The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

No excuses
A writer’s apprenticeship

I once had dinner with a writer friend, a hardworking woman I’ve known for years. She’s had times when she’s wondered whether she’d get another contract, and times when publishers have wanted her to write three books, pronto. She’s been writing through all the years I’ve known her, and she’s in a field where you have to hustle to get work, where only well-known people receive attention. The last book she published finally got the recognition she’s deserved—it’s been a bestseller for many months.

Through the ups and downs, she’s done her work. She hasn’t waited for the right opportunity or for her health challenges to diminish. She’s honored her art and written every day, no matter what.

We talked about a mutual acquaintance, a woman who wants a stellar writing career but doesn’t have one. She’s found scores of excuses to keep away from her desk, to stop her from beginning again: she doesn’t write because a book she wrote didn’t get the attention it deserved; because the publishing industry isn’t what it used to be; because editors aren’t worth anything anymore. And because she doesn’t show up, nothing gets written. And because nothing gets written, her writing career is on hold. Still, she keeps blaming everyone but herself for her lack of fulfillment as a writer.

Like my successful writer friend, I prefer to demythologize writing and frame writing as a kind of work that we do no matter what. Sometimes would-be writers let themselves off the hook: they’re not inspired; they don’t know what to write; they don’t feel well; their work won’t be acclaimed. But Ian McEwan, author of Atonement, approaches his writing as if it were a job. He’s “at work by nine-thirty every morning.” He learned his work ethic from his father who “never missed a day’s work in forty-eight years.”

There are two books I keep on my bookshelf to remind myself that if we want to be writers, we write no matter what.

The first is Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1983). El Saadawi is an important Egyptian feminist, medical doctor, writer, and perhaps most well known for her campaign against genital mutilation. She’s championed women’s rights in Egypt throughout her life, was imprisoned in 1981 for “crimes against the State,” and was incarcerated until after Anwar Sadat’s assassination.

In her afterword to the American edition of her memoir, El Saadawi describes how she first started writing her graphic description of the conditions inside the prison housing women who’d been incarcerated for political reasons while she herself was an inmate. At first, because she was denied paper and pen, El Saadawi would sit “on the ground, leaning against one wall … and write in my memory.… By night I would reread from memory, reviewing my writing, adding sections and deleting others, as if I were putting pen to paper.”

But then she found herself unable to remember all she was “writing,” so she got hold of “a stubby black eyebrow pencil” and “a small roll of old and tattered toilet paper” from a prostitute who smuggled them to her from the next cell and she used them as her tools. El Saadawi didn’t tell herself she’d wait until she was released to write. She wrote under these difficult conditions because she wanted to capture the immediacy of life inside prison and reflect upon what she observed—the hell on earth of the mothers’ cell crammed with hundreds of women and hundreds of children, the women fighting each other for space, food, and water—and because she knew no one else would write it. She knew she could have been severely punished for writing. But she never complained that the conditions under which she worked were too difficult or dangerous. Even under such horrifying circumstances, she did her work, and she saw it as a “victory over the overwhelming and arbitrary might of the unjust, oppressive ruling authority that had put me behind those steel bars solely because I write.”

I was with El Saadawi in Barcelona when she called her husband in Egypt and learned she couldn’t come home because it would be too dangerous. Still, she told me she wouldn’t stop her work, and she wouldn’t stop writing.

The other book I keep near me for inspiration is E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (1981), a firsthand account of what it was like to be a young marine during World War II during these famous battles. (Sledge’s memoir was used as the basis for an HBO series, The Pacific.)

The armed forces forbade soldiers to write accounts of the war while serving, but despite the threat of court-martial, Sledge wrote down what he experienced and hid his notes in a copy of the New Testament. Because he was a member of the 1st Marine Division, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, Sledge participated in and witnessed some of the most horrific fighting of the war. His account has been called one of the five most important books about twentieth-century battles. Imagine what it must have been like to be a marine, penning your account of what you’ve lived through, knowing you might be punished for doing so.

Although Sledge kept his wartime notes, he didn’t begin writing his book as soon as the war ended. Sledge had a difficult time adjusting to civilian life, as do so many war veterans. Sledge was a victim of a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder before our society understood what that entailed. But after the war, it was considered unmanly to admit to having been deeply affected by combat. His wife believed it would help him recover if he wrote an account of what he’d experienced, and she urged him to do so, telling him his account would be invaluable and must be shared.

Sledge learned that writing about what he’d lived through helped him immeasurably, even though it meant revisiting the horror of his experiences. Turning his random notes into a coherent account helped Sledge make sense of the war. He learned that he could retell what happened without reliving it. And so we have With the Old Breed to teach us what a generation of men in combat experienced.

Sometimes I think the act of writing is far too accessible for us. We take the freedom to express ourselves for granted. We forget that writers like El Saadawi have been persecuted—and are still persecuted—for their work, yet they continue writing. We forget the struggle of our forebears to make literacy available to us—the hedge schools established in the eighteenth century in Ireland for Catholic children in defiance of penal laws, for example. And so I believe it’s necessary as we begin work to remind ourselves that people living under very difficult conditions have nonetheless found the time and energy to write.

I use these two books as reminders. It’s difficult—if not impossible—to make excuses to keep myself away from my desk with models of writers who penned their narratives—no matter what—on my bookshelf beside me.