The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Game plan
A writer’s apprenticeship
I just finished organizing a twelve-week plan for my writing so I’ll know what I’ll be doing come September. I now do this four times a year: in mid-August for September through November, in mid-November for December through February, in mid-February for March through May, in mid-May for June through August. I started doing it after meeting a writer who convinced me I needed to take time to plan and think about what I’d be writing over a swathe of time. This writer told me she begins by making, and continually revising, five-year plans, one-year plans, then twelve-week plans. She begins with her five-year plan and works back from her long-range goals to figure what she can accomplish in a year, then works back from her year’s goals to think about what she can accomplish in just twelve weeks’ time.
I love the freedom of being a writer, of having no one tell me what to do. I enjoy working on what I myself have chosen. Still, I believe there are advantages to long-range planning and thinking about our work over time, even—and especially—during our writing apprenticeships.
The most inspiriting writer’s game plan I know is the one Henry Miller developed in May 1927, before he’d published a single novel, when he was learning how to be a writer. He sat at his typewriter in his office at the parks commission in Queens where he worked, and wrote a detailed plan for what he next wanted to write—a novel about his life with his second wife, June, that had begun with such promise but was now all but over. He worked for eighteen uninterrupted hours and outlined a road map for what would become much of his life’s work.
He’d begin with an account of the day he met June; he’d finish with the day she left him for France with her lover, Jean. He outlined chapters dealing with leaving his first wife, his and June’s trying to make a living selling candy, his dismal work at Western Union, June’s affairs. He wrote a catalog of “events and crises”; he made a list of manuscripts and letters he could use. When he finished, he had thirty-two closely typed pages labeled “June.” Miller had, in effect, outlined a plan for all the autobiographical novels he’d write in his lifetime: Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn (1939), Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus (1959)—all were conceived, plotted, and planned during that brief period. Miller referred to that outline from 1927 through 1959, when he completed Nexus, his last novel about June. Miller’s example teaches us it’s worthwhile to make a grand scheme early in our writing lives.
When I read Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I noticed that, early in the year, she’d think about what she wanted to work on for the next several months. These plans became her writing programs, and she revised them continuously. On January 13, 1932, for example, in the midst of assessing her novel, The Waves (1931), she contemplated the fact that she would soon turn fifty, and that she hoped for another twenty productive years. She thought about the books she wanted to write before she died. “And I want to write another 4 novels,” she wrote. “Waves, I mean; & the Tap on the Door [Three Guineas]; & to go through English literature,… like some industrious insect, eating its way from book to book, from Chaucer to Lawrence. This is a programme, considering my slowness … to last out my 20 years, if I have them.”
On January 5, 1933, Woolf described her current program to finish Flush (1933), her autobiography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, and to begin planning her novel The Pargiters, which became The Years (1937); she imagined it as “a curiously uneven time sequence—a series of great balloons, linked by straight narrow passages of narrative.” On April 6, 1933, she revisited that plan; she needed a break from The Pargiters and decided to “bury it for a month … & write on Goldsmith & c [an essay].” Then “dash it off in June July August September.” And she did complete a draft in September as planned.
At the beginning of 1935, she planned her next program, assigning dates for the works’ completion: “But now I want to write On being despised [Three Guineas].… And I must finish Ordinary People [The Years]: and then there’s Roger [her biography of Roger Fry].”
Early in my writing life, I wrote day by writing day without thinking too far ahead. I often felt frustrated because I took on whatever projects came my way and had no overarching plan. I hadn’t taken time to think about what I wanted to write. Speaking with that writer who wrote detailed plans, and learning that writers like Miller and Woolf did the same, urged me to begin doing so, too.
I’m nearing the end of two books. But I’ve planned to put one book—the book about my father—aside to finish this book about slow writing. I have a draft in hand, and a quarter of the book revised. I must revise the remainder of the book and then prepare the final manuscript. I’ll also read contemporary novels set during World War II to prepare me for returning to the father book. Throughout this time, I’ll jot down ideas toward its completion.
I’ve written a specific set of tasks and estimated how long it will take me to accomplish my goals. I’ve plotted my work on a calendar so I know it’ll be possible to finish revising within four months’ time. I’ll be working three hours a day, four or five days a week, and my plan is realistic. But I can revisit it anytime, and pare it down or add items to my list if I move through my plan more quickly.
Until I sat down to write my twelve-week game plan, I was feeling overwhelmed. I was working on two books simultaneously; I’d finally found the voice for the beginning of the father book, and I was revising the writing book, too. Until I began to plan, I didn’t realize I couldn’t work on both books simultaneously. Like Woolf, I learned I needed to put one book aside temporarily.
Writing my plan took less than twenty minutes, but I gained a sense of relief, purpose, energy, satisfaction, and quiet confidence. Now I’m driving my work; my work isn’t driving me. I’ve typed up my plan and put it in a manila folder on my desk so I can refer to it daily. Now I can take a few weeks off, but I’m looking forward to September to begin work.
I’ve discovered that, for me, focusing on a twelve-week time frame, as Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington suggest in The 12 Week Year (2013), helps me create a greater “sense of clarity regarding what is important, and a sense of urgency each day to do what is necessary.” Whether we’re apprenticeship writers, like Henry Miller, or writers who’ve worked for a long time, like Virginia Woolf, consistently writing and revising a game plan is an enormously useful tool to help us decide what to do the next time we sit down to work. A game plan holds us accountable; it makes the possible—Henry Miller’s writing a series of novels about June, Virginia Woolf’s completing a number of novels during her remaining years, my revising my writing book—probable.