The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

The creative act
A writer’s apprenticeship

I recently met a beginning writer, working on a late draft of a memoir, who asked me, “What do seasoned writers do when they work?” Learning how a writer creates is difficult, if not impossible, for we can’t penetrate the consciousness of a person in the moment-to-moment alchemy of creation. What happens during the creative act is virtually inaccessible.

Still, I believe it’s important we learn as much as we can about how writers work by reading interviews describing writers’ processes. The Paris Review interviews, 12 Short Stories and Their Making, The Story Behind the Story, The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, and The Writer’s Notebook II are valuable tools for studying the creative act.

Learning that Christopher Beha, author of What Happened to Sophie Wilder (2012), studied each of his sentences, “moving its parts around,… struggling to achieve balance and shapeliness,” can help us figure out how to work like a published writer. Learning that Beha continually asks himself, “What do I need this sentence to do?” and “what role the sentence plays in its scene, the scene in its story” provides a model for us to use. If these questions can’t be answered, then Beha—and we—will know we have a creative problem that must be solved.

I told my writer friend about these sources but warned him about how difficult it is to describe the writing process as it unfolds. Still, he asked me if I’d take five minutes of a writing day and pay close attention to what I was doing, and then tell him. We realized this might affect my work. But I agreed, though I feared there’d be little to share and that I couldn’t both work and observe my process.

I suggested he do the same thing so we could compare notes. I warned him that knowing what I did wouldn’t tell him anything about another writer’s process, nor how I work at other times, nor how he might decide to work. Still, I believed if he studied his process and became conscious of how he worked, and compared it with that of other writers, he might learn something valuable.

The day I watched myself work, I was beginning the sixth revision of a chapter of my book about my parents’ lives during World War II. I was recounting what my father told me about my parents’ decision about the timing of their marriage and the chapter would reveal the difficult choices lovers had to make as the United States headed toward war.

I planned a simple revision of the first paragraph. I wrote “reread” onto my next-to-do list. As I reread, I realized I didn’t like the opening and decided to search for one more suitable elsewhere in the chapter that would put the reader in the midst of the action, and I did that. Next, I decided to revise the new beginning.

I noticed that I reread everything I’d written, making changes as I progressed throughout the paragraph. And after I made a change, I’d reread everything again, and make other changes, so I reread, revised, reread, revised, reread, and so on.

After five minutes, I was still working on that first paragraph. (At the end of my two-hour work period, I again reread that first paragraph and realized it needed still more work.)

During the revision, I spontaneously introduced a fast-forward about the impending war and also a metaphor—that the great engine of war was grinding onward toward their lives. The metaphor was rough and needed work, but I thought the fast-forward was promising and decided to keep it, because reminding readers of the war’s inevitability from the beginning worked better than confining the narrative to the moment when my parents were discussing the date of their wedding. The “engine of war” came spontaneously as my metaphors do, late in the process. As I worked, I evaluated what I produced rather than judging it: “Is this working?” “Is this better than what I had before?” “How can I make this work?” “What does the reader need to know?”

A few days later, my friend and I compared notes; and he decided that, in the future, he might consider thinking about what he wanted to write; rereading his work in progress; and moving more slowly through the work, revising as he went along.

We discussed how a writer can use two different writer heads alternately: the writing writer who produces language, and the revising writer who checks to see if it works and amends it if it doesn’t. I described how, when I revised the beginning, I made structural changes, such as finding a new opening; trying some material in parentheses, then without as well as linguistic changes—working with repetition, substituting a sharper word for a vague one. I reported how I changed the structure of one sentence describing when my mother wanted to marry to parallel that of the sentence describing when my father did. Although I was calling this the sixth draft, in this pass I’d revised the wording perhaps fifteen times.

We discussed, too, about how, at some point, we might think about what a reader needs to know to understand the narrative: it took me some time to begin to fill in the historical blanks—I had to keep in mind that this was a wartime romance but that the reader wouldn’t know the United States wasn’t yet engaged in fighting.

This process might not represent my process in general. Nor could it be viewed as emblematic of what we were calling the creative act. Still, after our conversation, my friend said he’d try rereading as he worked, that he’d try to start playing with the work, and that he’d start checking what was on the page against the impression he wanted to create—Beha’s “What do I need this sentence to do?”

Yes, we writers have to find our own way. But this writer said hearing how a seasoned writer worked was helpful. He liked knowing many drafts were necessary and how slowly the work progressed because it permitted him to be realistic about how long it would take him to complete a work. He’d imagined writing got easier after you’d written a few books and thought that, by now, I should be able to write a book straight through. I told him that it didn’t get any easier, though I suspected I’d complete the work. But every writer is a beginning writer, and every work teaches you how to write it, but not the next one.