The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Turning the corner
Challenges and successes

There comes a time in every project when we know we’ve turned a corner. Before that moment, everything was opaque, confusing, and difficult. We wondered whether what we’re writing is worth anything. We worry that we’ll never finish. We have a lot of good material, but we don’t know what to do with it. We might have an inkling of how the piece or book will come together, but we’re not sure it’s right, and we’re reluctant to try to implement the plans we’ve germinated.

We’re working every day, but the work seems to be going nowhere. We circle around and around our subject, writing good material, and then writing material that seems not to fit—material we suspect we’ll never use but that we need to write anyway. And this phase of the process continues. Sometimes for weeks; sometimes for months; sometimes, even, for years.

At times we think we should abandon the project, abandon writing. The book seems to be taking over our life. We think about it all the time, but thinking about it isn’t solving our problems. We get downhearted and worry we’ll never find the solution to the immense creative challenges we’re facing. We write one possible outline and then another and then another. We organize our work into neat piles. We begin thinking we just might be able to make a book out of our hundreds (or thousands) of pages, some of which, we have to admit, are wonderful, some of which work, some of which we’ll have to abandon, some of which have potential but must be revised.

Then, one day—and who knows when or why or how—we know the book will happen. We may not know exactly what the chapters will look like, or even whether there will be chapters—we might decide to opt for a continuous narrative instead. But one day we begin trusting that we have the right stuff to finish the book.

Most writers reach this moment. Beginning writers who haven’t yet might find it hard to trust that if they just keep working, that time will come. This is miracle time, magic time, the move from opacity to clarity. And we can’t force this moment—the arrival of clarity—to happen; this moment takes its own sweet time. We have to show up at the desk day after day, week after week, year after year for that splendid moment to arrive.

Often, that moment comes after we’ve put the book down for a time, after we’ve been dragged away on a holiday we didn’t want to take. We get away from the project for a while, visit a new place, let our mind rest, and when we return to the desk, there it is—the solution to the book.

That’s what’s happened to me every time I’ve written a piece or a book. It’s happened to each of my students. That moment when we turn the corner on our work, when we know we’ll finish our work, when we have a felt sense of what needs to be done, although we might not be able to articulate the steps to the end of the project. When students ask me when it will happen, I say, “Who knows? Just keep working.” When students ask me how they’ll know when it’s happened, I say, “Don’t worry, you’ll know.” Just like when my husband told our son that he’d know when he fell in love, and wanted to know how he’d know, and my husband said, “Don’t worry, you’ll know,” which again didn’t satisfy him, but then, after he fell in love, my son understood what my husband had meant.

Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth (2000), has described what the middle of writing a novel feels like for her, that moment when she’s turned the corner on the work. “The middle of the novel is a state of mind,” she says. “Strange things happen in it. Time collapses. You sit down to write at 9 A.M., you blink, the evening news is on and four thousand words are written, more words than you wrote in three long months, a year ago. Something has changed.”

Before that moment, problems might seem insoluble. But then, Smith states, “Incredibly knotty problems of structure now resolve themselves with inspired ease. See that one paragraph? It only needs to be moved, and the whole chapter falls into place! Why didn’t you see that before?”

If we keep at it, the moment that Smith says “renders everything possible” will come. And we’ll know when it does. But before that time, our job as writers is to learn to live with uncertainty and to trust that if we keep working, what seemed problematic will resolve itself. Michael Chabon, when interviewed about writing Telegraph Avenue, said he feels “completely stymied” every time he writes a novel, yet the lesson he’s learned “is that you do come out the other side with a clear understanding of what you’re doing.”

That’s a stage of the writing process that I love and that I yearn for before it happens. Who wouldn’t love that stage of seeming ease? And it’s a stage I don’t like to rush, though I sometimes have the impulse to drive the book forward faster than before. For who, after spending a few years on a project, doesn’t want to be finished, doesn’t want to move on to something else? And that’s one of the conundrums of the creative process. We become completely immersed in our work; we reach a stage where we want it to be finished; and when it’s finished, we rarely think about it again because we’ve moved on to working on something else.

I’m at that stage right now, and I’m loving it. Every day I look at earlier drafts of this book about my parents’ lives during World War II, and I know what to cut, what to expand, and how to change the voice. I don’t “know” all these things, really. I seem to be working automatically, instinctively after having been so thoughtful about this book for so long. And I have no idea how I know, I just do. I have no idea about why I know now and didn’t know last week, last year. Every day the work inches forward, but now I know there’s an end in sight, although I don’t know when it will be. I remind myself that, at this stage, it’s essential that I don’t overwork, that I retain my energy, and that I finish well.

To me, this stage feels better than any other phase of writing, better, even, than that exciting time at the beginning of a project. It feels better than when I’m finished, better than when the book gets accepted at a press, far better than when a book comes out.

You’ve worked for a long time to get it right, and now it seems to be coming together. But you’re still in process; you have a good stretch of work ahead of you, and the possibility of that work feels wonderful; but you know you’re heading toward the finish line.

And we should celebrate this moment, when we turn the corner on our work. Because it’s been hard earned.