It could
take a few minutes to finish a work of literature, and it could take a few
decades. It depends in part on your method of composition, and the texture of
the text you’re weaving. (Both text
and texture come from the Latin verb texere, to weave.) It also depends on
how prepared you are to embark on the project you’ve selected.
One method
of composition that the writer finishes rapidly is automatic writing, a technique
invented by André
Breton and the French surrealists.
 |
| Members of the surrealist group in Paris. André Breton is third from the left. |
In
automatic writing, the author dreams onto the page, allowing the subconscious
to dictate to the hand. The writer deliberately attempts to write faster than
s/he can think, letting the deepest parts of the mind create a spontaneous
cascade of images:
And
as a
Little
girl
Caught
in a bellows of sparkles
You
jump rope
Long
enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of Asia
Can
appear at the top of the invisible stairway
I
caress everything that was you
In
everything that’s yet to be you
André
Breton, “I dream I see you endlessly superimposed upon yourself,” from The Air of the Water, in Earthlight,
translated by Bill
Zavatsky and Zack Rogow
In this poem,
Breton creates a dreamlike collage of his beloved at various moments in her
life, layering each sequence on the next. To generate an image such as “You
jump rope/Long enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of
Asia/Can appear at the top of the invisible stairway,” no amount of editing or
rewriting is of use. Only the first-take, last-take method of writing, where
the author doesn’t stanch the mind’s spring of creativity, is effective.
Scholars have gone over Breton’s drafts and found that he edited very little. Ben Jonson famously said of the legend that Shakespeare never blotted a line of his scripts,
“Would he had blotted a thousand!” Maybe Breton should have edited his writings
more. But when the spontaneous method of composition works, it produces a
unique and loose weave of language, an amazing texture that a more
laborious method usually can’t reproduce. This is the few-minutes version of
finishing a poem.
But there
are other types of writing that require a much more time-consuming process.
James Joyce reportedly took 17 years to write Finnegans Wake, and there is a story that he was still making edits
until the publisher’s messenger snatched the overdue manuscript out of his hands.
Elizabeth Bishop’s book The Complete
Poems: 1927–1979 is all of 287 pages, meaning she only produced an average of one page of
poetry every two months.
 |
| Elizabeth Bishop |
Certain
types of writing just can’t be done quickly, because the texture of language
requires a very tight weave that can only be accomplished with many drafts, and
much revision:
The
big fish tubs are completely lined
with
layers of beautiful herring scales
and
the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with
creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with
small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Elizabeth
Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”
Bishop’s exquisite
description of the Favrile surfaces of the wheelbarrows does not seem like a
momentary inspiration, but rather a meticulous accumulation of precise details
combined with le mot juste, a
carefully chosen phrase such as “plastered” or “coats of mail.” That’s the kind
of writing that takes many drafts.
Another
reason that a work of literature may need a long time to complete is that we
often come up with ideas before we have the skill and knowledge to realize
them. More than once, I’ve had the experience of rereading a poem I published
decades before, and seeing that I had had a genuine impulse behind the poem,
but I hadn’t gotten it right. The diction or the imagery or the ending weren’t
quite what the original idea was pleading for. With more years of experience, I was
able to revise a poem that I thought was complete, but really needed one or two
more drafts.
So, how
long does it take to finish a piece of writing? That’s a bit like asking how long it takes to fall in love. It might happen with a moment’s encounter, or it might be decades in the making.
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe
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Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
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Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry