The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Where to begin
Getting ready to write
When my students begin their first major projects, they often say, “I don’t know where to begin,” and they sometimes ask me where I think they should begin. I’m inclined to say “Just begin, and see what happens” because there’s no right answer to this question. Successful writers have different ways of launching their works, and it takes a period of experimentation to learn what works best for each of us. And I know, too, that many writers shift the way they enter their projects from one time in their writing lives to another.
What worked best for me when I began writing was to begin a book by writing an essay for someone else. I wrote for a magazine and for other people’s essay collections as often as I could. Beginning a book without having something in hand was too scary for me. But if I wrote for someone else’s magazine or book, I felt far less pressure and far more freedom than if I were beginning to write the same material for a book of my own. This wasn’t my book; it was someone else’s, I’d tell myself. And although I was responsible to make my work as good as I could make it, I’d have an editor’s help in refining the work for publication. This freed me to figure out the voice of the book beforehand so that when I turned from writing the essay to writing the book, I had a sense of what the work would sound like, what its subject matter would be, and how it would be structured.
I began my biography of Virginia Woolf by writing an essay about when she was fifteen for a friend’s collection. I began my novel, Casting Off (1987), by writing a story, “Gluttony and Fornication,” for Chicago magazine. I began my memoir Crazy in the Kitchen (2014) by writing an essay called “Cutting the Bread” for The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture (2002) that I was editing with Edvige Giunta.
Getting a book off the ground is sitting down, starting to work, witnessing what happens, and moving on from there. As Anne Tyler, author of The Beginner’s Goodbye (2012), a novel about a man dealing with his wife’s death, has said, “It doesn’t take very long for most writers to realize that if you wait until the day you are inspired and feel like writing you’ll never do it at all.” She’s learned “just to go to my room and plug away.” She keeps a quotation by Richard Wilbur from the poem “Walking to Sleep” in her study about plunging directly into the work—to reassure her that once she begins, she’ll figure out what to do.
Tyler has described the challenges she’s faced as a writer in “Still Just Writing”—her kids’ vacations, a sick dog, visits from repairmen, a sick child, long visitations from foreign relatives, grocery shopping, bathroom scrubbing. She feels she’s always “hewing … creative time in small, hard chips from … living time.” She’s learned the necessity of boundaries: how to write when she can but to be fully engaged with the rest of her life when she’s not writing.
Tyler doesn’t begin from scratch. She keeps “an index box in which she has written ideas … and left them to ripen for years … until she feels she can make something of it.” After she settles on something that captures her fancy, she plans for “exactly a month” before she begins working. Her plan enables her to feel “very sure how a novel is going to end.” She writes “detailed background notes on each of her characters,” much of which goes unused because the work often takes a different, unexpected turn. Tyler’s way into her work has remained consistent for the nineteen novels she’s written.
Zadie Smith began writing her novel On Beauty (2005), about the lives of two families, by reworking the “first twenty pages for almost two years.” She’d shift from “first-person present tense, to third-person past tense, to third-person present tense, to first-person past tense, and so on.” As she worked, she paid close attention to voice; she learned that the nature of the work would shift dramatically “by the choice of a few words.”
The time Smith spent on these first pages was necessary: she unconsciously worked out many of the project’s challenges during this time. Staying with those pages was one “way of working on the whole novel, a way of finding its structure, its plot, its characters.” Smith felt like she’d wound “the key of a toy car tighter and tighter.… When you finally let it go, it travels at a crazy speed.” Once Smith felt satisfied with those pages, she finished On Beauty in five months. Smith’s method of beginning the novel worked well for her, although it was difficult.
When Smith started work on her most recent novel, NW (2012), she began very differently, improvising “’like a jazz musician’” with “’some scales, some tone, a colour’” about her subject, “the intricate class system that operates in London, with poverty and wealth existing cheek by jowl.”
Smith’s life differed dramatically from when she wrote On Beauty. She was married; she’d given birth to her first child; her father had died. Her writing rhythms were different; she’d been through a period of mourning. Because of these changes, she wrote about “the ’genuine relativity’ of time speeding up as one gets older.” Unlike the speed with which she completed On Beauty, NW proceeded far more slowly and took her eight years. A process that had worked for her when she was a young writer had to be adjusted. As a writer with a young child, she’s “on a different schedule.”
Before Virginia Woolf began composing Mrs. Dalloway (1925), she wrote a short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” She’d also written another story in which a shell-shocked veteran of the Great War “plots to assassinate the prime minister.” She then realized she could use both stories in her novel. In time, Woolf intertwined the story of Mrs. Dalloway, the wife of a member of Parliament, with that of the veteran Septimus Smith.
When Woolf began To the Lighthouse, the novel she wrote after Mrs. Dalloway, the idea for it came to her “in a great involuntary rush” while she was taking a walk. She then sketched a plan for the novel in her notebook. She decided that she would leave many of the characters of the Ramsay children undifferentiated; that time would become a character in the work; that she would describe her father, mother, St. Ives (her family’s summer home), and her childhood, “& all the usual things I try to put in—life, death &c.”
Woolf worked out some of the issues she faced in the novel in stories she was writing at the same time. One, “Ancestors,” describes her parents and her childhood. It’s a preliminary sketch for material she was describing in her evolving novel. The composition of To the Lighthouse was successful, in part, because she honored a moment of inspiration and then spent time planning and thinking about what she wanted to achieve. But Woolf also felt free to improvise on the page, even as she stuck to the original structure of the work.