The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Epilogue: Beginning again

The end of the writing process is a complicated time. We might be elated that the work is finished. We might feel empty because this project has preoccupied us for so long. We might miss the grounding routine of our daily work. We might enter a temporary state of mourning as we release the work to the world. We might experience intense anxiety and uncertainty about the work’s worth. We might wonder whether we’ll have the will to write again; we might worry that our ability to create might desert us. We might be eager to begin another work. Or we might find ourselves in extremely difficult emotional terrain, as John Banville, winner of the Man Booker Prize, did after completing Mefisto (1989), a novel discussing the price creativity exacts; after the book appeared and was ignored—“a traumatic time”—Banville spent a summer in his garden, healing. Although Banville’s experience is extreme, most writers concede that finishing a project isn’t always a blissful time.

Some writers need to take considerable time off between projects, or after certain projects, especially if the work required intense concentration—Maxine Hong Kingston needed to rest after she completed The Woman Warrior and China Men. After I’ve completed a difficult project, especially one requiring much research, like Virginia Woolf, I need time off to clean my study and to deal with what I’ve neglected taking care of in my house. And then I either wait until I decide what to work on next, or I begin the next project awaiting me—like Anne Tyler and many writers, I have a collection of ideas for books.

The end of any book marks a transition in a writer’s life. Part of our job as writers is to honor the work we’ve done, to be grateful for what the work has taught us, to learn how to let the work go so that we can move on.

When we draw near the end of a book, especially if it’s commanded our attention for a long time, we might realize how much we’ll miss working on this particular book, and we might want to linger in that special world we’ve created that’s perhaps become more familiar to us than our daily lives. When I finished my novel Casting Off, I didn’t want to let go of Maive Macnamra, the free-spirited character I’d created.

Norman Rush has a “hard time letting go of a novel.” He works on his books for years—Mating appeared in 1991, Mortals in 2003—and he spends so long in the worlds he’s created, he begins “to breathe the air the characters breathe.”

Rush is deeply aware that the meaning of his novels’ endings affect his readers. He feels an ethical obligation to the meaning his endings impart and he works hard to get them right: “I want my books to reach only the conclusions that are implicit in the trajectories of their characters.” In both Mating and Mortals, Rush settled on “sad outcomes” for his characters, “but optimistic codas.”

Rush takes so long wrestling with conclusions that are right for his books, that in the case of Mortals, his wife, Elsa, “threatened to move to Mohonk Mountain house, which is a pricey place to move,” until he “let go of the manuscript.”

Writing provides structure to a writer’s life. When we complete a work, unless we begin a new project immediately, that structure disappears. When she was still writing, Alice Munro was asked whether she took any time off after working on a story for months, she replied, “I go pretty much right into the next one.” Although she didn’t do this when she had children—she had other tasks to occupy her—as she aged she became “panicked at the idea of stopping—as if, if I stopped, I could be stopped for good.”

Munro didn’t lack story ideas. Nor did she fear that she would someday lack “technique or skill.” Instead, Munro knew that it took a tremendous effort of will for her to “maintain excitement and faith” in the writing process, and that if she didn’t continually write, she feared she’d lose her will and never begin again. So she kept working, kept adhering to her strict schedule of writing “every morning, seven days a week” from eight to eleven, completing her self-assigned “quota of pages” each day “to keep this from happening.”

John Banville has said that he always has to be writing, that stopping writing would be dangerous for him, and that when he finishes one work, he begins another. “I cannot not write,” he said. “If I find myself with a spare forty-five minutes at the end of my working day, I will turn to adding a few sentences to something.”

Banville publishes a book every three years. He’s published sixteen novels in his own name, among them, The Sea (2005), The Infinities (2009), and Ancient Light (2012), a fictional trilogy about science, and another about art. He’s published eight detective novels, using the pseudonym Benjamin Black, among them, Vengeance (2012) and Holy Orders (2013). He also reviews books for the Guardian and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.

Still, writing his Banville novels “is a constant torment.” But writing his Black novels is “a frolic.” Banville has found a method that works for him. Because he works in three genres—literary fiction, detective fiction, and nonfiction—each requiring a different voice, a different level of concentration, and a different style, Banville can always be writing. He can move from the excruciatingly taxing work of writing his Banville novels, to the more pleasurable work of writing his Black novels, to the more quickly completed work of journalism.

And each work calls upon a different set of literary skills. Banville has said that, “for Black, character matters, plot matters, dialogue matters to a much greater degree than they do” in his Banville books. Black’s characters are “consciously crafted”; Banville’s characters “sort of drift out of me.”

Zadie Smith, author of NW, feels dissatisfied with each book she finishes. But Smith uses that feeling to impel her to begin afresh, to start work on another, completely different novel. Finishing a work, especially one you know has flaws, as all works do, Smith acknowledges, means you have “to start again, means you have space in front of you, somewhere to go.” Letting a work go is far easier if we understand that the act of leaving it behind will urge the next, and different, work into existence.

We writers often have ideal works in our imagination against which we evaluate the work we’ve completed. Although we write the best book we can, understanding that our work can never meet our expectations can help us let go of it, and can allow us to move on to the next phase of our writing lives. If we see our writing life as a continuum, we can acknowledge that writing each book teaches us something that writing no other book can, and we can look forward to what we’ll learn from the new work awaiting us.