The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Turning pages into books
Building a book, finishing a book
A former student of mine, who wanted to transform her MFA thesis—a memoir about her Indian forebears—into a book, discussed that process with an agent. During a conversation, the agent asked a number of questions my former student needed to think about to turn her pages into a book.
• What is the book? Is it memoir? Journalism? Creative nonfiction? Fiction?
• What’s the voice? Personal? Authoritative? Whimsical? Irreverent? Solemn? Is there more than one voice? If there are several, how will they be handled?
• What’s the structure? Is it chronological? Does it move sequentially through time? Does it begin at a high point and work by association? How many parts are there to the narrative? Does it have chapters? Or is it a book without chapters? What is the chapter breakdown? Can you synopsize the chapters?
• How long will the book be? Does the subject require a lengthy treatment (Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down [1997]—368 pages)? Or one that, though complex, can be treated in a short book (Kathryn Harrison’s The Mother Knot—96 pages)? Or does the work function as a collection of short pieces that are tied together by an underlying theme (Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth).
• What’s the narrative arc? Where does it start? Where does it end? What happens to the characters in the story? What’s changed? What’s remained the same?
• How are the events linked by cause and effect? How and why do they unfold as they do? E. M. Forster makes the distinction between “The king died and then the queen died” and “The king died and then the queen died of grief” in Aspects of the Novel.
• What is the argument? What is the significance of the work?
• What are the themes/issues/questions in the work?
• What are the narrative threads and how are they linked to the theme?
• What are the central patterns of imagery? How are they related?
Often, when we work, we accumulate pages without thinking about what the meaning of our book will be. The preceding questions force us to think about how we might turn our pages into books: we can’t amass pages and expect a book to miraculously appear.
Ian McEwan, author of Enduring Love (1998), among other novels, has described the method whereby he turns his pages into books. He often begins by writing “random scenes and sketches, whistling in the dark.” When he works on these early pages, although he writes freely, not worrying about structure or chapters or order, McEwan nonetheless often has a general theme in mind. With Enduring Love, he “wanted to write in celebration of the rational,” and he also wanted to illuminate his belief that “the ways people are similar is at least as interesting as the ways in which they vary.”
After spending time writing whatever he chooses—“doodling,” McEwan calls it—he begins to develop a first draft, paying careful attention to the language of each sentence, considering it a “basic unit of thought.” McEwan has said, “I feel that if I don’t get the sentences right in the first draft, it’s going to be hard to get them right later.”
Throughout composing his first draft, McEwan works slowly, and he works meticulously, pretending the “first draft is the last.” This saves him difficulty when he’s completing his work. He reads his work aloud, paragraph by paragraph. And then he thinks of “the chapter as an intact, independent entity with a distinct character of its own, a kind of short story”—the chapter is an “important building block” of his work and McEwan ascertains whether his chapters are meeting those criteria. Sometimes, though, when he’s working on a scene, he’ll work steadily “to get it down.” These scenes will then “need a lot of slow revision.”
What is our book about? Can we answer this question simply and directly, in no more than a sentence? If we can, fine. If we can’t, then we might work aimlessly. We can revise our answer through time, of course.
When I’ve asked students to answer these questions, they often resist, saying they don’t know the answers. I tell them they’ll have to take time, at some point, to answer them and to determine the shape of their book. Students needing structure might want to think about this early; students working in a more exploratory manner might not be able to tackle this challenge until they’re in the middle of the process, but surely before the final stages. Of course, as the work changes, these parameters might change. Writing down the answers to these questions, revising them until they’re stated clearly, and refining them can help us understand what we’re doing. They can serve as a study guide. If we take time to think about our books in progress, we won’t be just writing, we’ll be writing toward a well-defined outcome.
Although many writers begin working in an exploratory way, and learn about their works as they progress, at a certain point I think it’s useful to step back, read our work, and make some decisions. This is difficult because we must begin to think about our work differently from when we’re simply generating prose. We must begin to think about what a naive intelligent reader needs—what background must we provide for a reader to understand what’s happening. We must think about the meaning of our work and its structure. We may begin the writing process, hoping our work has intrinsic value (and it always does to us), but unless we can articulate its meaning and significance clearly to someone else, our writing might be solipsistic and not meant for a general readership.
Unless we shift our attention to thinking about what we want a reader to take away from the time spent reading our work, we won’t be able to clarify the obscurities within it nor will we be able to understand its importance and significance. This often happens with time. In answering these questions we can begin sculpting our pages into a work of art for an eager reader.
I’ve found that beginning writers who stop and think about what their narratives mean are more easily able to complete their books. This work takes time and thought. But when we’ve produced a hefty sheaf of pages, we can sometimes become frustrated when we realize that turning those pages into books will take us a long a time—as long, or even longer—as it took us to generate the pages themselves. But it’s necessary work. And it’s exciting.