The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Over time
Building a book, finishing a book

As we write our books over time, and as we add new material bit by bit, our work can take on a depth and complexity that would be missing if we rushed through the process. A writer like Jeffrey Eugenides works with rather than against the fact that his books take long to write. Through the years, as he adds new material, he slowly develops the complexity of his novels.

Through the years Eugenides was composing Middlesex, his multigenerational saga about the life and past history of the intersexed Cal Stephanides, many “life-altering things happened”—his father died in a plane crash and his daughter was born. He wanted the novel to respond to those changes as he worked.

Initially, Eugenides wanted Middlesex to be “a fictional memoir of a hermaphrodite,” which led him to inventing his character’s Greek ancestry. But when his wife became pregnant, he became interested in “birth and fetal development”; he transformed that knowledge into discourses on Cal’s genetic history. And when his father died, he became newly interested in family history; he transformed this preoccupation into a discussion of Cal’s family in Greece and their emigration to the United States. When you’re writing a book, Eugenides said, “everything you come across seems to fit into it.”

While working on the early chapters of the novel, Eugenides read about “W. D. Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam,” reputedly a silk merchant, who established a temple in Detroit, the setting of Middlesex. Eugenides’s—and Cal’s—grandparents were “silk farmers,” and Eugenides was writing the silk farming material in Middlesex when he stumbled upon Fard’s story and decided to include him as a character.

“Fard seemed ordained to become part of Middlesex,” Eugenides remarked—the serendipitous connection between Fard and silk farming and Detroit were too good to let go. While Eugenides works, he continually finds material he can incorporate into his novel, and, as he discovers how to include it, and how it relates to what’s already there, his narrative becomes richer.

Although Eugenides has described how he achieves complexity during the long process of writing a novel, when we write shorter pieces we also can allow ourselves to incorporate material that comes our way during the time we’re composing a work.

In “Old Flame,” a short piece I wrote for Ploughshares, I began by digging out a chapter I’d deleted from Crazy in the Kitchen about the time I saw an old boyfriend’s wife in a health food store when I was a grown woman. That led me to recalling the last time I’d seen him.

I tried to work with the wife material for several weeks and got nowhere. But then I suddenly felt compelled to write about attending a funeral, which I abandoned but which led me to write about my father’s stay in a nursing home in the months before his death, very difficult material.

At this point, there was no piece, just tangled, unrelated threads of meaning. I knew that this piece would take several months, and that it would take time to figure out what it was about; and I let myself write whatever I chose for a while, trusting it would somehow come together.

I remembered that when I visited my father once, I brought an art book depicting the paintings of Michelangelo. My father lingered over Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, and I wrote a scene describing how this painting depicting tortured sinners going to hell captivated this old man, near death. This led to my writing honestly about my difficult relationship with him, and how he’d harmed me when I was young, and how he again tried to harm me in the last weeks of his life.

Then one day, for relief, I went back to writing about the very last time I saw that old boyfriend—I was married; he was married; he was walking home past my parents’ house, and I was out on my parents’ lawn fighting with my kids. “What’s he going to do in a piece about my father?” I wondered, but still didn’t know.

And then I remembered driving to see his house one day after I’d had a particularly difficult time with my father—I’d never done it before—and I wrote about that.

Finally, I asked myself what the piece was about, and figured out (very late) why these narratives belonged together and what the narrative about that boyfriend had to do with the narrative of my father dying. I remembered how my involvement with this boy when I was a teenager helped me deal with my father’s rages, and I wrote about that.

I had the title “Old Flame” from the beginning, and it helped me understand how the seemingly disparate components of the work could fit together. There were flames in Michelangelo’s painting of the Last Judgment. My father was old. My boyfriend was an “old flame.” And I could use that metaphor to bring the strands of meaning into alignment, to speculate on what that boyfriend had meant to me when I was enduring the worst of my father’s brutality. Old flame/boyfriend; old/father; flame/hell—which my life with him often was, and how often I’d said to him, “Go to hell.”

Kathryn Harrison, who edited that edition of Ploughshares, suggested I change the ending. The piece originally ended with my father’s narrative. Harrison rightly believed ending with what that boy meant to me during the worst of my adolescence was better for the arc of the narrative—beginning with seeing him as a grown woman, ending with my being with him as a teenage girl.

Working bit by bit over time means that we’re often not sure about where we’re going, or what the work will look like when it’s finished. I’m pleased with the way “Old Flame” turned out. But imagine if I’d been less receptive to the way the work evolved and said to myself, “Look, this has to be about your father or the boyfriend, not both.” My job was trusting that the pieces I’d written fit together, and trusting that, in time, I’d understand how to construct the work.

My mentor, Mitchell A. Leaska, taught me that every completed work reverberates against its unwritten and unchosen alternatives. Imagine “Old Flame” without the boyfriend. Imagine Middlesex without W. D. Fard or genetics or silk farming. And in doing so, we can see how exciting it is for writers to allow layers of meaning into their works that they hadn’t even imagined when they began. This is the benefit of being receptive, as Eugenides is, to whatever happens during the time that we do our work. “Slowly, as you write the book,” Eugenides said, “you become aware of … correspondences, and then you make them cohere into a pattern” over time in the process of constructing the work.