The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
The finish line
Building a book, finishing a book
As Zadie Smith, author of NW, has said, “I think sometimes the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.”
Years ago, when I took painting lessons, my teacher, David Boyd, took a new canvas to demonstrate something he believed it was important for us to learn. He put a stroke on the canvas, then another, then another. And as he worked, he reflected on the process and said that when we begin a work of art, anything is possible. But that with each successive stroke, the possibilities become more limited, until, by the end—the most difficult stage—we have relatively few choices because the universe of the work has been defined. Or as Nicole Krauss, author of Great House, centering on the history of a desk and its owners’ lives, loves, and losses, has said, “The book, which for so long was something elastic, shifting to accommodate each new thought, every nuance in the writer’s mood, begins to harden.”
I’ve often thought about what it takes for a writer to finish a project. I’ve spoken to writers full of promise. Writers with glorious projects I can still vividly remember. Writers intent on living a creative life. But years later, nothing. Or, not nothing. A work of art that hasn’t been completed. But an unfinished work not deliberately set aside is a drain on the psyche. It’s like a sore on the bottom of a foot, an ulcer on a finger, a wound that won’t heal. Every writer I know who has a book they want to complete but that they’re not working on feels this way.
What stops writers from finishing? What keeps writers from picking up works they’ve set aside? A misapprehension about how long it takes or the intense kind of work that it takes to finish a book? Perhaps. Because I’ve found that when my students understand what finishing a book entails by reading about how published writers worked as they completed their projects, they were more likely to finish because they were prepared for the intense work that completing their projects would demand.
When Jeffrey Eugenides was finishing The Marriage Plot, describing the interrelated lives of students at Brown and what happens to them after graduation, although he’d worked on the novel for years, by the end of the process, he was so afraid the book was “going to be bad” that he continued working until he “fixed everything” that he could. Eugenides knew that “you can keep fixing things ad infinitum,” and that there’s a point when you have to stop. Still, he worked up to “the last minute” before his deadline.
Eugenides handed in an incomplete manuscript of The Marriage Plot to his editor, Jonathan Galassi—the last two chapters remained unwritten. Galassi determined the book was “almost there,” urging Eugenides to finish in time for a fall 2011 publication date.
For the next four months, Eugenides “worked like a madman, finishing the last two chapters and revising the entire four-hundred-and-fifty-page manuscript.… The thing was done.” To complete the book, Eugenides worked from the critiques of four trusted readers, including his wife and Galassi: “I responded to all their queries and suggestions,” he said. His wife’s notes alone “ran to a hundred and fifty pages.” And Eugenides reworked passages that still didn’t satisfy him.
When he received the page proofs, Eugenides went back to work, “this time listening only to my inner promptings,” he said. He worked into the summer, staying “alone for a month in Berlin” for the most intense work. At that stage, he “inserted new transitions and polished everything.” When he received the final page proofs, “there was little left to do.”
Eugenides compares his work at the end stage of The Marriage Plot to a sprint to the finish of a long and very difficult race: “I sprinted the last mile,” he said, “and held out the sacred flame, in the form of a red pencil.”
Eugenides did the best he could with the book; then he handed it to trusted readers, listened to their advice, and revised. He reverted to his own instincts late in the process, and worked intensely to finish. Some writers—Eugenides is one of them—describe that working toward a deadline somehow allows them to work better and more instinctively, if not more easily, than they had before.
John Steinbeck noted that, for him, the hardest work on a book came toward the end. That was the time when it was especially important for him to marshal his energy to complete the work. On October 27, 1951, nearing the end of East of Eden, Steinbeck wrote, “Weariness is on me, really creeping in, and I can’t give in to it.” He wondered whether he was “a little nuts” and vowed to shake the mood off as soon as he could.
What was getting in Steinbeck’s way was a promise to finish his book by a certain date. “I find myself trying to make it when I said I would,” Steinbeck wrote, and that unnecessary, self-imposed pressure was reflected in his writing work so that he had “to throw it out.” Steinbeck decided that “[t]his book is more important than the finish.” He reverted to his trusty method of trying to get his quota of work done each day. For Steinbeck, a looming deadline interfered with, rather than helped, his process.
Shortly before completing the novel, when he estimated he had but two or three more days of work to do, Steinbeck said, “I wish I were finished and at the same time I am afraid to be finished.” Steinbeck understood that the completion of a book was a loss, and he prepared himself, as best he could, in his journal, for its passing. He knew that he needed to try hard “to keep some kind of discipline together.” And he realized that, though he was nearing the end, these pages would “probably [be] the hardest work in the whole book.”
Nearing completion of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck wrote, “But I feel very lost and lonesome.… I don’t seem to have the knack of living any more.” Steinbeck realized he had to work through this feeling or it would either impede the completion of his novel or harm him. He understood that some writers inadvertently don’t finish books because they’re trying to protect themselves from losing them. As Steinbeck—and many writers, including myself—near the completion of our books, and after their completion, we move into a period of mourning that might also be accompanied by elation. It’s a confusing time, as Steinbeck’s testimony reveals, but one that we can move through more easily if we honor those feelings and if we remind ourselves that there will be another book waiting to be written. After confessing his feelings of loss, Steinbeck returned to work, nonetheless. “This book,” he attested, “has to be written.”