The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Writing rehab
A writer’s apprenticeship
After I got the stress fracture in my left foot that I mention in my introduction, it took six weeks before I could begin to walk again. I’d been off my feet, and with the pain gone, my doctor said it was time for me to relearn to walk. Yes, in six weeks I’d forgotten how to walk. Not completely. But my gait was off; my hands didn’t know what to do; the bottoms of my feet were tender. At first, I staggered and weaved. It would take me far longer, and it would be far harder than I’d imagined to relearn a process I’d taken for granted.
Stephen King, in describing the physical therapy he underwent after his near fatal accident in 1999—a van driven by a man he described as a character he himself might have created hit him while he was taking his daily walk—remarked that PT stands for “Pain and Torture.” In describing his rehabilitation and reentering work in On Writing (2000), the nonfiction book he’d begun before the accident, he links the challenges he faced during recovery with those he faced as a writer who hadn’t written in a while. Not that the conditions were equivalent by any means. But just as the process of rehabilitating his body was, of necessity, long, slow, and difficult, so, too, was the process of beginning to write fluently again.
Just before King was injured, he’d decided to return to composing On Writing. The manuscript had been giving him trouble. He’d completed describing how he began writing but he hadn’t yet begun a key section answering questions about craft that had been posed to him. He wasn’t sure “how to continue” or if he should. He’d started work in late 1997, stopped in early 1998, and some eighteen months later, the book was only half-finished. Though writing fiction continued to be enjoyable, “every word of the nonfiction book was a kind of torture.” To ease back into work, King “listed all the questions I wanted to answer, all the points I wanted to address”—important advice if we’ve been away from writing for a time.
King wrote four new pages of the book. Then he was struck by the van.
As he was rehabilitating his body, King remarked that he “didn’t want to go back to work.” He was in pain; he couldn’t imagine sitting at his desk “for long”; and the book “seemed more daunting than ever.”
King realized it would be difficult to get back into the groove of writing, and that he would have to be patient. His first impulse was not to work. But then he thought that maybe writing “would help me again” as it had during earlier times when he’d experienced great difficulty.
I once spoke with a writer who hadn’t written in several years. She’d put down a novel and then decided to begin work on it again. “It won’t be that hard,” she said. “After all, I’ve written before.” Unlike King, she didn’t recognize that if we stop writing, it might help us realize that beginning again will be difficult. Writing is like any other art, any other skill. We have to practice to keep in shape. And beginning anew requires us to be patient with ourselves.
Writing is a physical act. Sitting at a desk and moving pen across paper or typing takes focus, concentration, stamina, and physical effort. Making sense takes time. If we’re away from writing for long, we’ll need to resharpen our skills. It will take time for us to get back in writing shape. We can be realistic and begin slowly—we can’t expect our writing to be fluent if we haven’t worked in a long time. But we shouldn’t be fatalistic either—“I’ll never write well again.”
Because it takes long to get back into writing shape, many writers I know believe that writing daily, or, if not daily, not less than five days a week, is essential to keep in shape. If we’re not writing an essay, a poem, a play, or a book, we can keep a notebook. We can write about the books we’re reading. We can record and reflect upon our daily life. We can dream the books we want to write.
Along the way to our writing recovery, there will be setbacks, and we might become angry, discouraged, or exasperated. Progress is never linear, though we often expect it to be. We think that if we begin writing after a long hiatus, we should see daily progress. But that’s not the way it goes. We make progress for a while. Then we regress. Then we make progress again. The trick is to keep at it steadily, even when it’s difficult, as it was for King after his injury, even if it seems we’re not getting anywhere. We’ll see progress in time. But we can’t expect to every day.
What if King gave up trying to relearn how to walk because it was difficult? Or rather, not difficult, but excruciating? (He relates a marvelous moment about how, when he was learning to walk again, he and another patient, an eighty-year-old woman named Alice, cheered each other on. One day he told her that her slip was showing. “’Your ass is showing, sonnyboy,’” she responded.)
Getting back to writing is hard. So what. King had to relearn how to walk; he had to relearn how to work. That’s life. To expect that we can stop writing and then start again any time we want without some “writing rehab” is to engage in an act of hubris. We can, instead, be humble about it, let ourselves start slowly, and build our writing muscle bit by bit, day by day, and admit to ourselves that it might be difficult at times, but never more difficult than what King experienced. One day our writing will sing and we’ll be lost in our world of words, just as one day King began walking again, just as one day King started writing again.
On his first day back at work, King worked an hour and forty minutes. When he finished, he was in excruciating pain, “dripping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight.” Those first five hundred words were “uniquely terrifying—it was as if I’d never written anything before them in my life” to this writer who’s published more than fifty novels and some two hundred short stories. His work that day wasn’t inspired; his “old tricks seemed to have deserted” him. But King kept at it with “stubborn determination.”
If it was hard for King, it’ll be hard for us. But, as King says, the “scariest moment is always just before you start.” After that, “things can only get better.” King continued to write, though some days, writing was “a pretty grim slog,” though on other days, as he became reaccustomed to working, he had “that sense of having found the right words and put them in a line.”
King concludes that, for him, writing is about enriching his readers’ lives but also about “enriching your own life.” Writing is “about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”