The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Successful outcomes
Challenges and successes
A few years ago, I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Two of Allen’s suggestions have changed my writing practice. The first is determining what the successful outcome will be of any project we undertake. We often just start working, imagining that by simply writing, we’ll one day finish our books. But Allen says determining our intended “successful outcome” before we begin, and as we work, will make our work more purposeful and successful. Although many writers—and I’m one of them—often plunge in and let the material take them where it will, having even a general idea of our desired outcome—a story cycle about my childhood in Hoboken, for example—will help us focus.
To illustrate, a successful outcome for my current memoir might read: “An eighty-thousand-word book about my father’s experiences before, during, and after his service in World War II, and their effect upon him and our family.” Writing down this intention may seem obvious. But when I ask writers to state the outcome of their work, many haven’t thought about it and few can state it succinctly.
It’s also helpful to determine the successful outcome for each section of our projects: “Completed Prologue, introducing major themes and characters,” for example. And it’s also important to write down successful outcomes for each day’s work. (I keep a notebook on my desk for that purpose.)
Here are a few of my daily entries:
6 April: Completed draft of PT dream sequence.
4 May: A draft of “Lifeboat,” incorporating readers’ suggestions where appropriate.
10 May: Revised Prologue, incorporating PT dream sequence.
Allen suggests we write down our outcomes so we can refer to them and help us focus. He also suggests we state them as if we’ve completed them.
I try to be realistic about what I can accomplish in one day; I prefer to work slowly and methodically. When we begin, the work might proceed slowly; as we revise and near completion, we might work more quickly.
When I work like this, I don’t feel overwhelmed, and I feel less confused. I know my daily writing sessions are moving my work closer to completion; I don’t feel I’m circling round and round and going nowhere. Even at the beginning stages, I know where I’m headed as I draft material I will probably one day incorporate into my finished book. Most important, I know what my book is about.
Still this doesn’t mean we need to be rigid; our work will often take an unexpected turn that will enrich it. But if we have some sense of where we’re headed, we’ll feel far more purposeful each writing day. This is one of Allen’s crucial points—not only do we have to do our work, we have to think about the direction our work is heading and about what we want its outcome to be. And, yes, we might need to revise our successful outcome throughout the process.
Another of Allen’s suggestions I use is identifying the very next action we should take to move our projects in the direction of our intended successful outcome. Once we’ve decided upon a successful outcome for the day’s work, Allen suggests writing down the very next action to take—the “next to do”—to move the project along. We work on that single task before determining the next, and so forth.
The next to do permits me to focus. Without having a next-to-do task, my mind races. But if I finish one next to do, and then I write the next, and I work on that, my work feels purposeful. Some days, there might be only one; other days, several. But I write only one at a time. (This structure needn’t cramp our creativity. One next to do I often use is to write freely on a given subject for half an hour to see where that writing takes me.)
I’ll illustrate from a roughly two-and-a-half-hour writing session, interrupted by one long break. I wrote down one “successful outcome” and twelve next to dos, but I only wrote one down at a time, after I completed each task. Remember the next to do is the single next action that will move the project along to its “successful outcome.”
21 May: Successful Outcome. “Flushing Out the Enemy” material [a narrative about my father’s flashback to combat] “married” with second version. Potential epilogue material removed.
Next to Do:
1. Continue retyping “Flushing,” incorporating yesterday’s handwritten revisions. [This takes an hour.]
2. Find overlapping material. [Ten minutes.]
3. Integrate the two, keeping best wording. [Twenty minutes.]
4. Print new version. [A few minutes.]
5. Write down word total. [I update this daily; a few minutes.]
6. Assemble material for possible epilogue from deleted material and print. [Fifteen minutes.]
7. Read other epilogue material—4th pass against 5th pass—to ensure all changes incorporated. [Ten minutes.]
8. Read new possible epilogue and revise by hand. [Half an hour.]
9. Incorporate changes into document on computer. [Fifteen minutes.]
10. Print epilogue.
11. Enter totals.
12. File old versions; file new version; back up.
If I’d written down all twelve items as goals, I suspect I would’ve accomplished little. I might have jumped from one task to another or felt overwhelmed. But I got a great deal of work done by focusing on only one simple, doable task at a time.
Some writers believe we should move through our work organically, without writing down goals or thinking about aims. But an interview with Joan Didion, author of The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011), describes how she thinks about what she wants to achieve in a given work.
When writing Play It as It Lays (1970), Didion decided she “wanted to make it all first person.” But she learned she couldn’t maintain that point of view, so she revised her aim, “playing with a close third person”—“very close to the mind of the character.” Then she decided to try juxtaposing “first and third.”
At the end of each day, Didion steps back from her work, considers it, and decides what to do next.
“I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I’ve done that day. I can’t do it late in the afternoon because I’m too close to it,” she said. “So I spend this hour taking things out and putting other things in. Then I start the next day by redoing all of what I did the day before, following these evening notes.… If I don’t have the hour, and start the next day with just some bad pages and nowhere to go, I’m in low spirits.”
Didion knows that at the end of each day, the single next thing she’ll do is step back from her work and review it. Then the next thing she’ll do is revise and take notes on what needs to be done next. The following day, she’ll use the notes from the evening before and revise the previous day’s pages. She moves her book along, one step at a time, while avoiding the “low spirits” that might derail her work. Because she thinks about the successful outcome of her work, Didion has a self-defined set of criteria against which to judge each day’s work.