The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Radical work takes time
A writer’s apprenticeship
Part of our apprenticeship as writers involves learning how long it takes to complete an inventive work of art. Before we begin our own lengthy works, it’s instructive, humbling, and necessary to learn that a renowned painter like Henri Matisse and an accomplished writer like Jeffrey Eugenides sometimes took nine years or more to refine their visions.
Modern technology has unveiled the changes Matisse made to Bathers by the River from 1909 to 1916, the time it took him to complete this landmark work. Each layer of paint revealed that Matisse’s work became stronger and bolder with time. In his early attempts, Matisse rendered the women’s bodies with a fluid line. Through time, he made them “increasingly rigid and abstract,” even iconic. The final work is a “far more radical” painting; Matisse’s shift in point of view took years.
Jeffrey Eugenides is known for the audacity of his fictional vision. Each of his three novels—The Virgin Suicides (1993), the Pulitzer Prize—winning Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011)—differ greatly. The Virgin Suicides deals with the deaths of the five Lisbon sisters, inhabitants of Gross Pointe, Michigan, told in the first-person plural through the voices of the girls’ would-be lovers years after their collective tragedy. Middlesex deals with the epic narrative of the immigrant family history of the hermaphrodite, Cal Stephanides, told from his point of view. The Marriage Plot narrates the intertwining lives of three Brown University students during their senior year and thereafter and discusses semiotics, manic depression, and a religious conversion. To achieve each work’s singularity of vision, Eugenides labors for many years to craft them.
Eugenides doesn’t want to repeat himself, so he relies on a “slow, methodical” process to craft each work “sentence by sentence.” Sometimes just a few sentences take him long to perfect.
Eugenides constantly revises his work. “That’s why I don’t publish books very often,” he says. Still he works every day, seven days a week, from about ten in the morning until dinnertime, in a “not-very-nice office bedroom,” composing on a computer and making handwritten corrections after he prints out his work each month or so. To lead this dedicated writer’s life, Eugenides has made sacrifices, but only of “things I can get along without.”
Some days he’s productive; some days he’s not. But over time, his initial vision shifts and changes. When his novels are finished, they’re a far more complex vision of the events that he originally imagined.
Eugenides is “obsessively secretive” about his work because he wants to represent his own untrammeled vision: “If I can still make the book better on my own, I’m not eager to show it to anyone” because then he might be tempted to tone down its more radical aspects. For Eugenides, the “idea that a writer is a born genius … is mostly a myth.… You have to work at your originality.”
Each novel is begun without much preparation. Eugenides doesn’t know “what the book is about beforehand”; his is an exploratory process. When he begins worrying that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, he makes “a fuzzy outline,” and thinks about plot and structure. Throughout the years, he continually revises his vision because he’s always “discover[ing] things and hav[ing] ideas of how it might work out.” It takes time to learn what his books are about. But because they surprise him, they also surprise the reader.
In observing my own process, I’ve noticed that the earliest versions of my works are constrained and safe. I employ narrative solutions that have worked before. My characters are one-sided. My settings are sketchy and ambiguous. My narratives are linear. What happens to my characters isn’t rooted in their history or culture. But I’ve learned that, dissatisfied though I may be, it’s essential to continue working, for it’s only near the end of the process that I develop my singular voice.
Like most writers, I don’t know what I’m doing at the beginning, and I’m unsure and afraid. Uncertain work, fearful work is often safe, constrained, and timid—that’s my work through several early drafts. But that’s normal for my process, and for many writers I know.
During, say, an eleventh draft, I begin to see what I’m doing. And I become tired of my project and often this, and not courage, is what allows me to drop my guard. This is when working slowly and persistently pays off. So one day I experiment with a crazy kind of order, a few parentheses with wild material inside, a flash-forward and flashback in the same paragraph, a shift in tenses (past to present to past within a page), an image that just appears, or a title. These changes start happening quickly and I wonder why it’s taken so long and why it’s been so hard until now. But it’s because it does take long to break into a new vision of our work. Why should it take less time than it took Matisse or Eugenides?
These are golden moments when the work we do shifts gears. When I was composing Vertigo, late in the process, I stumbled into using a young child’s voice, like nothing else in the narrative, to relate how a relative abused me. My initial impulse was to discard the section. But I decided to let the piece stand and it was the beginning of a thrilling and frightening giant leap into unfamiliar writing territory. It meant abandoning a traditional narrative and developing something new and unexpected.
Many writers I know stop or retreat just when their work is about to become very, very interesting. For Matisse, this didn’t happen until the seventh year of his work, although you could see incremental changes in that direction before. It takes a leap of faith to witness the most radical aspects of our works in progress hidden within their more conventional trappings and develop them. It takes patience and courage to change that work in progress into something unexpected and altogether new. How much easier to say “That’s good enough,” rather than “I’m not there yet.”
How long are we willing to wait to develop our most singular work? Or rather, how long are we willing to work? Are we stopping short of when our work begins to sing its true song? I suspect many of us do, and that’s unfortunate. If it took Matisse seven years, or Eugenides, nine, why do we expect important work from ourselves in, say, a year or even two? If we let ourselves work, as Matisse and Eugenides did, long enough until our work surprises us, startles us, or even scares us, we, too, might create a singular, authentic, powerful work of art.