The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Structuring our work
Building a book, finishing a book
I routinely study the structure of the books I read. I look at the beginning, just before the midpoint, the midpoint, just before the end, and the end. I study foreshadowing, repetitions, character development, image patterns, depictions of place and time, flashbacks and flash-forwards. This practice has served me well when I compose my own books and when I discuss the possible structure of a work with a writer. Structuring our work is one of the hardest parts of completing a project. Anyone can write pages, but it takes a special skill—a learned skill—to turn pages into books.
When I’m writing a book, I work until I accumulate much of the raw material that will become the book. Then I reassess my work and make some decisions. They’re not irrevocable, but they give me an anchor.
I think anew about the beginning, the place just before the middle, the middle, the place just before the end, and the end. I think about what I want to happen at these points in the narrative. This forces me to think about structure, about how a reader will experience what I’ve written.
Alice Adams, author of the collection To See You Again (1982), indicated she needed to know what she was doing when writing a short story, so she often used a formula—an ABDCE formula (action, background, development, climax, ending). It’s one way of structuring a narrative and an excellent structure for a beginning writer to learn. Begin with an “action that is compelling.” Discuss “who these people are … and what was going on before the opening of the story.” Then develop their characters, describing what they desire (drama, action, and tension “grow out of that”). “[E]verything comes together in the climax, after which things are different … in some real way.” The ending lets us know “who these people are now, what they are left with, what happened,” and what the narrative meant.
When Adam Braver, author of the novel November 22, 1963 (2008) about Kennedy’s assassination, realized that a chunk of his work, “The Casket,” wasn’t working, he realized the linearity of his work was the problem. He wanted to transmit the experience of a character witnessing “the calamity and confusion taking place within the emergency room” after Kennedy had been shot.
He realized to accomplish his goal, he had to break the chronology. He took his draft, cut the pages into scenes, and reorganized them, searching for “that ’something else’ that inherently connected them.” After reassembling the work, he faced “narrative challenges” requiring research, revision, or rewriting. The work was “slow and meticulous.” But the result was an exciting—rather than a predictable—reinterpretation of the events. The right order of a work, according to Braver, “doesn’t always equate to linear narrative.”
In most narratives, the beginning of the story isn’t the beginning of the narrative. The beginning is that moment telling the reader everything needed to introduce the world of the narrative. A writer’s obligation is to make the reader fall in love with the subject, character, setting, or writing. The first words of a narrative are a seduction. When a writer understands this, the beginning becomes more obvious. And, no, a reader can’t wait for the good stuff. Study the first pages of the books you love. They’ll teach you what you need to know about how to begin a book. An excellent example is Cheryl Strayed’s prologue in Wild (2012), where the narrator, hiking alone, watches one of her boots drop into the forest below.
I’ve rarely composed the beginning of a work at the beginning of the process, though sometimes it happens, as when I wrote “Old Flame” for Ploughshares about an old boyfriend. I heard a line in my head—“I saw him once in all these years, walking up the steep hill from the bus stop, past my parents’ house…” that I knew would be the first line. More often, though, that beginning is buried somewhere in my jumble of pages.
When I start turning my pages into books, I try to find something a little unexpected for the beginning. How does a reader become engaged in a narrative? For me, it’s when I find myself in the midst of something fascinating, something unexpected, something that leaves me questioning, but something that leaves me satisfied, too. So that’s what I aim for at the beginning of my books. For the first words of my biography of Virginia Woolf, I chose these words, originally buried in a chapter: “Virginia Woolf was a sexually abused child; she was an incest survivor.” They immediately told the reader what the book was about.
My writing partner, Edvige Giunta, is writing a memoir about her childhood in Gela, Sicily. During today’s conversation, we discussed how she could take her pages and structure them so they become a book. Edvige has decided she wants the book to have three parts. I suggested she decide what chunks would come first, second, and third. She already knew what would come close to the middle—a key scene where her grandmother tells her a story. I suggested she calculate how many words she’d already written for each section so she’d know how many more words she needed to write.
I suggested she take all the chunks of her book and organize them on her dining room table—everything for the first third of the book on one side; everything for the “turn” of the book in the middle; everything for the conclusion on the right. She wouldn’t necessarily be arranging them chronologically but in circles of meaning: the history of Gela and how she learned of her family’s past, her childhood and friendships, her emigration.
She couldn’t do that yet, though, because her book existed only as a single long document in her computer. She had to break it into chunks, make each a separate document, and give each chunk a “tag name” so she could refer to it and locate it. (I’ve learned that working in one very long document, as Edvige had been doing, makes turning pages into books difficult, if not impossible.) She had to print everything out so she could see what she had, sort everything, and determine what she needed to write. She’d then be closer to ascertaining the structure of her book. And she wouldn’t be working in the dark.