The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Doubt
Challenges and successes

Doubting always seems to accompany the act of writing. Doubting whether our work is worthwhile. Doubting whether we have the requisite skill.

Nicole Krauss, author of Great House (2010), writes “without any sense of where the writing will take me.” But instead of uncertainty derailing her, she “commit[s] to this doubt, this uncertainty.” As she drafted the novel, Krauss used the doubt inherent in her process as a subject so that Great House became a novel about “what it is … to commit to our lives, all the while being uncertain about so many things.”

Other writers have dealt with doubt by thinking deeply about the purpose of art and its function in society and writing essays about their beliefs so that, when they composed, they had a clearer sense of why they were writing. They’d taken time to understand why writing mattered, and this sustained them throughout difficult periods.

Though Virginia Woolf sometimes doubted herself, she thought about the function of the novel, and this gave her a sense of purpose and a set of standards against which to judge her work. She’d taken time to understand why the novel was important; she knew why writing her work was important.

In works like A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas (1938), “The Art of Fiction,” and “The Leaning Tower,” she discussed her beliefs about fiction’s importance, developing complex insights about the role of literature. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf asked, “What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” She wrote that “the relation of human being to human being” and the human being to society was the subject of her art. She believed it was necessary for people from all classes to write, not just the elite and privileged. For this to happen, society must become more equitable. In Mrs. Dalloway, she created the character of Septimus Smith, a workingman who might have been, but never became, a poet, illuminating this idea.

Because women’s relationships to men had been the subject of fiction for so long, Woolf wanted, instead, to describe women’s relationships to one another. Works like Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, reveal this concern. She also wanted to describe the interior life: “Above all,” she wrote, “you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say … what is your relation to the everchanging and turning world.” She developed her own idiosyncratic version of the multiple point of view novel to do this.

D. H. Lawrence also reflected upon his purpose in writing the novel and described why he believed what he was doing was significant. Even when his works were criticized, even when The Rainbow (1915) was banned and burned, when Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) was censored, when he knew no one would publish his work, Lawrence had erected a sturdy touchstone against which to judge his works’ value. He evaluated his work according to his standards; he disavowed the notion that others had the right to judge his work.

In essays like “Surgery for the Novel—or a Bomb,” “Art and Morality,” “Morality and the Novel,” and “Why the Novel Matters,” he articulated his philosophy of the function of fiction. He believed the novel was a supremely important didactic tool that could—and should—be used to change society. “Let us learn from the novel,” Lawrence wrote in “Why the Novel Matters.” “Turn truly, honourably to the novel, and see wherein you are man alive or dead man in life.… You may eat your dinner as man alive, or as a mere masticating corpse.”

Lawrence was sure his work was important and he was messianic in believing that his work would help change society’s attitudes about materialism, sex, and love. He reviled his critics, cursing them in flamboyant language, calling them insects, beetles, or hedgehogs. He had his fears, too. He thought that after Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published, he’d be regarded merely as a specialist in sexual matters. But his sense of mission—and perhaps an expectation that he would die young—fueled Lawrence’s writing.

Lawrence thought deeply about the relationship between men and women and the function of marriage and expressed his beliefs in essays like “Love,” “We Need One Another,” and “Women Are So Cocksure.” His philosophy about the centrality of love permeates his novel The Rainbow, which challenged the prevailing belief of sacrificing one’s personal destiny to a nation’s. In The Rainbow, Lawrence described the core experience of human existence as a kind of difficult-to-achieve heterosexual love, shuttling between the merging of two separate identities and a compelling need for privacy. The novel describes its characters’ attempts to achieve this union with every subtle shift of feeling scrupulously represented.

In writing a mission statement for his work, Lawrence articulated his own goals, his own standard for success. He knew how each novel fit into his grand plan. He wasn’t just writing fiction, he was writing fiction that criticized his society to change it, to help men and women live vital lives.

Krauss used the doubt she experienced as a subject in her work. Both Woolf and Lawrence show that one way to deal with doubt is to think about our writing in terms of the function of art in society.

We can—we do—doubt the worth of our work. But riding the horse of self-doubt can waste the psychic energy we need to do our work. We can own our doubt without letting it disable us. How would we react if a book of ours was condemned, banned, and burned? Would we carry on, as Lawrence did, because we know what we’re doing and commit ourselves to writing despite censure, or to find ways around censorship? Or would we let society’s censure about the worth of our work disable us?

Maybe we all need to take time to think about our work’s significance and write a mission statement. Maybe if we do, we’ll understand more clearly why we’ve committed ourselves to a writing life. Maybe doing this will give us—as it gave Woolf and Lawrence—the motivation to continue working.

When my students doubt whether their work is worthwhile, I ask them to think about what their unique contribution might be and where their work fits into their beliefs about the function of art. I ask them to write a miniversion of a mission statement like Woolf’s and Lawrence’s. Then I ask them to imagine what would happen if all potential writers stopped writing because they doubted their work was worthwhile. Do any of us want a world without books, like Great House, that a writer’s uncertainty might have derailed? Every book that has changed their lives has likely been written by a writer who wondered, just as they do, whether their work was worthwhile.