On Writing Slowly
I wasn’t always a slow writer. I had to train myself to be one.
In graduate school, I only wrote for deadlines, avoiding writing until I had to turn in a story for workshop. After I graduated with an MFA in the early 2000s, I worked as a secretary in the office of the Creative Writing program at The New School. I considered myself a writer, but this claim didn’t stand up under scrutiny.
(How to Use Vignettes as Stepping Stones to Build a Novel.)
The critic Hilton Als taught for us. He sometimes stopped by the office, and we would chat. During one visit, he asked me if I was writing every day.
“No,” I replied.
“Why not?” he asked.
I started to list the reasons.
“You know,” Hilton said, cutting me off. “Toni Morrison, when she was working as an editor at Viking, would work all day, go home, feed her kids and put them to bed, and then write late into the night.”
I didn’t have kids or a high-pressure job, and whatever excuses I’d made for myself became clear for what they were, evasions. I respected Hilton, and I loved his work.
His words had an immediate effect on me. Nervous energy wakes me up early, and I thought I might as well use that energy for something useful. I began to write every morning. Not that I had much to show for it at first. I worked on one short story for six months, fiddling with it every morning. I never published it. From what I remember the story was about a middle-school substitute teacher. One day, some of students follow her home and spy on her. By the end of that time, I knew that I could write every day, that this was a habit I could keep. Though it didn’t solve the problem of how to write something longer, like a novel. I was never going to finish anything if I revised as I went, obsessing about sentences.
To make some generalizations, there are some people who write a lot, quickly. And then there are those of us who find the production of words painful. I started out in the second category. I know why I wrote slowly, I didn’t want to make a mess. I’d read about a writer who didn’t move on until each sentence worked. When she got to the end of the book, she was done. Just like in the movies, when the novelist pulls the last page from the typewriter and places it neatly on a stack of other perfect pages. I don’t know why I believed this story, or why I thought it could be true for me.
I’ve taught for decades, and I’ve always given prompts for in-class writing. When students read their work aloud, I’m shocked at how they can write such coherent and moving passages in such a short amount of time. When I write with them in class, or in any first draft, my writing is thin, the ideas incomplete—and forget about there being any sense of movement or a real scene. If I’m lucky in a first draft, I get maybe one sentence per day that does something unexpected, one sentence that has some juice. Maybe I’ll land on a few sentences that aren’t showy, but that help create the world, that push the story forward. To get anything useful in my writing, I had to train myself to be OK with writing tons of words that would eventually be cut.
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This is the part of the process I now enjoy the most. I turn off the editorial, judgmental, scared part of my brain, and I just type. I don’t even look at the page. My gaze goes to the right corner of the room, my eyes unfocussed, translating what’s playing on the screen of my brain into English. I produce many words a day during this stage of writing. But because my first drafts are always flimsy, I need to go back in and add a lot of physical and emotional detail. My process is to do this many times, layering in story and meaning until things start to seem almost done. And then I cut, ruthlessly.
When writing The Witches of El Paso, I made my way through many drafts, writing tons, and then ripping out whole plot lines by the root. I erased characters who at one point seemed essential. I changed the timeline and the structure. And then I wrote more.
I teach a novel writing class now, and most students are working on their first draft of a novel. Sometimes they ask me, how many drafts did it take for you to finish your novel? It’s not possible to count things that way, so I just say, “a few.” I’ve seen the horror on their faces when I’ve answered too honestly.
I’m writing something new, a novel, and despite what I’ve described above, I am certain that I will be done with the book in less than a year. Fiction and delusion are first cousins. It’s fun to think that I may yet become a fast writer.
Check out Luis Jaramillo’s The Witches of El Paso here:
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