Verona, Italy, we decided to also journey to Gargnano on Lake Garda to visit the house where D. H. Lawrence lived while he revised Sons and Lovers (1913). I was researching an essay about the impact of the places Lawrence lived upon his work. In exile from England, writing at a desk positioned so he could view the changing light on Monte Baldo across the lake, Lawrence re-created his childhood in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. He described his collier father and his grueling work, his proper mother who wanted a better life for her children, the violent arguments between his parents. He wrote about his early, unsuccessful efforts at love, his struggle to free himself from his mother’s dominion, his response to her death, and how he became a writer.

On Lake Garda, Lawrence went back and transformed his manuscript Paul Morel into Sons and Lovers. He’d begun the work in the autumn of 1910; the draft he produced on Lake Garda was his fourth—the novel took two years and four drafts to complete. In this revision, Lawrence transformed the work from a rather straightforward autobiographical novel into a study of a young man’s growing understanding of his own troubled sexuality. Lawrence wrote his friend Edward Garnett that in Gargnano he “made [Sons and Lovers] patiently, out of sweat as well as blood.”

As I planned our trip, I was beginning to think about the process of slow writing. Visiting Lawrence’s house would be a pilgrimage, a reminder of my own desire to work as patiently as Lawrence had. I was in the midst of writing a chapter for a book in progress about my parents’ lives during World War II, describing how they found and decorated an apartment near the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey. The United States hadn’t yet entered the war. Still, my parents knew war was imminent and that my father would be called back into service because he’d been in the navy before and was an expert airplane machinist.

I knew how much that apartment meant to them, and how hard they worked to make it beautiful. But I suspected there was far more to the story. Writing about my father’s wartime absence, the terrible carnage of that war, and how the war changed him was difficult. I knew there was no way to rush this. Each time I worked, I’d have high expectations—I’d want to write four, five, maybe six pages. After all the time I’d spent researching and writing preliminary drafts, I expected myself to complete the chapter quickly and well.

I’d noticed how my students at Hunter College often told me they wanted to finish their memoirs in a year or two, a condition I jokingly referred to as “terminal hurriedness.” “What’s the rush?” I’d ask, even as I was pushing myself, too.

After I’d published Writing as a Way of Healing (1999), I’d communicated with scores of writers who’d begun important projects. They also complained about how long their works were taking. To help them—and myself—understand how long it took to complete a work, I’d begun collecting anecdotes about how slowly many famous writers and artists worked. Salman Rushdie, in his memoir, Joseph Anton, described that it took him thirteen years to understand that his identity as a writer was that of a migrant “who ended up in a place that was not the place where he began.” After finding the right voice, Rushdie worked for three more years to complete his first novel, the Booker Prize—winning Midnight’s Children (1981). Vincent van Gogh also took long to perfect his talent; “’he had no talent for drawing’”—his early work was horrible; but he persisted: “’If he couldn’t do it, he tried it 50 more times.’”

* * *

We live in a world that values speed. Messages that used to take days or weeks to reach their recipients arrive in our e-mail in-boxes instantly. By comparison, James Clavell’s Shōgun (1975) describes how, in the sixteenth century, a person would receive a reply to a letter sent to Europe four years later—if none of the ships carrying either missive sank. The people we communicate with expect our responses immediately. And all this back and forth e-mailing or texting, innocuous as it seems, shifts our attitude to time so we might begin to value only that which happens quickly. It can also rob us of our precious writing time—a writer friend having difficulty completing a book discovered she’d written more than three thousand words in e-mails in one day.

An article in The New York Times—“Writer’s Cramp: In the E-Reader Era, a Book a Year Is Slacking”—described the pressure publishers put on bestselling writers. The Edgar Award—winning author Lisa Scottoline is now publishing two books a year. Her writing schedule is brutal: “2,000 words a day, seven days a week, usually ’starting at 9 a.m. and going until Colbert.’” Publishers now act as if writing is the same as typing.

“’It seems like we’re all running faster to stay in the same place,’” the British thriller writer Lee Child, also urged by his publisher to write more quickly, declared. That’s one downside of the fast-paced world we live in. We’ve internalized the idea that the only actions worth undertaking are those that can be accomplished quickly. (New presidents are expected to solve every major crisis immediately—think of those “First Hundred Days” articles.) And we get frustrated when, say, writing a chapter takes a long time. We blame ourselves for ineptitude or conclude that lengthy projects aren’t worthwhile. We push aside work that takes long—novels, poetry collections, biographies, articles, memoirs—to write e-mail messages that take little time while complaining we have no time to write.

We expect ourselves to work quickly. We tell ourselves that if our writing takes so long, we might not be cut out for the writing life. We might equate our worth as writers with the number of pages we write rather than with the excellence of our work.

