Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

by Sarah Stodola

just get the writing down and worry about the organization of the thing later.

The great writers in this book do not by and large put the right words on the right page in the right order on the first try. But in the place of perfection, they possess the quality of perseverance and a willingness to recognize their own shortcomings.

What Brod had to deal with was mostly contained in the copious diaries Kafka left behind. Kafka’s diaries were the central artery of his writing life, and taken as a whole, they provide a map of his thought process as a writer.

With a completed handwritten draft, Morrison then types the manuscript on her computer, and the revision process is under way. Part of revising for Morrison involves going away from the work and coming back to it with a fresh eye. As a cautionary tale, she told an interviewer of the time she spent a summer writing fifty pages that she felt were “really first-rate.” Because of other obligations, she wasn’t able to return to the pages for revision until the following winter. “When I read them each page of the fifty was terrible. It was really ill-conceived. I knew that I could do it over, but I just couldn’t get over the fact that I thought it was so good at the time.”

Revision, then, is crucial for Morrison. “That’s the best part,” she says.73 She might revise a manuscript six, seven, or even more times, and she’s been known to go so far as rewriting the entire novel, as was the case for The Bluest Eye.

The entire process typically takes her anywhere from three to five years.

Morrison eventually came to terms with that melancholy and understood that she needed that mood and time between books in order to come up with her next idea.

Once it finally starts, the writing can proceed intensively for three to six hours. Price is a writer who edits as he goes. “Typically, what I’ll do is write a page, reread it, edit it, write half a page more, and then I’ll go back to the very first thing I wrote that morning . . . I don’t know whether I’m editing, reediting, or writing something new, but it’s kind of a creeping, incremental style of writing.

Some days involve more revision than others. “Sometimes all I did was fix and fiddle,” he says, “and some days I just wrote great gouts of original stuff.”

Wharton would not become a published author until her late thirties, when her innate desire to write books finally—and indeed inevitably—bubbled to the surface. She would go on to write a total of forty-four books.

And then the serialization before hers was canceled, and The House of Mirth was on deck. She accepted the moved-up publication date, leaving only four or five months to complete the novel.

The pressure inspired a daily work routine that up to then had been erratic. “The effect on my imagination,” she wrote, was magnificent and played a central role in turning her finally into a masterful writer.

Sure as she was of the first and last pages, Wharton didn’t always know how her characters were to arrive at their fates when she wrote the first lines.

Afternoons were reserved for life’s pleasures, as conceived by Edith Wharton: adventure, conversation, and cultured living. She shied away from the showy social events that were her birthright, preferring instead small gatherings of people who shared her interests.

Eileen herself once said, “His writing comes before anybody.” Even on his wedding day, he found time for it.

“The rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of job,”

For Orwell, it was most important to secure the hunk of clay first and worry about sculpting it later.

Both men—Swift in the eighteenth century and Orwell in the twentieth—were geniuses of the political novel, and Gulliver served as a clear template for Animal Farm, less in actual content than in style and intent, with its satirical suspicion of European governments and man’s inherent corruptibility.

She always wrote her first drafts out with pen and paper, thus seated, her formal handwriting crossing the page, reminiscent of calligraphy.240 Every morning, no matter where she’d left off, she started on a fresh piece of paper.241 With a draft complete, she’d then type it out, making a first revision as she went. Woolf revised relentlessly. Even though she most often professed a real horror at the ritual, and even as it took a toll on her mental health, the perfectionist in her kept her going, through five or six or seven miserable revisions.

An idea for a novel often sprung from a thought previously and nonchalantly recorded in her diary; only in hindsight and with reflection would she realize that the seed for the story was in the throwaway remark.

The biographer Andrew Field put Nabokov’s typical output at 280 pages per year.275 Nabokov himself put it at 200 pages of “final copy” per year.

This pace, along with his tendency to take on several projects at once, could make for slow going.

