Support for our work - A writer’s apprenticeship

The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Support for our work
A writer’s apprenticeship

Support is essential to the fruition of creative work. Howard Gardner in Creating Minds asserts that the people he studied who made advances in their work had a “significant support system” including both “affective support … and cognitive support from someone who could understand the nature of the breakthrough.” Instead of the model of the writer as a solitary individual working alone, we can substitute another, more useful model: that of writers actively seeking and finding support and creating communities in which each member helps the others create their finest works.

We needn’t—perhaps shouldn’t—wait until we’re immersed in our first full-length project to find that support. Peter Carey, awarded the Booker Prize twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang) initially believed he wanted to be a zoologist, but he failed his university exams and had to find work. He got a job writing advertising copy. One of his colleagues, Barry Oakley, had been an English teacher. Carey learned that he, and other people he worked with, were writing every day. (It was, he said, a most unusual place.) That advertising agency became Carey’s first invaluable writing community. He’d stumbled into a community where “people were writing and talking about books” and supporting one another’s efforts to write their own works.

Not knowing how difficult it would be to write a novel, Carey told himself “If they can do it, I can do it,” and he began “writing all the time, every night and every weekend.” A portion of his first novel was published in an anthology. Without the support of Oakley and his colleagues, Carey might never have begun his illustrious career.

Literary history teaches us that enormously successful writers are often members of a cohort of creative people who, as they mature in their field, help one another achieve success. The work of each member of the group gains more notice than if each had worked in isolation.

I never would have written my first memoir unless Sara Ruddick, who’d edited Working It Out (1977), asked me to write a piece for Between Women, a collection of essays she was editing. Before then I’d been a literary scholar. But Ruddick asked me to write personally about why a woman raised in a working-class family chose to work on Virginia Woolf. I was afraid and unsure, but Ruddick encouraged me and guided me through the process. In time, Ruddick invited me to join her in editing the book, and through her I met many writers in her circle. I never would have written memoir without the support of this community of writers.

So how do we find that affective and cognitive support we need as we begin our writing life? Sometimes, like Carey, we can stumble into it. But more often than not, we must seek it out. And these helpful relationships take time and effort to cultivate.

The first step is recognizing we need support. The second step is thinking about how we can find an existing writing community to join or create one if it doesn’t exist. And, throughout, we must learn to distinguish between support and sabotage and avoid the latter assiduously.

I believe it’s essential for us to ask for support from those nearest us. That means having a conversation in which we relate our desire to write seriously, describe how we plan to achieve our goal (writing, like Carey, perhaps, nights and weekends), discuss the help we’ll need, and ask whether we can count on support. And then we can find one other writer or group of writers who understands what we want to do and who are willing to support our work through meetings, ongoing conversations, or other means.

Virginia Woolf’s loving friendship with Vita Sackville-West enriched the work of both writers. Woolf was the first friend Sackville-West had who was a committed writer, and Woolf helped Sackville-West push her talent to the utmost. Together, they discussed books, and Woolf helped Sackville-West draw up a list of “solid reading” to improve her style. After meeting Woolf, Sackville-West wrote the most highly skilled works of her career: The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), and Family History (1932). As Gardner maintains, writers need supporters who understand what they want to do but haven’t yet accomplished.

From Sackville-West, Woolf learned to recognize the breadth of her accomplishments, not because of her character faults but because of her strengths. Sackville-West insisted that Woolf understand her own worth. Woolf also learned that she could earn more money writing than she had, and put a small sum aside for pleasure—household furnishings; paintings; indoor plumbing; new clothing; and, eventually, an automobile. From Sackville-West, Woolf learned to be less obsessive about her art and to take more time for relaxation, travel, and excursions to enrich her work. She subsequently spent time bowling, doing needlepoint, knitting, bread baking, and listening to music.

We live in a culture obsessed by competition. So if we view the writing life as a struggle to get to the top, we might do everything we can to best other writers. Or we might imagine that the competition is too stiff for us to contribute a significant work. But instead, we can frame our writing life as a project we embark upon together with a group of other supportive writers, trusting that our writing and our lives and theirs will improve because of these significant relationships, just as Woolf’s and Sackville-West’s did.

I never would have become a writer, never would have continued writing, without the support from my writing community. We edited books and we published our friends. Our friends edited books and they published us. We introduced our writer friends to editors and publishers we knew. And they introduced our work to publishers they knew. We read their manuscripts and offered constructive criticism and they read ours. We reviewed them and they reviewed us. In less than a decade, many of us had published our first important work. But none of us could have done it alone. We depended upon one another, and I continue to be blessed by belonging to a generous community of writers.

So here’re our challenges: How can we find the help we need to support our work? And in what constructive ways can we help a writer friend? Can we share child care? Create a writing group or a reading group? Read works in progress empathetically? Help find a venue for a reading? Help figure out how to get the work noticed? Think together about establishing writing routines? Support one another emotionally and intellectually through difficult writing times? Listen to what they hope to achieve in their works and help them find ways to realize their goals?

I believe that our own work will flourish if we find the support we need, but also if we consistently help other writers throughout our writing lives. And not only because we can then count on a coterie of people to give us help when we need it, but also because if we’re not generous to others, we can’t possibly be generous to ourselves.