The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Ship’s log
Challenges and successes
I’ve been doing research about the aircraft carrier my father served on during the late 1930s, prior to World War II. I learned that each takeoff, landing, flight, accident, repair, event (ceremonies, parades, changes of command, orders received) was recorded in the ship’s log. This was required so there was a record available for accountability but also for historians. Because of the ship’s log, I can re-create my father’s days aboard that carrier.
Ernest Hemingway kept something like a ship’s log. In interviewing him, George Plimpton learned that Hemingway kept track “of his daily progress—’so as not to kid myself’—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head.” On the chart, Hemingway recorded his “daily output”: “450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512,” the high number reflecting days Hemingway worked longer so he could spend the next day “fishing on the Gulf Stream.”
We writers so often make lists of what we have to do, but we don’t often record what we’ve accomplished—our “done” list, the equivalent of a ship’s log. How often do we think about our writing day, reflect upon what we’ve accomplished, congratulate ourselves for work well done, and make a record that we can refer to in order to help us document how a book was written?
I recently spoke with a writer friend who’s been chastising herself for not having accomplished much. Then one day she and her writer husband revisited the work of the past several months, and she was startled to discover that she’d reviewed and revised scores of her poems, made a significant decision about the book’s order, detached several poems from the collection to turn them into a chapbook, submitted the chapbook to the press that had published her work before, submitted her work to a community of writers for review. She’s also been working on a biography of a famous poet; she’s helped scores of writers with their works in progress; she’s read her husband’s novel manuscript and made detailed suggestions for revision; she’s discussed a collection of essays she’s edited with a publisher.
But until my friend wrote everything down, she’d been telling herself she wasn’t productive and that she’d been wasting her time. This eroded her sense of self-worth, although there was no reason for her to feel this way.
My friend does far more than write. So if she were to write down her accomplishments as a partner, teacher, friend, householder, reader, and so on, her “done” list would be extremely long. And perhaps if she’d recorded these items at the end of each day, she would have spared herself the self-flagellation.
Why bother spending a few moments each day recording what we’ve done?
If you’re anything like my friend or like me, your perception of what you accomplish is faulty. We don’t often record our accomplishments. But honoring what we’ve done (whether it’s writing a few pages, washing a sink full of dishes, sitting in silence to gain perspective on a challenge) helps us value our work and value ourselves. Unless we keep an accurate ship’s log, we might not hold ourselves accountable—as Hemingway did. And having such a log is essential if we claim our work space, equipment, and travel as tax deductions: we can easily document how long it took us to write a book.
Leonard Woolf kept the equivalent of a ship’s log which became the basis for his five-volume autobiography. Because of his detailed entries, he could, for example, document his meeting on January 28, 1939, with Sigmund Freud, whom the Hogarth Press published, and their discussion about the Nazis. He could relate that on his drive from Cantal to Dieppe in France in his Singer automobile, his tires blew out “an average every 25 miles” and that he made friends with a French family who helped him repair a tire.
Virginia Woolf also kept a version of a ship’s log in her diary so literary scholars can chart when she conceptualized a work, when she was at work on a book, when she revised, what her goals were for her works in progress, when she believed she was finished. And because these entries are dated, we can coordinate her writing with historical events as I have in the introduction to this book, when I described how she created a working-class character in To the Lighthouse when England was experiencing a massive strike and Woolf realized how dependent society is upon the working classes.
I keep a ship’s log of my writing that permits me to look back and recall the progress of one of my essays or books. I know, for example, that I spent two hours revising an essay for this book, that I rethought its organization, that I read interviews with Norman Rush about his writing process. I often reread my log so I can remind myself of the hills and valleys of the creative process. No matter how accurate I think my memory is, I often misremember how I wrote a particular book. I seem to think it was harder or easier than it was. Rereading my log during a difficult stage of a current project—often when I’m urging myself to work too quickly or beating myself up for my slow progress—reminds me of how slowly my work progressed before.
When I’ve been interviewed about how I wrote my memoir Vertigo, for example, I could describe the work’s progress accurately. I know that on February 16, 1994, I was revising the chapter about my sister’s suicide to figure out how to incorporate it into the memoir. I know that on March 29, 1994, I read Jay Martin’s Who Am I This Time? (1988) and it helped me understand why Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo (1958) was so important to me when I was a teenager, because I wrote some ideas into my log on this date about my personal connection to the movie that I subsequently used in the memoir—that the character played by Jimmy Stewart was obsessed with the character played by Kim Novak and that I had to think about my relationship with a particular boy. I know it took me until June 11, 1994, to actually begin work on the piece called “Vertigo” about that movie.
By referring to this log, I can re-create my process of working on this book. And now, when I’m in the midst of writing another memoir, reading the log helps me remember that although I thought Vertigo was an easy book to write, my log shows, instead, that it was slow going, that it was hard work, that it took a long time to write, that I agonized over its order, just as with the memoir I’m writing now. I learned, for example, that “Vertigo,” the piece about the movie, took me over a year to perfect. And it was a piece I erroneously believed came quickly.
I’ve found that keeping such a record is an important way of honoring my work. It’s not easy for a woman like me with origins in the working class to value the work of writing. My mother, for example, didn’t consider writing as work. She felt free to interrupt me whenever I was writing and wasn’t proud of the writing I did. So I must do all I can to value my accomplishments, to remind myself that, indeed, my writing is work, and that I work hard at writing.