In a quite literal way, the writing comes before everything else, first thing every morning. “I’ve learned that I need to give it the first energy of the day, so before I read the newspaper, before I open the mail, before I phone anyone, often before I have a shower, I sit in my pajamas at the desk,” he told the Paris Review in 2005.317

Didion repeated those lines throughout the book. It’s a technique she’s used often, as if trying to drill a specific idea into the reader via simple repetition.

“Toward the beginning of a novel I’ll write a lot of sections that lead me nowhere. So I’ll abandon them, pin them on a board with the idea of picking them up later.”382 The bulletin board becomes a physical representation of Didion’s nonlinear approach to writing.

the 120-foot scroll was not the first draft of On the Road, but rather the culmination of a couple years of work—these are the true realities of Jack Kerouac’s writing days.

Kerouac always kept austerely organized—visitors to his house were always surprised to see how meticulous he was in keeping records and files.

The sudden success of On the Road in 1957 after so much time and struggle changed Kerouac’s life overnight, giving him a measure of financial security for the first time. With the money from this second novel, he bought a house for his mother and himself on Long Island and, also for the first time, had a room dedicated to his writing.

A reporter for the Long Island Newsday, who visited him in the second of the two Northport houses he lived in in 1964, described a room with “a thousand books on the shelves, and everybody’s there, from Aristophanes to Allen Ginsberg. Two of the walls blaze with abstract paintings from many lands.”

But the time reserved for novel writing came in sporadic bursts, during which he would take Benzedrine and then write night and day until the work was finished, often at his mother’s kitchen table.

And despite his reputation for hard living, Hemingway didn’t drink while writing, although he did tend to commence pretty quickly after stepping away from his desk.

A complete story would often have come together in his mind before Hemingway wrote the first word. Other times it came to him as he went. In this sense, Hemingway had no consistent process for conceptualizing the story itself.

1961, Hemingway took his own life in a dismal act that stood in stark contrast to the rest of his robust life.

It’s no surprise, given these protracted timelines, that Joyce completed only three novels and one book of short stories in his fifty-eight years (along with a play and a modest number of essays).

“For Joyce, Dublin was always the Dublin of 1904. The clock stopped.

He took such manipulation to perhaps its most egregious extreme when he urged his wife, Nora, to sleep with other men so he could write about it.

In a fit of exasperation, she once asked him, “Why don’t you write sensible books that people can understand?”

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a complicated work about a nerdy Dominican kid growing up in New Jersey and the forces of history that got him there, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008.

His slow pace is not a matter of failing to find a work-life balance, or of carving out time to write every day. It doesn’t seem to be a matter of succumbing to distractions. It’s merely that Díaz finds writing extremely difficult.

While for Díaz not every day is a writing day, every day is a reading day, and his daily routine often also involves teaching creative writing at MIT.

His ever-present plan was to write enough short stories to fund a six-month period of uninterrupted work on a novel.

He became drunk easily and didn’t hold his liquor well, which can be charming only when one is very, very young. Over time, Fitzgerald found himself unable to strike a note of moderation, and his days became an increasing and continual struggle to remain sober enough to write worthwhile material.

Fitzgerald eventually concluded that he could manage short stories while drinking, but couldn’t keep a novel together in his head while inebriated.

But he displayed keen powers of observation and creativity early on.

Aside from the infrequent occasions on which he joined friends for dinner, Roth passed the evening with a book, and it wasn’t an unusual day that ended without his having seen another soul.

The bright side of this approach is that when she reaches the end of the novel, she’s done with it: “If you edit as you go along, there are no first, second, third drafts. There is only one draft, and when it’s done, it’s done.”

It’s an approach that a writer of a century ago wouldn’t recognize as physically possible—it’s an option only available to the writer in the age of the computer.

She makes great effort to restrict her access to the Internet during her writing hours.

Smith’s obsession with getting those first twenty pages right—and they have to be right, if the rest of the novel is to rely on them—can verge on paralyzing: She spent almost two years agonizing over the first twenty pages of On Beauty.

Smith writes quickly from page twenty-one through to the end—after those nearly two years, she finished the rest of On Beauty in five months.