In the journal John Steinbeck kept while writing East of Eden (1952), he described how, in the eighth month of his novel’s composition, his editor, Pascal Covici, urged him to work faster than Steinbeck’s self-assigned two handwritten pages of manuscript a day. “I [now] find I am hurrying to get through my day’s work.… It is a destructive suggestion.… A book, as you know, is a very delicate thing. If it is pressured, it will show that pressure. So—no more increases.” Steinbeck refused to yield; he knew how he needed to work and he stuck to the plan he’d steadfastly adhered to since beginning the novel in late January 1951.

* * *

I’m a teacher and writer. But I’m also a passionate foodie. So as I planned our trip to Lake Garda, I looked for a special restaurant, preferably a Slow Food establishment, overlooking the lake, where we could eat local freshwater fish. Slow Food, which began as a movement to resist the opening of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome, at its most basic means slowing down enough to understand our relationship to what we eat—where it comes from, how it’s grown or raised, how we prepare it, and our rituals in consuming it. Many of the fundamental ideas of the Slow Food movement can be adapted to describe the slow writing process.

As Adam Gopnik has written of the Slow Food movement in The Table Comes First, in a world that values speed, if we make a commitment to take time, we commit to an important set of values. Slow writing, I thought, could be one way to slow down time, to “articulate time.” A way, too, to “slow down life.” Like Slow Food, “slow writing” doesn’t “just take time, but makes time.” Slow writing is a meditative act: slowing down to understand our relationship to our writing, slowing down to determine our authentic subjects, slowing down to write complex works, slowing down to study our literary antecedents.

* * *

I was looking forward to visiting D. H. Lawrence’s house, looking forward to gazing at the window through which Lawrence viewed Monte Baldo when he paused in his difficult work on Sons and Lovers. But I had an accident.

A few days before our scheduled departure, I was racing around New York City wearing ill-fitting, floppy shoes, and developed a stress fracture of my left foot, and we had to postpone our trip. That accident and its aftermath forced me to undergo what Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill describes as a spiritual change that can accompany a life-altering event. Needing to slow down—I couldn’t walk at first, and when I could again, only slowly—I started to understand my relationship to my writing differently. I read about the lives of writers who composed important works while they or their partners were ill—Marcel Proust, Mark Doty, and Elizabeth Bishop, among them.

When I was beginning to walk again, our back fence neighbors had their annual Memorial Day party to which my husband and I were invited. We drove, though their house is just around the corner. When it was time to leave I decided to walk home. It would be my first solo walk since my injury.

I began with trepidation. At first I was disgruntled with my slow pace, eager to get home. But soon I started noticing my surroundings.

A neighborhood teenager was throwing a party. I heard her classmates’ jokes, their comments on the music playing, their boy/girl antics. I smiled, remembering the gathering where I met my husband. I observed how a breeze made the leaves reveal their silvery undersides. Needing to rest, I paused before flowers in a neighbor’s yard. Late spring had never smelled sweeter. And I wondered why hurriedness had taken over my life. This newfound sense of peace from taking time to linger and enjoy the world was a benefit from my injury I hadn’t anticipated.

And because I needed to walk slowly, I needed to do many things slowly. The first day I resumed cooking, I made focaccia. It took long, but the experience was blissful. When I was out in my garden, having remembered my book but forgotten my reading glasses, I was forced to sit and “be” until I could summon the energy to retrieve them. I saw birds washing themselves in the pool above our little waterfall, a chipmunk dashing into its nest, a dragonfly hovering over water. I’d sat in this garden for years, writing or reading, but I hadn’t ever spent this much “slow time” there.

When I returned to my study, I took down the published edition of Virginia Woolf’s handwritten draft of To the Lighthouse (1927). I was curious about how many words Woolf had written in one day. I knew I was living too fast, trying to work too quickly, and my injury was teaching me the necessity and the benefits of slowing down. Maybe I could learn something more about the creative act from the way Woolf worked.

I’d studied the earlier versions of Woolf’s published novels—what she deleted or added to a page, whether key scenes or images existed in the earliest version. I believe we can deepen our understanding of the writing process by examining writers’ early drafts, reading their journals or transcriptions of interviews with them. Whenever I get stuck, it’s time for me to turn to the experts for help.

My students are often stunned to learn that famous writers revise more and take longer to complete their works than my students think necessary. Ernest Hemingway penned about forty-seven alternate endings of A Farewell to Arms (1929) before deciding on the one he used. The Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon took almost five years to complete his novel Telegraph Avenue (2012). “If you want to write like the pros,” I thought, “you have to work like the pros.”

Woolf usually wrote fiction for two and a half to three uninterrupted hours, from about ten in the morning to twelve thirty or one in the afternoon. Did she write a thousand words, two thousand?

I opened the early draft of To the Lighthouse to May 9, 1926, and learned that Woolf penned roughly 535 words and crossed out 73 of them, netting her 462 words for her day’s work. Let’s say she worked for three hours. That’s about 178 words an hour including the words she deleted—and Woolf was writing at the height of her creative powers.

Once I’d learned how many words Woolf wrote, I thought about how many words I expected myself to write. If I sat down to write for two and a half to three uninterrupted hours, did I expect to draft a scene, a short essay, revise an entire piece of writing? How many words did I hope to write? Far more than Woolf, I had to admit.

