The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
What worked and why
Challenges and successes
Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn’s The Mindful Way Through Depression describes an experiment called The Mouse in the Maze, the results of which can help us with our writing. Two groups of students were shown a cartoon mouse, trapped in a maze. Each group was shown a different version. One depicted a piece of Swiss cheese at the maze’s exit, the other, an owl hovering to seize the mouse.
The maze took a few minutes to solve. Later, the students were tested to determine their current state of creativity. “Those who had helped their mouse avoid the owl turned in scores that were fifty percent lower than the scores of students who helped their mouse find the cheese. The state of mind elicited by attending to the owl had resulted in a lingering sense of caution, avoidance, and vigilance for things going wrong. This mind-state in turn weakened creativity, closed down options, and reduced the students’ flexibility in responding to the next task.”
Imagining that the owl would capture the cartoon mouse significantly diminished the students’ creative responses. But imagining that the cartoon mouse would get the cheese significantly boosted the other group’s creative responses. According to The Mindful Way, the experiment suggests that if we approach any task—our writing, say—with “qualities of interest, curiosity, warmth, and goodwill” we can counter “effects of aversion and avoidance,” and choose more creative strategies. But this takes awareness, and conscious, deliberate work.
Now imagine two scenarios in our writing lives. In the first, we go to our desk, and tell ourselves, before we’ve written a word, that we don’t want to be writing and that we’re likely to encounter insurmountable problems. In the second, we pause for a moment to cultivate a state of “interest, curiosity, warmth, and goodwill” toward what might emerge during our writing session, to imagine a positive outcome of our day’s work and the surprises in store for us. We imagine the sense of fulfillment we’ll feel when we’re finished for the day. If we deliberately cultivate the idea that all will be well as we work, as the authors of The Mindful Way report, it will likely enhance our creative capacity.
Martin Seligman, one of the founders of the positive psychology movement and author of Flourish (2011), suggests we keep a what-went-well-today-and-why diary. Seligman states that this simple practice tends to lower depression and increase satisfaction—the results have been documented. The technique also increases self-discipline and grit, essential qualities for writers.
The what-went-well diary focuses on the positive; it invites us to learn about our own effectiveness and provides us with information we can use to plan our future behavior. If we understand what went well today, and why it went well, we’ll be more likely to engage in activities that will yield positive results in the future.
We can apply Seligman’s technique not only to our daily lives but also to our writing. What if, at the end of our writing day, we deliberated and then wrote about what went well with our writing today, and why? If we do this consistently, we’ll have an invaluable record of what works for us and why what we did worked, rather than the altogether more common litany of complaints about what isn’t working, and goodness knows why.
I’ve just finished writing a chapter of my book about my parents’ meeting and marriage during World War II; I still have a few more chapters to write. When I spent time writing what went well as I wrote this chapter and why, I learned that organizing my notes into a time line of worldwide events helped—I didn’t have to refer to hundreds of pages of notes to check dates. I learned that inserting events from my parents’ lives helped—I could plot their lives against historical events. I learned that culling family photographs into one photograph album helped—I could see what my parents looked like, and because the photos were dated, I could determine when events (like their honeymoon) had taken place. I learned that working in the morning for two or three hours on this project helped—it was good for me to stop when I still had something to say. I learned I worked best when I’d had a good night’s sleep, done thirty minutes of aerobic exercise, turned off my phone, and didn’t check e-mail. I learned I needed twenty days to complete the chapter; I learned I needed seven days to organize my materials before beginning the revision. I learned it was best to work without showing the chapters to anyone and without talking about it. I learned the proposal I’d written for the chapter acted as a guide for my writing.
After I wrote what worked and why for a few days, I started feeling better about this book in progress. I learned that I really know what I’m doing and know how I work best. I learned that, for me, the writing process is far less haphazard and far more studied and planned than I’d imagined. I learned how to organize my work for the next chapter based upon what worked for me while I was writing this one.
Rick Bass, author of thirty-one works of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, All the Land to Hold Us (2013), has described what he does “when a story isn’t working as well as it could be—or when it isn’t working at all.” He says that when we face this situation as writers, we have two choices—“to endure and accept the failure or to try something different.” Because accepting failure isn’t an option for Bass, he’s learned, from past experience, that when he encounters tangles in his work, what works for him “is to try to stay calm and go back to basics, to try to show, in gestures, images, and descriptions as simple as possible, what it is you’re trying to convey, and not to try to do it all at once, but break it down into pieces.”
When the work is confusing, and Bass can’t figure out what he’s trying to communicate, he tells himself, “Try to say it straight.…” After “frustrating attempts” at untangling a snarl of language, Bass has learned to step back and ask himself, “What is the one thing, the main thought, the simplest thought?” Next, Bass tries to “speak the thought out loud, as if in conversation.” Then he writes down the sentence he’s uttered aloud as a “placeholder” and then he “proceed[s] anew.”
The reason this works, Bass says, is that he’s learned that he often asks “words to do too much work” in his prose. His prose becomes incomprehensible not because of a “muddled brain” but because he’s trying to relate something that’s “too complicated to be captured or expressed in a single sentence.”
Bass has taken the time to reflect upon what has worked well for him and why it has. His tried-and-true formula empowers him to dig into a draft that isn’t yet working because he’s learned what he needs to do to make a draft work. The benefit of this strategy, he says, is that “your body and mind will relax”; “your body and mind will seek tenaciously to solve the problem.…” Rather than telling himself he’s failed, Bass looks at his muddled prose as a challenge that he can solve because he can rely on his proven strategy to “Say it straight.”