The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
The second sleeve
Building a book, finishing a book
Right now, I’m knitting a complicated Fair Isle sweater called thistle coat. I’ve finished the back, the fronts, and the first sleeve. I’ve been knitting this sweater for months. But I’m still knitting that blasted second sleeve. The shaping is complicated, and I’ve had to rip it out a few times. I’ve come close to abandoning it, but haven’t. To finish it will take persistence and some skill. One of my knitting teachers told me she wished she had a dollar for all the unfinished sweaters languishing in closets missing only that second sleeve. She thinks it’s because by the time knitters are working on the second sleeve they’re bored and want the excitement that comes from beginning a new project; the second sleeve is nothing but a slog. Yes, it’s hard to finish what we start—a sweater, a book—especially if we run into challenges near the end.
There isn’t a clear analogy between finishing a sweater and finishing a book, of course. But I know many writers who’ve abandoned projects close to the end because they’ve become frustrated trying to figure out how to fix something that isn’t working. And, yes, sometimes abandoning a work to start something else is wise. Still, when I have a snag in my own projects near the end, I always call Edvige Giunta, and tell her I’m thinking of abandoning the project. Edvige knows I need to think that I can stop work on something that’s giving me trouble. And she knows that once I entertain the possibility of casting a project aside, I’ll somehow figure out what I need to do next. When we get to the stage when we want to abandon our books, it might be because we’ve worked so hard to get where we are that we can’t imagine tearing the book apart to fix something we know doesn’t work and we just want to walk away. Maybe we realize we need a new ending or a new beginning. Or that we need to completely overhaul the work. Or that the structure is wrong. Or the voice. Or the point of view. Or that something central isn’t working—when Donna Tartt was writing The Secret History (1992), she realized: “I was torturing myself unnecessarily” with a “tricky time sequence”; when she decided to tell it “very simply from beginning to end,” everything in the novel “fell smoothly into place,” and the solution was “just cut and paste.”
Do we decide to stick it out and do the grunt work that it takes to complete the book like Tartt? Or do we throw it in a drawer, sick of it or confounded by what needs doing, eager to get on to another piece of writing? But writers who haven’t completed their projects tell me the unfinished work feels like a thorn in their sides: they often think about it and it makes them feel bad.
Writers have asked me how to get through this stage. Knowing this is normal helps. Knowing that I’ll get to start something new after I finish helps. It also helps to realize that if I abandon what I’m working on and start something new, I’ll just get to that stage again, and then I’ll have not one piece but two to untangle. When I arrive at this stage, which I’ve come to call “the second sleeve stage,” it helps me to know that many important writers have been there, too. I’ve learned strategies from them. But, I’ve learned that most important writers face this moment and that they get to the other side and finish their books.
When Zadie Smith was composing NW, set in the northwest London of her youth, “describing the simultaneously tangled and divergent lives of four people in their 30s who were all born on the same housing estate,” she came to a seeming impasse in writing the last section of the novel. After she gave the work to readers, “nobody liked it.” Smith knew it wasn’t good, but she had been working on the novel for so long that she “had a very childish, throwing-the-toys-out-of-the-pram reaction,” and she contemplated abandoning the novel.
But her husband, the poet Nick Laird, said, “’Don’t do that.’” Laird made her go back and rework the third part of the novel. “’We’ve all had to put up with you for seven years,’” Laird said. “’Something has to come out of this.’” So Smith went back to work: “The last section I rewrote entirely,” she said.
When she was still writing, Alice Munro often got to the point in the composition of a story when she realized she didn’t “want to work on it anymore.” She would have an adverse visceral reaction to it, “a terrible reluctance to go near it,” a sense that she’d have to force herself to continue.
Munro learned that a moment like that told her “something is badly wrong” with the work, and she contemplated abandoning it. And this happened with “about three quarters” of the stories Munro wrote.
At this point, Munro usually experienced “a day or two of bad depression.” She let herself seriously contemplate stopping work on that troublesome story and she began to “think of something else” she could write. Munro likened this time in her work to a stage where there are problems in “a love affair: you’re getting out of all the disappointment and misery [of the relationship] by going out with some new man you don’t really like at all, but you haven’t noticed that yet.” Somehow you realize that if you go out with that other man, you’ll face the same challenges, or worse ones, with him than you’re experiencing with the first man, so you might as well try to figure out how to stay with him.
By emotionally distancing herself from that troublesome work and flirting with the possibility of writing another work, Munro “suddenly come[s] up with something about the story that I abandoned; I will see how to do it. But that only seems to happen after I’ve said, No this isn’t going to work, forget it.”
But the time preceding when Munro happened upon her artistic solutions was difficult. She would be “on edge and enraged”; she’d try to figure out the answer, but would just keep “running into brick walls.” And this process—thinking of abandoning the work, trying to figure out how to fix it, thinking about beginning a new work—would last for some time. Then, and “quite unexpectedly,” when Munro was away from her desk “in the grocery store or out for a drive” she’d know what she had to do. Perhaps she’d have to change the point of view. Perhaps she’d have to eliminate a character. Perhaps she’d have to shift the relationships of the characters in the work. “The big change, which is usually the radical change,” one which might not necessarily have improved the story, Munro admitted, but one, she said, which made “it possible for me to continue to write.”