The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Practice deciding
Challenges and successes

When I was a teenager, my mother took me on one of our infrequent shopping trips, and I picked out a form-fitting turquoise wool sheath. This would be my only dressy dress until I outgrew it. My mother looked at it and asked, “Are you sure you want it?” The moment she asked, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted it or not. I stopped loving it and wondered whether I even liked it.

Once I started writing, my difficulty making decisions plagued me. Do I write this article or that? Do I begin this book or that? Do I take this chapter and split it in two? What chapter should come first? What event should come first in that chapter? Should I eliminate this word? Add that image? End the book this way? Or that?

Should I write today? Take a weekend off? Work in the morning or in the afternoon? Am I using being sick as an excuse to not write?

Sound familiar? Sound exhausting?

Writing can be wonderful. Those of us who didn’t get to make choices when we were young get to make scores of them every day. But writing can be hellish because we have so many decisions to make, and many of us haven’t practiced making them. Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice describes how having too many choices can be paralyzing. And writers have a seemingly infinite number of choices to make.

I’ve been reading D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia (1921), which he planned as soon as he began his journey to Sardinia. Once he arrived, he began writing; he described what he experienced, where he visited, what the Sardinians were like. He didn’t ask himself “Should I write about Sardinia?” He just decided to write, and he did. With Lawrence, there was no equivocation between the time he made a decision to write and when he began to work. It was never “Is writing a book about Sardinia the right thing to do?” Instead, it was “I’ll go to Sardinia and write about it.” Reading Lawrence’s life stunned me into realizing how much time and energy I’ve wasted equivocating and what a huge emotional drain it’s been.

Lawrence didn’t seem to spend much time making choices—even difficult ones, like leaving England without any money and becoming an expatriate. He just acted, which sometimes got him into trouble. While he was writing Women in Love (1920), he never asked himself whether mocking Ottoline Morrell would get him sued. While he was composing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he never wondered whether his work would be censored if he wrote explicitly sexual material. He wrote what he chose, and took the consequences.

He could be, and often was, overly smug and self-assured. He was often elated and excited. But he was just as often angry and miserable. Still, it was important for me to understand from his example that learning how to make decisions might help my writing practice.

So, how did I become a writer who’s comfortable making scores of complicated choices each day of my writing life? I simply decided to practice deciding. And one key principle helped me more than any other: in writing, it doesn’t matter what you choose to do, it only matters that you choose to do something.

I’ve seen students waste precious writing time because they can’t decide whether to write about, say, their mother or their father; they want to wait until the subject seems right. I tell them, “Just choose. Once you make a choice, possibilities you haven’t yet imagined will reveal themselves.”

I’ve witnessed students hampered by their incapacity to decide what should come first, or what should come last in a memoir. I say, “Try it one way. Try it the other way. Think about the advantages of each. Then decide.” I’ve learned that as you practice making decisions over time, you begin to have a stronger sense of what needs to be done.

But I’ve learned, too, that deciding becomes easier in my work if I focus on just one writing task at a time.

Let’s say I decide to begin a new personal essay. I let myself write anything I want for a while. I decide not to think about whether my work is worthwhile.

I decide it’s time to draft a full-length version of the work based on my scribbles. I decide not to think about whether the piece is working.

I decide it’s time to deepen the piece, to develop the characters. I decide not to think about how to organize the work.

I decide it’s time to organize the piece. I decide not to carefully edit on this round.

I decide it’s time to line edit the piece, to work on it word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. I decide this will be the last revision before I show the work to someone.

Antonya Nelson’s essay “Short Story: A Process of Revision” provides an insightful paradigm to help us decide what to do throughout the process of composing and revising one piece of work. (Nelson used it in a fiction workshop.) During each draft, we attend only “to the requirements laid out for that draft”; we revise “with a single objective each time.”

The first decision, says Nelson, is to choose what to write about—an event that we understand is “a story.” We then write a five-hundred-word account of the event.

The second decision is the point of view of the narrative. In fiction, Nelson suggests a third-person narrator. In memoir, it would be an “I” narrator—but it could be the “I” during the time of the narrative, or the adult “I” who understands that event more fully. We then write a one-thousand-word account using that point of view. (Each subsequent draft increases by five hundred words.)

The third decision is “to put some sort of clock on the story”: a road trip, an hour, a day, a weekend, a summer. Do we want to include only the time frame of that event? Or what came before and/or after? We revise, again, inserting this focus.

The fourth decision is to identify “the props and objects” to use in the narrative: this is the “detail-making draft.” We revise, again, including them. In a scene where my father comes home from World War II, for example, it would be important for me to include the parachute silk he brought me as a present and my mother’s horrified reaction—what I didn’t then know was that my father had taken it from a dead pilot.

The fifth decision is to think about the protagonist’s age in the narrative, to imagine a time line suited to the protagonist and a life-altering event. Once chosen, we revise, again, including these.

The next decisions involve introducing a world event to deepen the narrative; thinking about how to use oppositional forces in the narrative; creating a narrative arc; and trying, perhaps, something out of the ordinary.

This oversimplifies both Nelson’s and my processes. But deciding what we’re going to do on each round and also deciding what we’re not going to do helps us immeasurably. We writers seem to have more difficulty making decisions if we try to do too much on one round. And we seem to work more decisively if we focus on only one thing at a time.