The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

What’s in your drawer?
Writers at rest

Diana Athill, in her memoir Somewhere Towards the End (2008), reflects upon what it’s like to be almost ninety and knowing you’re nearing the end of life. It’s forthright and unflinching, yet hopeful, a work worth reading for writers composing works of reflection.

Athill describes her life as an editor of V. S. Naipaul and Jean Rhys, among other famous writers. She describes how thrilled she was to discover, late in life, that she, too, could write. After she retired, she began writing a memoir, something she didn’t have the courage to do earlier, although she’d squirreled away the beginnings of three books in a desk drawer.

“[L]ooking for something in a rarely opened drawer,” she writes, “I happened on … two pages, and read them.” She thought “something could be made of them after all, so the next day I put paper in my typewriter and this time it wasn’t a blip, it was a whoosh!—and Instead of a Letter [1962], my first book, began.” The work became an account of how a pilot she’d loved broke off their engagement and then died in combat. After she completed the work, she was happier than she’d ever been. But she realized it might have taken her that long to comprehend her grief and write about this crisis in her life.

I suspect most writers have a manuscript hidden in some drawer that, like Athill’s scribbles, could be turned into a work of art. We might feel because we haven’t worked on it for a long time that we may as well let it go. But, instead, because time has passed we might arrive at a new perspective on that long-neglected work.

Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot, has described how, in the late nineties, while he was writing Middlesex, he “hit a rough patch and put the manuscript aside.” During this hiatus, he started writing another book “about a rich family throwing a debutante party.” Tired of the demands Middlesex was placing upon him, he hoped the new effort “would be less demanding” and easier to write. He toyed with it for about a month, and then realized it, too, would be a challenge. Besides, he missed working on Middlesex, and in the interim he’d figured out what he needed to do.

After publishing Middlesex, Eugenides “went back to the debutante book and worked on it for another couple years.” He thought the work was adequate, but he sensed something wasn’t working. “Then one day,” he said, “I wrote a sentence that changed everything.… ’Madeleine’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love.’” After writing about Madeleine and the two men in her life, Mitchell and Leonard, Eugenides realized he was writing two books. He excised the material about the party and instead “followed Madeleine, Mitchell, and Leonard on an entirely different journey.” He didn’t yet know that the notion of “the marriage plot” would provide him with “a structure for the novel”; this only became evident in time.

Early in her life, before her marriage, Virginia Woolf wrote a work called The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn about a historian who discovers a journal written by a woman in the fifteenth century, describing her life. Woolf chose not to publish it, but she kept it. It contains many themes Woolf would later engage—the inequity between the sexes, the unrealized desire of many women to write because of family demands, the lost examples of women’s writing in England.

The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn is an example of an unpublished work that serves as a template the author devises in a preliminary examination of the themes of future works.

I have just such a text in my drawer—“White on Black.” I wrote it more than twenty years ago. When I finished—or rather, stopped—I’d composed seventy pages about my childhood. The title referred to my Italian grandmother, dressed in black, crocheting a white tablecloth resting in her lap. I wrote about my love for her, about my family during wartime, about my relationship with my mother when my father was away. I stopped because I didn’t know what to do next. It wasn’t an essay; it wasn’t the beginning of a book. So I took it and put it in a drawer, and there it stayed for years.

When I was asked to write a memoir, I dug it out. For a while, I tried to work from it. But I realized this was the wrong approach. The work revealed the subject I wanted to tackle, but I wanted to use another voice and structure. I read it, imbibed its meaning, and put it back in the drawer. If I hadn’t written that failed work, I doubt whether I could have written my first memoir, Vertigo. Because much time had passed, I understood what I could use—the scenes I’d sketched—but I also realized I had to begin anew.

I pulled “White on Black” out of that drawer four more times: when I was writing Crazy in the Kitchen and knew my grandmother would figure in the work, when I was writing On Moving and knew I wanted to describe where my mother and I lived while my father was in the Pacific, when I wrote an essay about my grandmother’s handiwork, and when I began writing my current book about my father going to war.

What I’ve learned from having returned to, but never completing, “White on Black” through the years is that sometimes provisional, unsuccessful work will yield its treasures in time. I got more mileage out of this piece than I would have had I tried to force it into publishable shape before I understood what to do with that material.

Jeffrey Eugenides took work he’d put away and learned, in time, what story line to focus upon. Diana Athill learned her forgotten scribbles could be turned into powerful works. She didn’t initially think her writing was worth much, so she’d hidden it away. But when she found it years later, she learned she could muster the skill to complete the work. And she did this with two other abandoned manuscripts.

It’s worth looking for work we’ve stored away long ago, digging it out, and deciding if there’s anything we can do with it. Perhaps, like “White on Black,” something we’ve abandoned can inform a book we’re currently writing. Perhaps, like Athill’s bits and pieces, it can serve as inspiration to try again. Perhaps, like Eugenides’s manuscript, we’ll discover what to do with the work. It’s up to us to decide. But I believe that it’s important to honor work we’ve stashed away and think about its possibilities and potential. It might reveal precisely what we need to write right now.