The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014
Tools of the trade
Getting ready to write
I’m always asked—and other writers are, too—how I write. By hand? On a computer? A combination of both? I’ve learned it takes time for beginning writers to discover what process works best. But hearing how other writers compose can help us understand our options. And what works for one writer might not work for another.
So much about the writing process is uncontrollable that we writers sometimes staunchly adhere to our idiosyncratic, proven ways of working. Some even become fetishistic about the process. For if the way we wrote one book worked, we trust that if we work the same way again, we’ll successfully complete the next.
Many of Paul Auster’s novels, including Mr. Vertigo (1994), describe the mechanics of the writing process. His City of Glass (1985), The Book of Illusions (2002), and Oracle Night (2003) describe characters that compose, as Auster does, in notebooks, which he calls “a house for words.” Auster isn’t only interested in the product his efforts will produce, “but in the process, the act of putting words on a page.”
When Auster begins, like many of his characters, he writes “by hand,” with “a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil—especially for corrections” because he confesses that keyboards intimidate him: “I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position.” When Auster writes by hand, he has an intimate, visceral connection to his work: “You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page.” He has “a particular fetish for notebooks with quadrille lines—the little squares.”
Auster has described his longstanding relationship with his Olympia typewriter in The Story of My Typewriter (2002). He’s owned it “since 1974” after buying it “second-hand from a college friend” and “[i]t’s never broken down.” Auster fears when “there won’t be any ribbons left to buy”—he’s stored about seventy of them—and he’ll have to work on a computer.
Although Auster admits his process is “cumbersome and inconvenient,” beginning his books by hand and then typing a draft on his Olympia forces him “to start all over again.…” The process is tedious because, once you’ve completed a handwritten draft, “you have to spend several weeks engaged in the purely mechanical job of transcribing what you’ve already written.” Because of this process, Auster experiences “the book in a new way,” and understands “how it functions as a whole.” Inevitably, Auster discovers necessary changes that would have eluded him.
Norman Rush, author of Mortals (2003), writes in “his one-room attic,” cluttered with the accumulation of treasures he collected in the years he served in the Peace Corps in Botswana and junk he can’t part with. He works at a “large U-shaped assemblage of tables and doors on sawhorses that incorporates, also, a desk.” On the agglomeration are “three manual typewriters, each a gorgeous antique,” together with all the tools of a writer’s craft: “Wite-Out, pencils, scissors, and glue.” Like Auster, Rush fears running out of typewriter ribbons.
As he works, Rush “rolls his writing chair from one station to another many times.” He composes “the main narrative” of his novels on one of two vintage Royal typewriters; he reworks “earlier sections” on a second Royal; he writes freely, “generating fresh associations” on an Underwood typewriter. This “ludicrous” process ensures that Rush inhabits “the novel in different stages.…” On “an ideal day,” Rush works in the morning on new material that is “raw, highly associative, difficult-for-anybody-else-to-interpret”; he then spends the afternoon revising it and trying to make it readable. When he’s completed twenty-five pages, he retypes a draft on yellow sheets on one of the Royals. His wife, Elsa, reads it; they review her comments; he revises. Then the “draft goes to a typist.” They edit the final copy together.
Anne Tyler, author of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), works section by section on her novels, employing a “’very mechanical process.’” She composes by hand, on white, unlined paper using “’the miraculous Pilot P500 gel pen,’” then revises “tiny sections in ’quite small and distinct handwriting.’” Her process “’is almost like knitting a novel.’”
When Tyler is satisfied, “she types it up, then writes the whole manuscript out in longhand again.” She then “reads it into a tape-recorder to listen for false notes or clumsiness.” Instead of retyping, she “plays it back … on a stenographer’s machine with a pedal to pause” so she can insert material. She works in this carefully calculated way, accumulating the building blocks of her novel, because she’s learned that, for her, “’[s]pontaneity is not always a good thing.’”
Margaret Atwood, author of Bodily Harm (1981), works by hand, too. But, unlike Tyler, she doesn’t necessarily work scene by scene. “Scenes present themselves,” she says. “Sometimes it proceeds in a linear fashion, but sometimes it’s all over the place.”
Atwood writes “in longhand and preferably on paper with margins and thick lines with wide spaces between the lines.” She prefers “pens that glide very easily over the paper” because she writes quickly. Even so, she doesn’t “churn out finished copy quickly.” She returns to her handwritten sheets to revise and rewrite: “I have to scribble over it and scratch things out.” After she’s revisited her handwritten draft, she “transcribe[s] the manuscript, which is almost illegible.…”
Ian McEwan, author of Atonement (2001), used to work by hand and with a typewriter early in his writing life. He wrote “longhand with a fountain pen.” Then he’d “type out a draft, mark up the manuscript, type it out again.” When computers arrived in the mideighties, McEwan was “a grateful convert.” For McEwan, using a computer “is more intimate, more like thinking itself.”
McEwan likes “the provisional nature of unprinted material held in the computer’s memory”—it’s like “unspoken thought.” The computer allows “sentences or passages [to] be endlessly reworked” and “this faithful machine remembers all your little jottings and messages to yourself.
“Until, of course, it sulks and crashes.”
I began my writing life composing by hand—computers weren’t yet available. Writing, for me, then, was a slow, deliberate, methodical act. I wrote on lined yellow sheets of paper with a fountain pen, composing one chapter at a time. I revised on the page. Like Atwood’s, my pages became virtually indecipherable, with insertions above the line, in the margins, on the back of the sheet. When I finished a draft, I’d recopy the chapter by hand and revise, again by hand. When I was satisfied, I’d type out a penultimate version, edit that by hand, and retype. Typing was slow and tedious until I bought an IBM Selectric typewriter.
Before computers, once a page was typed, if you made changes, you had to retype the entire page. And if you made a change on the typescript of a previous chapter—adding new material, say—you’d have to retype everything that came after that insertion and so I worked differently and revised differently than I do now that I use a computer. Once you committed to a final version, you were committed. There was no going back to noodle with language at the beginning of a book. Retyping was too hard and took too long.
The three books I wrote by hand and with a typewriter took less time than the ones I’ve written using a computer. Composing on a computer lets me be tentative for some time, encourages me to play with language, lets me work piecemeal. Because it’s a freer process, I often postpone decisions I had to make early when I worked by hand. To complete a book, now, means I have to decide what material to use of the vast quantity I’ve generated. And this sometimes causes anxiety—which version of a scene I’ve rewritten a dozen times should I use?
I won’t go back to composing by hand. But I do understand how different a process writing has become for me using a computer. My books have become less formal, less constrained, more experimental. But the writing process, paradoxically, has become far more difficult for me and has taken longer.