The Art of Writing a Novel Slowly
Every era has its archetypal image of the writer, and the writer’s habits and trappings. The quill, the inkwell, the typewriter, the MacBook. The attic, the orchard, the coffeeshop. The absinthe, the whiskey, the latte. The endless lattes.
They say writing used to be the tolerable eccentricity of the thinkers and hermits and contemplatives even after industrialization whipped farming and the crafts into profitable shape. But, inevitably, the hustle bros came for us as well.
I grew up twenty miles outside a town of one thousand, and I didn’t go to school. I read stories and wrote stories and sat around thinking about stories. I wrote reams and reams in unreadable ballpoint on old perforated computer paper. I bought a yard sale typewriter before they got valuable again, and wrote until the ribbon ran out of ink and then threw the whole thing away because I didn’t know they were replaceable. I wrote in the woods and on the scrap pile and in the loft of the barn. My stories were full of nature because that’s where I wrote. Being in the woods, being myself, and writing words down didn’t seem like separate concepts.
I still don’t fully understand people who don’t write. I don’t know how they interact with their own thoughts and daydreams without telling them back to themselves, then honing that telling endlessly until it’s as close to the seed of their imagination as they can get it.
At sixteen I had to get a job at the local dairy farm. I learned quickly that I didn’t want to have a job — I wanted to keep writing stories. So each day after I showered off the manure and the iodine, I negotiated some time on my parents’ dusty dial-up and researched writing careers. I learned the basics over and over from a thousand blogs: it’s a harsh world out there for writers, you won’t make much money, and, most importantly, you have to write thousands of words every day or you’re worthless. Writers write, goddamn it.
The blogs didn’t talk much about the craft of writing and certainly not about the writing life or a love of words. But they thoroughly captured the ass-in-seat, deadline-hitting, coffee-fueled ethos of modern authorship. Alright, I thought. Writing is about working harder and faster than everyone else. It’s about overwhelming the world with the sheer volume of words you can churn out. It’s about hitting wordcounts and it’s definitely about making fun of anyone that mentions “writer’s block.”
For a while, I was good at hustle-writing. I wrote in the evenings after working on a drilling rig, on construction sites, in publishers’ warehouses. I got married, I had kids, I kept writing in the evenings. I got a staff writer job for a video company, and I kept writing in the evenings. I was hungry; I wanted success. I loved writing and I was doing what they said you have to do if you love something: clutch it and squeeze it for all it’s worth. I’d mastered the advice, and I’d be damned if I would slack off even a tiny bit on the thing I loved.
Writing a lot does make you better at writing, to some extent. But I don’t think obsessive hustling makes good literature, or good writers, because writing is only the second part of the work. Most of the work is just existing. Writing, like, I suspect, any creative art, is just an attempt to transcribe infinity. And you have to sink into infinity slowly. By walking and talking and doing the dishes and working on things that don’t look like writing at all. By writing and rewriting and wrestling your word choices around for months. By choosing the opposite of efficiency with a kind of stubborn discipline. By stopping and starting over again a thousand times.
When I lost that first script writing job, I was burnt out. As the video company collapsed, everyone else found new creative jobs, but I ran away. I’d been a roofer before; I became one again. The grueling labor was like a purge for my body and soul. There’s a difference between hard work and hustle, and it’s mostly a spiritual one. Hard work can be done for the love of the work itself. Shingling straight perfect rows, a crisp chimney-flash, leaving the shrubbery spotless, and doing it all again tomorrow. Hustle is greedy and grasping. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing can be labored over for its own sake.
I came home sore, sweaty, sunburned and, some days, borderline nonverbal with exhaustion. And I was fulfilled. Every day I could see the good I had done — an old roof gone and a new one installed. When I was at home, my mind was there with my kids, not on the next one-draft-and-done script I needed to hork out to maintain my reputation as the fastest writer in the company.
For a while, I wondered if I could be a completely normal person with a normal job, and be content. But it was still there, my love of writing that had gotten me through my isolated childhood and my furious, heartrent teenage years. Before it became intertwined with visions of literary success, it was the purest thing I had.
So I started writing a novel.
On Saturday mornings my wife took the kids with her to the gym, and I walked down to a basement coffeeshop under a pickle factory. For close to a year, that was my only writing time — two hours a week at the same corner table under a shuddering air duct. I wrote by hand — twenty thousand words before I typed it up, realized it wasn’t quite right yet, and started over at the beginning. I wasn’t in any hurry. The writing itself was the goal — something that hadn’t been true since I was twelve and balancing with a typewriter on the roof of a chicken coop.
At some point I typed up the stack of notebooks again, and found a dark rural novel within them, an outlet I’d poured my frustration into, but a love letter also, to the landscape of my childhood. I edited it slowly for years, with character charts and endless marginalia and rewriting constantly by hand.
Editing a novel slowly is like raising a child. You can’t perfect either one and you shouldn’t try. You just live with them forever, it feels, and try to guide them in a good direction each day. And at some point you step back and realize they’re all grown up. They’re not perfect, or even very close to how you imagined, but they’re ready to be free of you. You hope you’ve done your part correctly, but there really is no “correctly.” There’s just the slow painstaking love of repeatedly showing up.
With children and with works of art, there’s no recipe that will take the place of dwelling alongside and knitting your beings together. There’s no success or failure, pride or disappointment, that will justify or invalidate those years of dwelling. They were for their own sake and contained their own trials and rewards.
When I was reading every writing blog on the internet, back in the golden age of writing blogs, they all claimed that hating the act of writing is normal. But I don’t hate writing, and I don’t think most writers do either. They hate that an art form that’s all about noticing and feeling has been turned into just another hustle job full of quotas and shame.
I think a lot of people want to write books. But most of the writing advice out there is sold by people who profit off writers’ desire for prolific “success.” No one is giving us permission to write slowly, securely, or enjoyably. So a lot of people who contain beautiful books never let them out. And a lot of people do try, but burn themselves out in pursuit of arbitrary metrics, instead of writing for the sake of writing.
So then I realized it was time, and I sent the novel off to agents. Now I’m waiting. Maybe it’ll be published by a big publisher. Odds are it won’t. But I keep reminding myself that I didn’t write it to succeed. I wrote it because I loved writing it. I edited it because I loved editing it. So I’ve already had my reward: the slow years during which the novel was part of my life.
They were good ones.
