The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Taking a break
Writers at rest

When I was stumped while writing my memoir Adultery, my husband and I were supposed to go to Hawaii, where we’d never been. When we’d first arranged the trip, I was thrilled. But close to the time of our departure, I didn’t want to go. I had a book to unravel. Leaving my work was crazy.

“Let’s not go,” I said one morning. “My work isn’t going well, and I don’t have time to fool around.”

“We’re going,” he said. “If you get away, you’ll figure it out when you get back.”

My husband believes in taking time off. I do, too—theoretically. But, practically, I feel more myself when I’m working. As the psychologist Howard Gruber has said, for “the creative person, the greatest fun is the work.” We’ve never taken a holiday without my first trying to subvert it. I don’t feel well. Travel is difficult. The weather is terrible where we’re going.

My parents valued education, so when I was young, the only time my parents didn’t bother me was when I was doing homework. My father made me a triangular desk that fit into a space at the top of the stairs. I’d finish my assignments and then invent more homework. I’d have to read about the Civil War in the encyclopedia; I’d have to practice vocabulary; I’d have to read two additional novels.

Sitting at my desk while I was working, nobody told me what to do. My father was pleased with my industry rather than angry with me. My mother wanted me to study because, no matter how much she needed my help, she wanted me to do well in school. Sitting at my desk working helped me feel a sense of control in my chaotic household. Who knew what might happen when I left my desk? With this history, who’d ever want to leave a desk piled high with work?

And then I met and married my husband, a man with a far different sense of what life should be. He started dragging me away from my desk soon after we met, and has been doing so ever since. I was going away to relax, I’d tell myself, and this was necessary. And I hoped that wherever I went, I’d come back with a story to tell, a change in perspective, or perhaps even a new way of working, just like some of my favorite writers, like Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. If it was good for them, it had to be good for me, too.

I know many writers like me—writers who’d rather be writing than doing anything else. Writers like Marcel Proust, with their own equivalent of a cork-lined room. Writers who feel unmoored when they’re anywhere but home, who don’t want to leave a book in progress until it’s finished, who take their work with them wherever they go. But not all writers are like this. Many have traveled often, and to far-flung places, and their work has been enriched by these sojourns, like Elizabeth Bishop, whose Brazilian poems “Squatter’s Children” and “Questions of Travel” and her story “A Trip to Vigia” illustrate how necessary travel was to her art.

When I read in Howard Gardner’s Creating Minds about how necessary travel is to foster creativity, and that I could construe my holidays as a kind of homework necessary for writing my books, I stopped resisting. In “Breakaway Minds: Howard Gruber, Interviewed by Howard Gardner” Gardner remarked that “creative people combine a zest for work and a capacity for play.”

There is a shift in the way the brain works when we’re in an unfamiliar setting. That shift into a different kind of awareness and alertness seems to precipitate changes in writers’ works that often occur after they travel.

And so, when I was writing about Virginia Woolf, my husband and I traveled to Rodmell, where Virginia Woolf lived, and we took a walk on the Sussex South Downs as Woolf did most days. That single walk changed my perspective—and how I wrote—about Woolf. She’d been described as an ethereal creature, but I learned that she had to be robust to hike up and down those hills.

Before Woolf married (she was then Virginia Stephen), she traveled to Italy in April 1909 and kept a journal, writing detailed descriptions of the landscape, portraits of the people she met, and observations about how the English lived when they journeyed abroad. When she returned to England, she used what she’d seen and heard in writing the earlier version of her first novel The Voyage Out, then called Melymbrosia, although she changed the setting to South America.

After she married Leonard Woolf, she was often as unwilling to travel as I am. But her husband insisted: he made her take official holidays—six weeks a year away from her work, though she never stopped writing. She’d read, write in her journal, look, listen, and store away experiences for when she returned to England. She’d unlock conundrums and dream new books.

D. H. Lawrence was an outsider, as his biographer John Worthen describes. After Lawrence left England, he wandered the globe. And he was one of those writers who seemed to be at his best—less angry, more cheerful, and less hostile—when he was en route from one place to another. Without Lawrence’s travels, there would have been no art; there might have been no Lawrence. He wrote about every place he visited and lived—Mexico, Ceylon, Australia, Germany, Italy, New Mexico—and turned the people he met into characters in his novels. A visit to ancient tombs in Tuscany, for example, was used in his Etruscan Places (1932).

My husband and I did take that trip to Hawaii. While we were away, we wandered into a gallery displaying works by Dale Chihuly, who transformed the art of glass blowing into realms previously unexplored. His pieces are astonishingly beautiful in their form, color, and dynamism.

When we returned home, I bought a DVD showing Chihuly at work. He was coaching those who blow glass for him—you can’t do it for very many years; glass blowing is dangerous work and damages the lungs. He was telling the glass blowers to go where the glass wanted to go. “Let it go, let it go, let it go,” was his message, as the glass took on one form and then another. Rather than forcing the glass into predetermined shapes, Chihuly was insisting that the glass do what glass does when it’s blown. He was working with the material of his art rather than against it.

Go where the work wants to go. Don’t resist.

I wrote that down on a card after our trip, after seeing Chihuly’s works, and after seeing the DVD of Chihuly at work. And that trip, which I’d resisted, provoked me into working on Adultery in an entirely new way upon my return. The work found its voice, its shape, and its meaning with less effort than usual. I worked more freely, more fully, and more dangerously. The subject matter found its form. When I was at my desk, I imagined Chihuly standing behind me, saying, “Let it go, let it go, let it go.”