Failure in the middle - Challenges and successes

The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Failure in the middle
Challenges and successes

In working with writers, I’ve learned it’s not talent that gets books written, it’s hard, slow, steady work. But it’s not only hard work—almost every student I’ve taught works hard. It’s learning to understand that the process of writing isn’t linear but filled with peaks and valleys; that sometimes we don’t know what we’re doing but we need to work anyway; that we must stay with the process through uncertainty, indecision, anxiety, and feeling our work is failing; that we must have tenacity when we feel like walking away from a project.

My most important job is helping writers endure the tough stages of the process. And I’ve learned that often the toughest stage comes just before the biggest breakthroughs. But that’s when many writers decide their work is a failure and put it down. Sometimes they think because the work is a failure, they’re failures and not meant to be writers.

The short story writer and memoirist Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life (1989), described how, when writing a long work, “a kind of anxious wonder sets in as to whether or not you’ll really finish it, whether it will be any good, whether all this time will have been wasted—and we all hate to waste our time.” Wolff feels this way every time; completing one successful work doesn’t mean he has more courage or conviction when he writes the next. “Everything I’ve written … has seemed to me, at one point or another, something I probably ought to abandon. Even the best things I’ve written have seemed to me at some point very unlikely to be worth the effort I had already put into them. But I know I have to push through.” Wolff completes every work he begins: “For me, it’s more important to keep the discipline of finishing things than to be assured at every moment that it’s worth doing.”

Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Switch (2010) states that if we want to reach our full potential, we need to cultivate “a growth mind-set.” According to Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “Everything can look like a failure in the middle.” At the beginning of a project, we feel hope; at the end, we might feel confident. But in between “there is a negative emotional valley labeled ’insight,’” according to Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO. During this phase, it’s easy to become downhearted because it’s immensely difficult to figure out what to do next.

It’s hard to take a mountain of manuscripts we’ve written—starts, false starts, finished work, half-completed work, fine work—and turn it into a book. Brown insists it’ll be easier to weather that trough in the creative arc if we anticipate, even expect, failure in the middle of the process. Brown encourages people to “seek out failure” because it’s the only way for genuine growth to occur. Without failure, our work stagnates. Without failure, we’re not frustrated enough to seek new solutions to the challenges we’re confronting.

For me, too, the toughest part of the writing process comes in the middle. Middle. Muddle. That’s how it’s always been, although I forget from one book to the next. I start a book, excited. I go to the desk eagerly, write page after page, scene after scene. I don’t yet know what the book is about, but at the beginning, I don’t need to. At this early stage, anything goes. Is it any wonder that writers often put down one work that’s frustrating and begin another?

The energy of beginning can last days, months, or years, depending on the size of the project. And then we have all these pages. They’re good enough to work with, good enough to revise. And revising might be fun, too, because we discover there’s so much more to say. But then there’s that moment when we realize that a mass of pages, no matter how good they are, no matter how good they might become, don’t constitute a book. A book is different in kind, not in degree, from a mass of pages.

This is the dreaded middle. “What’s the book about?” we ask ourselves, although we thought we knew when we started. There doesn’t seem to be a through line, a narrative arc, a satisfactory structure. We don’t know what we’re doing or where we’re going. And this feels like failure. It’s the “insight stage” when we might stop working.

As the authors of Switch write, most of us haven’t been taught what the growth process looks like and feels like. We don’t know that the dreaded middle—when the work looks like a failure, when we feel like a failure—is a necessary stage that no creative person can avoid. If we know it’s coming, if we understand it’s inevitable, we might be more prepared for it and less likely to walk away from our projects.

I once taught a student—one of the best I’ve ever had—who became a brilliant writer only after she learned this lesson about her process. She’d begin a work with gusto. Write a few drafts that another writer might find acceptable. But then, in the middle of her process, she’d become confused and start muddling everything up. She’d move pieces around. Take out one significant narrative line and introduce another that didn’t seem to fit. It seemed she was destroying what she’d created. But she was reaching for something unexpected, something quirky, something that united two or three seemingly unrelated narrative arcs.

The middle stage was difficult for her. She often thought of giving up or returning to the simpler, clearer incarnations of her work rather than dealing with the seeming mess she’d created. But in that mess was the kernel of a new way of understanding her material. And when she realized this—often after she said she was ready to chuck the whole thing—the piece came together seemingly without effort, though both of us understood the enormous amount of work that had gone into completing the project.

Michael Chabon has described how difficult it was for him to move through the middle period of writing Telegraph Avenue, centered on a used-record store near his home in Berkeley, California. “I got two years into the novel…” Chabon said, “and felt like it was an utter flop. I wanted to put it aside but my wife talked me out of it. She said she cared too much about these characters and wanted to find out what became of them.” Chabon began again, “keeping the characters but reinventing the story completely and leaving behind almost every element” of the original version. This wasn’t a new experience for Chabon. “It happens with every book now, I hate to say”; it happened, too, when Chabon wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007).

Nonetheless, Chabon persevered “thanks to my wife.” Her role, he says, is “to lash me to the tiller and keep me there long enough to get through the bad patches.”