The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Creative problem solving
Challenges and successes

In describing how he composed Atonement, Ian McEwan stated that the novel “grew out of many months of sketches and doodling.” Then one morning he wrote “six hundred words or so describing a young woman entering a drawing room with some wild flowers in her hand, searching for a vase,” and “aware of a young man outside gardening whom she wishes both to see and avoid.”

He knew he had “at last started a novel.”

But beyond that, he “knew nothing.” “Slowly,” McEwan said, “I pieced together a chapter,” the one in which “Cecilia and Robbie go to the fountain, the vase breaks, she strips off and plunges into the water to retrieve the pieces, she walks away from him without a word.”

But then McEwan “stopped, and for six weeks or so I pondered.” He was faced with a range of creative problems he had to solve. Who was the woman? Who was the young man? What was their relationship? When did this event take place? Where did it take place?

After that hiatus, McEwan began working again, and wrote the chapter about “Briony attempting to put on a play with her cousins.” When he completed that chapter, he began to understand what the work was about. The “whole household was emerging”; he sensed that he’d eventually be writing about “Dunkirk and St. Thomas’s hospital”; he realized that Briony was writing the chapters and that “she was going to commit a terrible error, and that writing … throughout her life would be her form of atonement.”

McEwan’s remarks illustrate how a successful writer sometimes begins without knowing the work’s subject. McEwan spent some time sketching. He then wrote a scene requiring him to solve many creative problems. As he imagined the solution to each, the work began to come into focus. McEwan’s process is worth recalling as we encounter our own set of challenges.

At the beginning of a project, I often know something about the work. The first stage is exciting: I anticipate the work awaiting me; I look forward to the surprises accompanying the process; I’m happy I have a project to work on.

But I’m also often unclear about what I’m doing for some time. Then something happens that’s promising but takes me in a different direction. I’ve generated a creative problem that I must solve. Will I stick with my original plan? Will I head down that unfamiliar road where the work seems to be going?

To solve this creative problem, I might write a bit in the new direction. And then return to my original scheme. (McEwan swapped his first two chapters and rewrote them several times before he realized the novel should begin with Briony.)

As we seek solutions to our creative problems, we might feel unsettled because we’re unsure of what to do. But we keep working through this uncertainty until, somehow, we know—as McEwan did—what the solution is. But we might not know it for some time, and we can’t force a resolution too quickly.

Creative solutions often take us into unexpected territory—the introduction of Briony’s narrative, for example—and often these swerves take us into exciting solutions we hadn’t anticipated—Briony as narrator, for example—and push our work in an altogether different direction. Had McEwan rigidly adhered to the first narrative that emerged—the woman and the young man at the fountain—and if he hadn’t understood the potential in Briony’s narrative, he might have written a less complex but still successful novel about love, class, and war. But in solving the problem of combining both narratives, McEwan introduced another layer of meaning, about the impact of knowing you’ve irrevocably destroyed other people’s lives.

In writing Crazy in the Kitchen, I knew I wanted to tackle the issue of my family’s relationship to food. I wanted to write my story, my parents’ and grandparents’ stories, too. But I knew I didn’t want to tell the story in a linear way. I didn’t want to begin with my grandparents’ lives in the south of Italy and end with how my life was affected by what theirs had been like.

I started with a narrative about how I made bread with one of my grandmothers. With each successive piece, I moved further back in time. I described the effect of my grandparents’ difficult lives upon my parents and me, before I wrote about the history of the south. (You can see this effect-before-cause structure in Paul Auster’s memoir, The Invention of Solitude, where he describes the effect of his grandmother’s murdering his grandfather upon his father before he tells the reader about that event.)

At one point, to my surprise, I began using an authoritative historical voice to narrate the history of famine in the south of Italy and the mistreatment of farm laborers that forced my grandfather to emigrate to America—the why of our family history. But this voice was far too different from my other, more personal, narratives.

One solution I entertained that I soon dismissed was to let that jarring voice stay; I was relating information I hadn’t known until I did research for the book, so the narrative felt contrived. Then I tried to find a more personal voice to relate this history, but I couldn’t find a voice to write about what I hadn’t known.

Then one day, after I’d wrestled with this creative problem for months, I saw that I could relate the history of the south using an “I” narrator telling the reader what I hadn’t known about my grandfather’s life—“I didn’t know that…” I realized the simplest solution was to write a litany that went on for pages of all of the things I didn’t know about my grandparents’ past. (“I didn’t know that farmworkers who ate every day were considered wealthy.… I didn’t know that many people in Puglia died of thirst.”)

My creative problem—how to tell the history of the south of Italy—was resolved, but it had taken a long time. Throughout, I asked, “What if I do this?” “What if I do that?” I tried several potential solutions to the problem I’d created. But then after I learned how to tell the history of the south, I had to decide where the chapter belonged in the narrative.

If we remind ourselves that writing is nothing more than creative problem solving, we’ll be more likely to tolerate the confusion every writer faces. And we have to learn to tolerate the anxiety that accompanies our confusion. But one way we can derail our process is to resolve confusion too quickly. (An excellent resource to help us through this process is Eric Maisel’s Fearless Creating [1995].)

I had to wait until I’d written every piece to solve the problem of where that historical essay belonged. I decided I wanted it to be the “turn” of the book, so I placed it in the middle. Once I decided that, I then faced the next challenge of ordering the other chapters.

Clarity will come when we encounter a creative problem, but there’s no predicting when we’ll arrive at a solution And, according to Maisel, confusion seems to fuel the creative problem-solving process. We can choose to trust that we’ll find the answer if we keep working. Completing a work involves learning how to wait because the solution to our creative problems can’t be forced.