The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Writing partners
Building a book, finishing a book
Writing doesn’t have to be—perhaps shouldn’t be—solitary. For years, Edvige Giunta has been my writing partner. When I don’t talk about my work with her, I second-guess myself; I’m afraid I’ll never finish; I can’t figure out what to do; I doubt the worth of my work. Having a writing partner is a blessing because I can ask for help when I need it.
These days Edvige is revising a second draft of a memoir about her youth in Gela, Sicily; I’m working on that book about my parents during World War II. We don’t share pages because Edvige and I work provisionally during our respective projects’ early stages. We usually don’t share work until ready for publication. We want to shape our work without criticism until we consider it ready; we don’t want to confuse our evolving vision.
We don’t want someone to critique our work; we want a collaborator in the creative process, someone to hold us accountable. As Edvige phrased it, we want an interlocutor—someone who asks us questions about our work, our process, our challenges, and who suggests solutions when asked. When we have regular telephone conversations discussing our work, we each proceed more confidently.
Edvige tells me what she’s accomplished during the past week, then describes her current writing challenges. She recently reported she’d completed a second pass of the first chapter of her memoir, and she’d previewed a heavily edited first pass of her second chapter. She’d found a chunk of writing describing Gela’s geographical/historical background, essential for readers. Should this become an interchapter? Or should the material be incorporated into the first and second chapters? As we talk, we take notes so we have a record of our discussion to consult the following week.
“Enter the handwritten edits into the computer document of the second chapter,” I suggested. “It’ll be too hard to incorporate the historical/geographical material unless you have a clean copy. I think you need to hang out with the uncertainty of what to do with that material; you’ll eventually know what to do.”
Edvige and I always commit to realistic work schedules and writing plans for the coming week. Edvige said she had four hours to work on her memoir—she was teaching, editing, and had household responsibilities. She decided to start entering the handwritten changes, though she didn’t know how long it would take. She agreed to postpone deciding what to do with the geographical/historical material. Meanwhile, she’d reread it.
I reported that as I was revising a section of the prologue, where my father laboriously climbs the stairs to my house near the end of his life, I stumbled into using a new voice and added flashbacks describing my early relationship with him. I’d struggled with incorporating my point of view into this book about him and hoped I might have found a way to do it. But I wanted Edvige’s opinion about the work’s new direction. I was excited, but also skittish, and worried this meant revising everything else I’d written to incorporate this more complex point of view.
Edvige knows I make radical changes near the end of my process. She suggested I move slowly through the prologue again, taking as long as I needed to refine this new point of view. “This just happened,” she said. “But you usually shift the work dramatically in your final drafts. Don’t rush the process. You knew something was missing, that you weren’t yet in the narrative, so it seems like you’ve learned what you need to do.” With Edvige’s help, I decided I’d revise the prologue again, and then revise it once more before deciding how to incorporate this new point of view into subsequent chapters.
Edvige asked me about my schedule for the coming week. I told her I wanted to work two hours each day. She suggested I not try to complete the revision by the end of the week but instead simply commit to my two-hour schedule. She reminded me it was essential that I not feel pressured.
Talking specifically in this way about a work in progress proves invaluable to us both. I’m revitalized by our meetings; I know the direction my work will take; I’ve generated some possible solutions to my current challenges; I know my plan for the coming week is doable. Each week, Edvige and I recommit to the slow and steady process of our work.
When Jonathan Franzen couldn’t find an agent for his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), a satire set in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1984, he contacted Hugh Nissenson, author of In the Reign of Peace (1972) and the only writer Franzen knew, and asked for advice. Nissenson asked how long the book was and when Franzen told him, Nissenson responded “I can tell you right now it’s two times too long. You’ve got to go back and cut it by half.” Nissenson also said, “There’s gotta be a lot of sex in it.”
Franzen considered Nissenson’s advice “a wonderful gift.” He realized he could cut “two hundred pages.” More important, he understood the “connection between my needs as a reader and what I was doing as a writer, which I had never made before.” That discussion taught Franzen that if he wanted readers, the novel “needed to move” and he “had to make the cuts to make it move.”
Before Franzen wrote The Corrections, he and David Means, author of A Quick Kiss of Redemption and Other Stories (1991), had telephone conversations about how they could connect with a larger audience. They wanted to move “beyond pure intellectual play into realms of … emotional significance.” They finally agreed that fiction was an “effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance.” After these conversations, Franzen decided to “write books that ordinary people … could connect with.” The Corrections was an outgrowth of his conversations with Means.
Having a writing partner can help our work immeasurably. Knowing we needn’t necessarily work alone if we choose not to can ease the difficulty of the process and can help us gain insight into what we need to do to our works in progress. Even if we choose to work in solitude, it still helps to have supportive writer friends who understand what we’re going through.