The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Introduction
Building a book, finishing a book
It’s important for us to understand that finishing a book has nothing to do with talent. Finishing a book requires a host of other qualities, among them, stamina. Keeping at a task for a long time when there’s no reward along the way (other than the satisfaction of engaging in the writing process and watching our work develop), no public acknowledgment that our work is worth completing (for many of us), and perhaps no guaranteed financial payoff for the hundreds or even thousands of hours of work we’re putting in is enormously difficult. It’s daunting to contemplate the completion of a long work even for seasoned writers. For beginning writers, it might seem overwhelming. Still we can cultivate the stamina that completing a book requires; it’s a skill that can be learned and that will be transformative.
I’ve learned what it takes to develop this skill from reading and rereading the journals John Steinbeck kept while composing The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. In both of these journals—one entry for each day Steinbeck worked on each of the novels—Steinbeck writes about what it took him to begin, build, and complete a work of art. I urge all my students and every beginning writer I know to read and reread these journals. They offer a manual of instruction on how to work day by day by day and how to overcome the inevitable roadblocks we encounter so that we can persevere in our work.
Even a writer as successful as Steinbeck needed to assess his process every single day of his writing life. He needed to think about what he was going to write and decide how it related to what he’d already written and what would follow. He needed to continually remind himself of the ongoing structure of his work and the themes and meanings he wanted to express. To plan how what he was writing that day fit into the scheme he’d already established and how it related to what he’d already written. To think about how to marshal the courage, strength, and stamina he needed for his work. To avoid thinking about the reception of the work, the money he’d make, and to focus, instead, on what he wanted to do each day. To think about his responsibilities to his wife and children and what he needed to do to maintain his relationships with them. To record whatever chores needed doing and how he would find time to do the woodworking and inventing that was an important part of his creative life. To think about how to create the kind of life that doing his work required. To ponder how he might need to change his writing space so it suited him better. To manage his emotions so he could go to the page each day, despite how he felt, by writing about what troubled him; to describe his doubts, his nervousness, and his fears. To remind himself that his work went best if he worked slowly and deliberately, if he refused to rush or to push himself to write more than his daily quota of two handwritten ledger pages though he might be tempted to work faster. Yet to hold himself to his self-assigned task lest he give in to what he termed his inherent laziness and to use his journal to warm up his writing muscle, and to prepare himself for the day’s work.
Although Steinbeck worked slowly and deliberately, halfway through writing The Grapes of Wrath, he wrote, “My work is no good, I think—I’m desperately upset about it.” Still, Steinbeck carried on despite his self-doubt and a host of interruptions—among them, buying and selling a house—with his daily, disciplined work schedule.
What does it take to turn pages into books? What does it take to finish a book? I’ve witnessed writers complete their work, and I’ve witnessed others stumble along the way and stop working. I think it’s important for us writers to understand that it takes a different set of skills to finish a book than it does to produce pages. Finishing a book demands that we think about a score of issues that we needn’t concern ourselves about in the earliest stages of our work. It requires us to assess what we’ve already written to determine what’s working and what’s not; to revise and refine our work. It requires our willingness, in effect, to rethink what we’ve written as we decide how to shape our work, and to jettison what doesn’t fit, and to write completely new material as required.
What do we want our work to say? What is the significance of the writing we’ve done? What should come first? What should come at the midpoint of our narrative? What should come last? What is our narrative’s structure? How should parts of our narrative relate to one another? Have we delineated place and time sufficiently so that our readers understand where and when our narratives take place? Are the people we’re writing about complex or do we have to go back through our work and deepen their portraits? Do the details of our work contribute to what we want our work to say? Have we gone through the work line by line, paragraph by paragraph, section by section? Does each sentence mean precisely what we want it to mean? Are there parts of the work that need to be discarded?
Years ago, I attended a lecture by the late historian Robin W. Winks, who spoke about his book The Historian as Detective. The writer, Winks said, must live with the knowledge that any book will be incomplete and imperfect. He suggested that we think of each work as an essay: an attempt to get at something and not as a definitive work.
“I work until I’m finished, not until the book’s finished,” Winks said. The book is never finished. And if we are to complete our books, we must learn to live with the fact that each effort will be an incomplete, imperfect attempt to codify our vision. To complete a book, we must accept that it won’t be perfect. And our pages will never become books unless we take the necessary steps to complete them, imperfect as they are.