The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Fresh air
Writers at rest

Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees (2002), has observed that although she believes in working hard, she also believes her writing can suffer “from a lack of loitering.” Kidd says, “I try to go out to my dock every morning and just sit there, watching the wind blow.” Though she doesn’t know if this routine is crucial for her writing, she thinks it might be “because the imagination needs that little bit of downtime to browse around.… Maybe the mind simply needs a breather, some mindless diversion.”

When Virginia Woolf’s work on Jacob’s Room came to a standstill because she was sick, she wrote into her diary that going out onto the Sussex South Downs was intimately connected with her ability to write. “[W]hat wouldn’t I give,” she wrote, “to be coming through Firle woods, dusty & hot, with my nose turned home, every muscle tired,… so sane & cool, & ripe for the morrows [sic] task. How I should notice everything—the phrase for it coming the moment after & fitting like a glove;… so my story would begin telling itself.”

Woolf knew what she needed to do to practice her art. Each day about four, she left her house and went outside. In writing Jacob’s Room, set during the Great War, she knew she was “writing against the current” and to do this well she needed to be in good shape and clear her head and lift her spirits by taking exercise outdoors. She trusted that when she was outdoors, the words she needed would come.

You can see the evidence of the time Woolf spent outdoors in her work. The walks that Jacob takes in Jacob’s Room—one with his friend Bonamy—replicate those Woolf herself took through London. Mrs. Dalloway’s famous walk in Mrs. Dalloway and her essay, “Street Haunting” (1930), are other examples of Woolf writing her walks into her work. Her descriptions of London, Sussex, and Cornwall are based upon years of her paying careful attention to what she saw as she walked.

When Toni Morrison was composing Beloved (1987) and working on the infanticide scene where “Sethe cuts the throat of the child”—an enormously difficult passage to write—she remembered “getting up from the table and walking outside for a long time—walking around the yard and coming back and revising a little bit and going back out and in and rewriting the sentence over and over again.” The scene was so difficult, so fraught with emotion, and required so much authorial control that Morrison found herself “unable to sit there and would have to go away and come back.” Those breaks from the work, those perambulations outside, enabled Morrison to write the scene in the understated way she desired so that the language didn’t “compete with the violence itself.”

Henry Miller walked the city of Paris and kept notebooks describing what he saw. He used them when writing about Paris. In Tropic of Cancer, you can see the artistic payoff of these walks—his descriptions of the Seine, of the various quarters. His walks also kept him alert enough and fit enough to keep working. Miller wanted to be a long-lived writer, and so he knew he had to keep active by walking, or, later in his life, by swimming when he lived in California.

My friend Christoph Keller writes about the effort it takes him to get outside in his memoir The Best Dancer (2003). Keller uses a wheelchair, and getting it down the steps into the street from an apartment where he lived with his wife, the poet Jan Heller Levi, took enormous coordination between them. Keller routinely roams New York City. “When I’m out and about in this city,” he writes, “I am amazed simply because everywhere you look there is something to be amazed at.” Keller shows us his adopted city from his vantage point; he describes the people who interact with him; he relates the impediments to his getting around; he writes about his intense love affair with New York.

“I’m stuck,” I sometimes complain to my husband when I’m working on a thorny piece of writing.

“Don’t just sit there. Go outside,” he replies.

Writing is intense work. It’s hard work. It’s work I need to take a break from each day to clear my head, to broaden my perspective, and to take care of myself. If I don’t, my writing suffers. Like Woolf, I’ll have a case of the fidgets. I’ll ruminate. I won’t know what to write. I’ll stare at the screen. I’ll begin to believe there’s nothing significant beyond the desk. And unless I breathe some fresh air each day, my work sounds as if it’s been written in a hermetically sealed and stuffy room.

Thinking about how necessary this outside life was/is to me and to the writers I’ve mentioned reminds me that the ability to be outside alone, freely and fearlessly, cannot be taken for granted. Nawal El Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Woman’s Prison describes what it’s like to be imprisoned for your political views, and wary of being outside when you’re released. Keller’s The Best Dancer recounts the thoughtless impediments our society puts in the way of those of us using wheelchairs as our only means of locomotion. Woolf describes how, for years, she took for granted the fact that she could open her door, walk out onto the Downs, or into the streets of London, and dream her books. And then, during World War II, the Luftwaffe began bombing England, and she could no longer roam her beloved Downs for fear of being hit by a bomb dropped from an airplane. That’s in her diary, too. What it was like not to be able to roam freely outside and how it adversely affected her life and work.

Some writers I know think that when you’re a writer, you should stay indoors at your desk and just write. It’s as if time spent away from the desk will impede your progress irrevocably. There are some writers—Peter Ackroyd, author of more than fifty books, for whom life is mostly work (he writes three books simultaneously—history in the morning; biography and fiction in the afternoon) and little play (two outings a month to visit historical villages in England). But many prolific writers—Sue Monk Kidd, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Henry Miller, and Christoph Keller, among them—took/take time to go outdoors. They understood/understand that we often get our best insights when we’re away from our work, while we’re doing something restful like Kidd or something rhythmic like walking (Woolf) or rolling along in a wheelchair (Keller) or something to ease the intensity of the work like Morrison. A writer’s work is close, intense, focused work. It’s often helpful for us to get away from our desks, change our point of view, and look at the outside world.