Labor and management - A writer’s apprenticeship

The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Labor and management
A writer’s apprenticeship

For me, one of the hardest parts of being a writer is supervising my work: figuring out when or when not to write, deciding what to do each day, setting goals, or shifting direction. If we work for someone else, we have a job description; we report to a superior; someone judges our performance. Every job does demand that we work independently, budget our time, and decide how to accomplish our work. But we know, say, we have two weeks’ vacation, that we begin work at nine, finish at five, though we might be on call.

As writers, though, we’re both labor and management. We work. But we also must supervise our work. We must decide when to work, when to take off, what to write, when to revise, when a work is finished, when it needs further revision. There’s no one to tell us when to start, stop, finish, move on, although it’s important for us to consider the advice of writing partners, members of our writing groups, and our agents and editors.

There was a time when I paid more attention to writing (labor) than to supervising my work (management). Writing pages, I could always do. But the writing life was difficult for me. I worked impulsively, too little or too much. I had no plan. At the end of a day, I didn’t feel satisfied because I’d had no goals; I was always “in” the work. I didn’t take time to plan, organize my days, or evaluate my performance. I never knew when or whether to take time off. Oh, I finished books. But writing felt like I was stuck in swampy ground. For a time, I thought I’d stop writing because it was becoming overwhelming.

I’ve found many writers excel at either labor or management. I’ve known writers who only write; they have thousands of pages (none, perhaps, printed out), but they’ve never reread, revised, or organized them or planned how to turn them into a book. They confuse being a writer with just writing. And I’ve known writers who only manage their work; they generate new projects ceaselessly, reorganize their work spaces continually, learn new word-processing programs, work and rework the few pages they’ve written without moving on. They confuse being a writer with organizing and judging their work. The first writer is stuck in the labor role; the second, in the management. It takes courage and self-scrutiny to determine how we can both write and manage our writing lives. And discipline to teach ourselves the skills we lack.

I learned how to function both as labor and management by studying John Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel: The “East of Eden” Letters (1969) and Working Days: The Journals of “The Grapes of Wrath” (1989). Reading each novel alongside each journal taught me how to function as a serious writer.

In Steinbeck’s April 9, 1951, entry, written as he composed East of Eden, he evaluates his desk’s new surface, determines how to keep his pencil drafts from smudging, figures when it’s best to do his laundry, plans his week’s work, determines to try to write somewhat more, assesses his energy level, discusses his fear of interruptions derailing his work, pledges maintaining his focus to complete the novel by managing his work in his journal.

Near the entry’s end, Steinbeck plans his day’s work: he’ll return to a scene with his character Cathy, vowing he’ll “take as much time” as he needs; he reminds himself to develop his theme of evil. After his workday, he summarizes what he’s written, plans the next day’s work—“where Adam meets his future wife”—and wonders whether, within the week, he can “get them to the Salinas Valley.”

Here we see Steinbeck deliberately managing his work before he begins the labor of writing. He evaluates his tools—his desk and pencils—shapes his day, sketches the new scene, deals with his emotions, summarizes and evaluates his progress, and figures how to move his work forward. And Steinbeck engaged in this process each day.

I’ve learned that Anthony Trollope, author of forty-seven novels, among them, Barchester Towers (1857), employed a similar process. “When I have commenced a new book,” Trollope wrote, “I have always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried it on for the period which I have allowed myself for the completion of the work.” Into this diary, Trollope recorded his progress so that if he slacked off, “the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labor.”

Imitating Steinbeck, I began to take time early in the day to manage my writing, and writing—and my life—immediately became more satisfying. I knew when I’d write and when I wouldn’t. I contemplated what to do, one slow step at a time. I reflected upon my work, making decisions about my habits and goals as well as all those choices a writer must make about a work in progress: what to do next, how to revise, how to structure a work, how to finish. I found I worked with greater clarity and focus. And I could enjoy my time away from the desk because I had established boundaries for my work time, I knew where I was in the process and where I was headed.

At the beginning of the day, my “manager” decides when and how long I’ll write and what I’ll work on. My “laborer” writes. And then, at the end of the day, my “manager” returns to assess not my work but my process and decides what to do the next day.

Like Steinbeck, I also use my process journal to record my feelings about my work. And I’ve generated a set of questions about my work in progress that I write about regularly based upon what Steinbeck discussed and also upon those posed in Anthony Robbins’s Awaken the Giant Within (1991): What am I happy about in my writing or my process? What am I excited about? Proud of? Grateful for? Enjoying most? Committed to? What do I love about my work? What will my work give an audience? What have I learned? What have I done that has added to the quality of my writing or writing life? What have I accomplished? What am I looking forward to?

Just taking one question and writing for a few minutes each day can afford us insight into our writing lives and our works in progress. This practice is a guaranteed mood lifter for me. It helps me realize I love the work of writing and that I’ve pondered what I’m doing and why I’m doing it. It helps me feel more in control of my work.

Once we become conscious that writing is hard because we have to learn both how to write and supervise our work, the process becomes, if not easier, then more manageable and more productive. The split in tasks is defined. We pay attention to both; we neglect neither. The best writing, I believe, comes when we focus upon both the management and labor sides of the writing coin.