The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Introduction
Getting ready to write
It’s essential for me to understand where I am in the writing process with a particular work. Am I getting ready to write—doing research, scribbling notes, assembling the bits and pieces I’ve written? Am I writing a first draft—trying to get my work into a provisional order? Revising or deepening a draft? Ordering a work? Completing it? Polishing a piece, readying it for an audience?
Unless I know where I am in the process, I expect too much too soon. I criticize myself for not accomplishing the impossible. When I’m preparing a new work, if I expect myself to know precisely how to work or what to say, I might forestall my process. If, instead of playing with the project for a time, I expect to write beautiful, lucid sentences, I’ll become frustrated.
Random, hazy, unclear attempts at meaning often characterize the earliest stages of the creative process. We work in the dark, not yet knowing the direction our work will take, trusting this early work will be rewarded. When Margaret Atwood, author of the Booker Prize—winning The Blind Assassin (2000), starts a novel, she doesn’t yet know where it will lead—it “seems a process of working [the problems] out.” She begins with something small, “an image, scene, or voice,” and discovers the “structure or design” as she writes. When she was writing Surfacing (1972), Atwood wrote two parts of her novel five years before writing the remainder. To know too much at first, Atwood maintains, would be “too much like paint-by-numbers.” Often, beginning writers skip this stage and try to write a first draft too soon. But many successful writers linger here for years. Trying to work too quickly, trying to work in too polished a way too quickly, expecting clarity too soon, can set us up for failure.
Margaret Drabble took time to learn about jigsaw puzzles before composing The Pattern in the Carpet (2009). Originally intended as a history of puzzle making, the memoir interleaves Drabble’s life story, her passion for games, and a history of puzzles. The choreographer Twyla Tharp collects objects, images, and ideas for future work in a special container long before she understands how to use them: “There are separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done.”
When we begin a new project, as embryonic or unsatisfactory as our early work may seem, we’re readying ourselves for the deeper work that comes later. We learn about ourselves as writers. We establish our work’s foundation. We permit ourselves to play and explore. We commit—or recommit—to working steadily and purposefully.
Michael Chabon stumbled in the dark for four years before beginning The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988). He honed his craft by writing imitative novels, “quasi-Calvino, and neo-Borges.” He studied the structure of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1959); each work, he learned, took place in a single summer, a scheme he borrowed, setting his novel in Pittsburgh, a place he understood. As Orhan Pamuk, author of My Name Is Red (2001), has said, “most of art … is really craft.” Learning technique requires a patient apprenticeship—Pamuk worked for seven years before publishing his first novel, Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Cevdet Bey and His Sons) (Istanbul: Karacan Yayınian, 1982) . Like these authors, in the beginning stage, we can learn how to work at our craft and learn what this particular work requires of us.
Though this may be unsettling, we continue to work even if we don’t yet understand what we’re doing or where the work is heading. Nicole Krauss, describing how she wrote The History of Love (2005), said, “I never know where the story is going until it gets there.” For Krauss, “Getting completely lost, coming unstrung and unbound, arriving at unknown and unexpected places, is, for me, a critical part of writing.” She worked herself out of many corners, having “no idea how the book would end.” Dealing with the anxiety of not knowing where our work is headed or whether it’ll be successful is essential. Krauss worked steadily though she thought The History of Love might fail. She took risks because she focused on the process of doing her work, rather than on the end product. As we begin a work, remembering we needn’t know how it’ll turn out or whether it’ll be successful might be comforting. And we can cultivate our ability to work despite confusion as Krauss does.
Our early attempts will most likely be muddled, like Virginia Woolf’s first draft of Between the Acts (1941), at first called Pointz Hall. The beginning of this draft—“Oh beautiful and bounteous light on the table; oil lamp; ancient and out-of-date oil lamp; upholding as on a tawny tent the falling grey draperies of dusk”—was nothing like the final draft—“It was a summer’s night and they were talking, in the big room with the windows open to the garden, about the cesspool.” The early version was muddled and flowery, like a prolonged play period with the language, subject matter, images, and characters Woolf developed and changed over time. The final version gets right down to business: cultured people are gathered around a lamp talking about how to dispose of human waste, retaining only the first version’s oil lamp.
We can take as much time as we need in our projects’ initial stages, allowing ourselves to be unsure of what we’re doing or whether we’ll succeed. We can commit to the process of learning and honing our craft even as we acknowledge the anxiety and frustration that often occur early on. We can commit to working slowly, taking time to figure out our work, one slow step at a time.
There will, of course, be occasions in our writer’s lives when we might find ourselves working quickly. Times when we’re in the flow of the work and we give ourselves over to it as it seems to come to us, unbidden. Times when we are trying to meet a self-imposed deadline. Times when we have a contractual deadline to meet. But working quickly does not mean rushing the process to get to the end no matter what. And even if we work quickly now and then, for the greater part of the writing process, by working slowly and steadily, we will produce our finest work.