The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Routine
Getting ready to write

Establishing a consistent writing practice is essential if we are to realize our dream of writing a full-length work. Most aspiring writers have other compelling needs—day jobs, child care, relationships, household tasks—that take time and are essential. Still, what we want—or need—to do most days is write.

Beginning writers often ask “How do you do it?” which means “How can I do it?” I suggest they learn about the early writing life of a writer like Carol Shields, author of the Pulitzer Prize—winning The Stone Diaries (1993), who published two poetry collections before she wrote fiction.

When Shields started writing fiction, she enacted a simple routine: “I used to try and catch that hour just before [the children] came home for lunch, between 11:00 and 12:00.” She wrote an hour a day, aiming for two pages. Later, if she had time, she’d read her work and plan what came next. “If you write two pages a day,” Shields said, “you have ten pages at the end of the week. At the end of a year, you have a novel, and I did have a novel.” Shields was surprised that “these writings, these little segments, added up to something larger.”

Before Shields wrote her first novel, Small Ceremonies (1976), she decided to first determine its structure—nine chapters corresponding to an academic year, beginning with September. She didn’t fully understand her main character. But she wanted to write about a biographer, who goes on sabbatical with her husband, finds the notes of a failed novelist, decides to steal them, and writes a novel using them. She attends a writing workshop and has her stolen work appropriated by her professor. “Develop a certain faith in your process,” Shields advises. Keep working through difficult times and trust that “somehow you’re going to work it out as you go.”

When I started to write, I was raising two toddlers, teaching full-time, dealing with health issues, caring for aging parents, running a household. My husband shopped, cleaned, took care of household maintenance, and coparented. I tried to write two hours a day when I could, less when I couldn’t, but I tried to write every day, no matter what. I wrote when my children were napping, or, later, when they attended school. Many parents squander that precious time on household tasks. Instead, I did laundry, shopped, and cooked when my children were around.

I recently spoke with a writer trying to finish a book who was miserable because she said she couldn’t write. “I yell at my kids all the time,” she said. “I need to write; I want to write, but I can’t find time to write.”

“You don’t find time to write,” I said. “You make time to write.” She could write when her children were at school, organize caregivers to trade kids off a few hours each day, write when her kids were home by giving them some quiet time in their rooms instead of trying to keep them amused.

Early in my writing life, a mentor advised me that if you want to write, you have to give something up. Often, you have to give up a great deal. He said that everything we do, we’ve chosen to do. And everything we choose to do means there’s something we’ve chosen not to do. All too often, aspiring writers choose to give up writing. My mentor said it’s important to say “I’m choosing to do the laundry instead of writing,” instead of saying “I don’t have time to write.” Jeffrey Eugenides has said that, in order to write, he’s had to “sacrifice things I can get along without: a frisky social life,” for example.

I protect my writing time. I don’t engage in long telephone conversations, lunches with people I don’t love, most meetings, Facebook, net surfing, e-mailing more than once a day, shopping for the sake of shopping, boozy nights out, television (except for movies), most parties, readings. When my kids were small, I didn’t bake for sales, attend every game they played, drive them places—they rode their bikes or used skateboards.

I spend some time in a cost-benefit analysis of the opportunities that come my way. Do I really want to do it? What will it cost? What will I gain? If the cost outweighs the gain, I don’t do it. I know writers who act as if they have an infinite amount of time and energy, and who say yes to more than they should. When they get serious about their work, they learn they need to scale back their activities.

Eviatar Zerubavel’s The Clockwork Muse (1999) suggests that, before we figure out when we can write, we mark all the times we can’t write on a calendar—preparing for work, work, self-care, household tasks, child care, etc. This gives us a realistic sense of the time we have available. It helps us understand if we need to make changes in our lives to write each day.

David Allen’s Getting Things Done (2001) suggests making a giant list of every project we’re engaged in. This reveals how busy we are and how many commitments we have. When a writer friend of mind did this, she was horrified at the number of projects she’d taken on. She learned why she didn’t have time to write; she realized she had to drastically scale back her commitments.

Most beginning writers I work with are far busier than they realize. They’re shocked when they learn how little time they have to write. They learn they must not waste the time they do have. If we want to write, we must actively choose how we spend our time rather than assume that writing time will magically come our way. Still, if we wait for the perfect time to write, we’ll never write.

I have some guiding principles I’ve evolved over the years.

Establish a simple routine. (Shields’s hour before lunch; two pages a day.)

Be realistic. (It’s better to commit to one hour we can manage than to three we can’t.)

Touch the work every day. (I write five days a week; weekends, I scribble thoughts into a process journal.)

Give yourself the gift of uninterrupted time. (It takes about twenty minutes to get back into flow after each interruption.)

Without a simple routine, each new writing day can become an existential dilemma that takes an enormous amount of energy away from our writing. The time we take deciding when to write, whether to write, whether we’re up to writing, or whether we should do something else is time wasted. If we develop a routine that permits slow, steady accomplishment, we won’t waste time and energy rethinking our routine each day.