While Woolf was carefully composing those 535 words of To the Lighthouse, she was also experiencing a life-altering event. England was in the midst of its most disabling strike. There were no trains, no subways, no taxis. A few busses driven by special constables plied London’s streets but riding in them was dangerous—strike sympathizers attacked the vehicles. Everyone worried about having enough food as supplies dwindled. The country seemed on the brink of civil war.

Living a life so adversely affected by the strike, Woolf was forced to contemplate the contribution of working-class people to her country’s stability. And so she introduced Mrs. McNab, the charwoman who restores the chaos of the Ramsay summer home to order by her hard labor, into her narrative. Woolf became newly aware that workers keep civilization afloat, and that her privileged life depended upon someone else’s efforts.

Woolf used her writing as a way to think about and report on what she observed. Though she’d planned this book carefully, because Woolf worked slowly, she could also ponder the changing condition of her world, the effect of the general strike, and allow a new character to emerge from this act of attention, a stunning breakthrough made possible only because of her slow writing.

* * *

During the months of my recovery, I worked to slow down my writing process. Not at first, but over time, I learned that my unease about the chapter I was writing was based upon my not having taken the time to learn enough about what was happening in the world as my parents spent their evenings creating their first home, papering walls, painting trim, laying a carpet, positioning furniture they’d bought with savings.

I did more research, wrote in my process journal, and realized something I’d overlooked. As my parents worked through the summer of 1941, they listened to the radio broadcasting news of bombing raids over London, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the uncovering of a Nazi spy network in the United States that planned to bomb docks like the ones at the end of my parents’ street. Nor had I taken time to think about what my parents must have felt like creating a home at this time.

Because I’d wanted to finish this chapter quickly, I’d missed its fundamental significance. My parents were creating their first home when homes created with as much care as theirs were being obliterated. They were beginning their life together knowing it would soon be wrenched apart. No home, no matter how lovingly created, could insulate them from the tragedy of war.

* * *

Although I’ve been writing since 1975, I’m still a beginner. I’m still learning my craft; I’m still learning what it means to be a writer; I’m learning what it means to be a slow writer.

Most of the writers I work with have a hard time getting themselves to the desk, thinking about their works in progress, thinking about the act of writing, finding a space for their writing within the context of their busy lives, dealing with the emotional roller coaster attending their work, expecting themselves to produce more than they can, continuing to write through all the vicissitudes of the writing process, and finishing the works they’ve started. Most writers I know expect more from themselves than is humanly possible and this often derails their work.

I like to think of The Art of Slow Writing as a report of the ongoing conversations I’ve had with writers about the act of writing since the publication of Writing as a Way of Healing. There I wrote about how writing could help us overcome trauma and how many published writers (Isabel Allende, Henry Miller, and Alice Walker, among others) described how they were inspired to begin a major work because of a deep wound they’d received. In Writing as a Way of Healing, I articulated the process whereby writing can serve as a healing art.

In The Art of Slow Writing, I write about that major challenge affecting all writers: our need to slow down to understand the writing process so we can do our best work. I’m inviting you on a journey to think about how to work at writing day by day. I’m providing a path—a slow writing path—to think about preparing to write, beginning to write, writing an extended work, and completing a work. This book isn’t prescriptive. It isn’t about how to write. It’s about how to think about working at writing and slowing down our process so we can become self-reflective writers so we can find our own way.

Finding our way as writers is a daily, ever-changing process. As soon as we’ve figured out how to work, something happens and everything falls apart and we need to learn how to work all over again. This happened to many novelists after the 9/11 tragedies. Ian McEwan took a long while trying to absorb its meaning. It took him until 2005 to publish Saturday, his fictional response to “a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the … attacks.” When our lives change, when the world changes, we must reinvent ourselves as writers.

Through the years, I’ve learned that the most successful writers I’ve worked with are those who’ve learned to think about their process and who’ve learned to reflect upon their work. Writers who, as Zadie Smith, author of NW (2013), says, are “always hard at work; refining, improving, engaged by and interested in every step in the process.” Writers who are slow writers.

This book will work best if you start or continue a writing practice. You can read straight through the book. Or you can read a section that strikes your fancy. But let’s imagine what we might gain from becoming slow writers, from allowing ourselves to really be in our work and with our work. What we might gain from thinking about the process of our work and not the product. From learning how real writers work. From not judging our work (which doesn’t mean not evaluating our work) but just doing our work. From congratulating ourselves on work well done. Let’s imagine how we might grow as writers if we work in a slow writing way rather than rushing through our work trying to accumulate a pile of pages. Just imagine what we might gain from being writers who move slowly through our work and slowly through our lives.

Slow writing is a meditative act. It acknowledges that we are all beginners and insists we cultivate empathy for ourselves because being a writer isn’t easy. Slow writing is a way to resist the dehumanization inherent in a world that values speed. It’s one way to find—or return to—our authentic selves.