The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Hailstorms
Challenges and successes

A few years ago, my husband and I were staying at a castle in Tuscany. This was a rustic place with few creature comforts—no heat, no air-conditioning, uneven ancient floors, generations of spiders, sagging furniture. And it was ten miles down a clay track, in splendid isolation on a bluff overlooking a river in the valley below. It was not for the fainthearted, so for most of our stay, we were the only people there.

The castle was protected by a gate, a dry moat, and battlements and surrounded by meadows, woods, an olive grove, and the owners’ vineyards. It was where I wanted to be after working on a book I couldn’t get right. It wasn’t my first; it wouldn’t be my last. I knew I had to put this experience behind me and move on. Still, I needed this time away. I’d been living with this book for too long.

The family who owned the castle was hardworking. They had to keep up an enormous, ancient, historically significant structure; tend to the accommodations; run the dining room. The mother and one brother cooked. The other brother took orders and served supper. The father fixed things, and there were many things to fix. The family, with helpers from nearby villages, worked in the vineyard and made wine, gathered olives and trucked them to a local press.

One evening, as we were getting ready to order supper—a dish made from local pork, listed as Groundmother’s Stew on the menu, which puzzled us and made us laugh (we soon realized they meant “Grandmother’s Stew”) there was a terrible rainstorm, accompanied by thunderous hail. When the storm was over, two inches of hail had fallen. The storm was beautiful, I thought, as I watched through the dining room windows.

We were safe and warm, inside a stout castle. We’d soon be well fed. Our rooms were a few paces away. As we awaited our meal, we didn’t realize what the hailstorm had done to the vineyard.

And then we did.

It was almost summer, and, on our languorous walks around the property, we’d seen tiny grapes growing on the vines. We knew that in autumn they’d be harvested for the year’s vintage. The evening before, we’d drunk a robust rustic red wine from the vineyard that paired so well with the simple, soulful food the family served.

A fifteen-minute hailstorm. The year’s grape harvest ruined. This year, there would be no wine. And there would be no income for the family from this year’s vintage.

Yet even as the hail fell, one brother took our order for supper, and his mother and brother cooked in the kitchen. We saw him glancing out the window, yet he seemed not to respond to the fact that the grapes were being pummeled by hail.

After supper, we talked. I didn’t want to intrude on what I assumed to be his great sorrow at the grapes’ destruction. But I wanted to offer sympathy. I knew I couldn’t possibly understand what the event meant to his family. But I believed it would be wrong not to acknowledge what had happened.

“I’m sorry about the hail,” I said.

“It happens,” he said.

“What will you do?” I asked.

“Get back to work,” he responded, “and fix what was damaged. This is our life’s work. The vines will survive. Next year there will be more grapes. Next year there will be another harvest.”

You complete a book, submit it to its editor. The editor leaves the press. The editor replacing him can’t understand why her predecessor bought it—it’s too much like one she’s edited. She ignores it. If it fails, she loses nothing. Yet the book took many years of your life.

You publish a controversial biography. A relative of the subject trashes the book in a major newspaper. The subject’s family pressures newspapers not to publish extracts of the book or to review it.

You publish a novel. It receives excellent reviews but doesn’t sell well. Your publisher cancels your contract for your next work.

You switch genres. Try a novel. It’s almost accepted for publication many times. Once, an editor asks for revisions, which take you six months, but then the editor doesn’t buy it. Five years have passed. It’s likely this book won’t find a publisher.

You win a major award and show up at a reading. But there are no books available. You learn the publisher has accidentally shredded every copy of your book. And they don’t plan on reprinting.

I’ve known writers—I’m one of them—who’ve reacted to inevitable setbacks like these with less dignity and grace than the Italian family responded when a year’s livelihood vanished.

The novelist Colum McCann, author of TransAtlantic, has survived a number of metaphorical hailstorms. After he published Zoli (2006), his novel about “Gypsies and Romany culture in Europe,” a part of him judged the work to be a failure. He “wanted to bounce back fast,” so he began an epic novel “about New York City on the verge of bankruptcy and an America scarred by Vietnam and Watergate.” But he abandoned it after writing two hundred pages because it didn’t meet his standards. Deciding to set the work aside was “a fresh wound” that hurt McCann every time he thought about it.

Although McCann felt the pain of having to abandon work, he stated that, for him, “these virtues that you know as desire, stamina, perseverance—they are the key things” for a writer to cultivate: the ability to get back to work when all is not well. McCann has said that, as he writes, “a lot of time I feel like I am drowning. One step forward, two steps back, and then a sudden plunge off the cliff.”

McCann believes it’s important for writers to realize that every work of art is a failure because you “can never achieve what you truly want to achieve. The thing you dreamt on the riverbank is never the thing you achieve when you are back at the writing table.” Paradoxically, embracing the likelihood of failure, as McCann does, can free us to do our best work. When McCann realized that the many strands of TransAtlantic (the aviators Alcock and Brown crossing the Atlantic in 1919; Frederick Douglass touring Ireland in 1845; George Mitchell trying to broker a peace accord in Ireland in the 1990s) were held together by the character Lily (a maid in the home where Douglass stayed who’s inspired by him to emigrate to the United States), he felt he “had achieved a sort of music.”

Encounter a hailstorm in your work. Get back to work. Fix what you can. Trust that there will be another year, that there will be another book. The writer will survive. A writing life will continue despite the hailstorms. A life’s work is, after all, a life of work.