The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Introduction
Challenges and successes

How many of us willingly accept failure, even look forward to it, as an inevitable part of a creative life? Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club, is afraid of failure. Yet she keeps Samuel Beckett’s motto “Fail better” posted above her desk. She asks herself what she’d write if she “weren’t afraid.”

Karr related that she was devastated when she had to abandon a “how-to-book about prayer.” She realized her pages “were duller than a rubber knife.” When she understood she couldn’t write a spiritual book for a secular audience, she moped around “in scuzzy clothes,” ate “Indian food,” cried, and listened “to Beethoven really loud.” She then called her former teacher Robert Hass, who told her any bad book has “some good sentences in it,” and Karr went back to work.

What looks like failure is often just a way station on the road to success.

Michael Chabon began writing Fountain City (1995) after the immense success of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. For five years and fifteen hundred pages, Chabon struggled to discover his novel’s subject amid its various plotlines: “a gargantuan Florida real estate deal … French cooking, and the crazy and ongoing dream of rebuilding the Great Temple in Jerusalem” set in both Paris and the fictional Fountain City. The novel was about loss. But Chabon wanted it to be about love, too. Still, Chabon “could never get those two halves to stick together convincingly.” With his editor’s help, Chabon tried one last time to fix the novel but decided it couldn’t be done. He mourned its loss, dreaming of “all the other wonderful books” he could have written.

After Chabon abandoned Fountain City, his wife, Ayelet Waldman, told him she’d be unavailable for six weeks, as she needed to prepare for the bar exam. Chabon decided to take that time to think about what he wanted to write next. He imagined a scene in which “a straight-laced, troubled young man … was standing on a backyard lawn at night, holding a tiny winking Derringer to his temple, while on the porch of the nearby house a shaggy pot-smoking, much older man … watched him and tried to decide if what he was seeing was real or not.”

He opened a new file, “called it X,” and quickly found the older man’s voice and continued to work without telling anyone. By the end of six weeks, he had “117 pages of a novel called Wonder Boys.” When Waldman passed her exam, Chabon had completed two-thirds of a first draft. Six weeks later, he finished the draft and mailed it to his agent.

Chabon drew upon his experience writing a failed novel to create Grady Tripp, a writer who’s struggled for five years to complete a novel called Wonder Boys: “I worked for hours, [on the] worm-ridden hole of an ending I’d already tried three times before. This would oblige me to go back through the previous two-thousand-odd pages to flatten out and marginalize one of the present main characters and to eliminate another entirely.”

Chabon used all the frustration, disappointment, sorrow, and despair he experienced in writing Fountain City to create an archetypal portrait of a writer struggling mightily to complete a work he knows is a failure and suspects he must abandon. In one scene, Grady takes pages of the manuscript, fashions them into a little boat, “set[s] this unlikely craft in the gutter,” and watches it drift away. After this ceremonial letting go, his head is clear: “I wasn’t happy—I’d poured too many years of my life … into that book not to part with it in utter sorrow,” he says. “Still, I felt light.”

Was Fountain City a failure? Another writer might have abandoned fiction. But Chabon transformed his experience into another—immensely successful—work of art. He couldn’t have written such a convincing portrait of a failed writer unless he himself had experienced it. He returned to Fountain City to try to learn why it failed, and began annotating it; he mentioned his project to David Eggers, founder of McSweeney’s; Fountain City (2010), with its annotations, has been published by McSweeney’s because Chabon hopes it will be useful for “fans of ruination.”

If we believe that creativity is—or should be—success after success, we’ve got it wrong. Setbacks in the work occur often; what some people call failure occurs often. But it’s what we do after that counts.

A setback often forces us into a necessary paradigm shift about the nature of our work that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred. Chabon shifted his focus to the pain of abandoning a work of art and the vagaries of the creative process. Frustration is often necessary to fuel creative solutions to seemingly insoluble problems. Seeming failure is often necessary to push our work into unexpected terrain.

John Steinbeck wanted East of Eden to be his magnum opus, a novel describing his family’s history in the Salinas Valley. He didn’t know whether he was “good enough or gifted enough” to complete the work. Still, in the journal he kept while composing the novel, he planned the novel, and how he needed to live while working to successfully complete the book. He concluded the only way to succeed would be to slow down his process.

Steinbeck wanted to be relaxed; he couldn’t rush: “I have always the tendency to hurry and I don’t want to this time,” he wrote. “I know this is going very slowly,” he stated, “but I want it that way.” To write a good book, he had to “forget even that I want it to be good.” As he worked, he decided “it should not have any intention save only to be written.”

Steinbeck’s journal documents his successful formula for completing a work. The only way for a writer to be successful is for a writer to resist the “indiscipline of overwork,” he learned, to move the book along “little by little,” and to “do the best” we can each day.