The Writing Unprocess
If challenge of the being a writer is a subject that interests you, the New York Times had a beautiful story about the novelist Kiran Desai, and the trials of completing her new book–twenty years in the making!–"The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny."
After she won the Booker Prize in 2006 for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss, Desai arrived at high literary recognition just as she began to disappear into her next book. Alexandra Alter writes of her attempts to make progress:
When she first had the idea for the novel, Desai didn’t realize how thoroughly the story would swallow her life. At times over the years, she feared that she might never finish it.
And:
About seven years into writing, Desai was at a residency in Brussels when she decided to print out the manuscript. She was shocked at what kept spilling out of the printer; she realized she had written 5,000 pages.
What Desai experienced is (almost) the struggle of a lifetime. But the basic problem is one that any writer who has attempted a substantial writing project will have sympathy for–especially one that seems (or is) beyond his or her current powers. After seeing physical proof of her difficulties in the 5000 page manuscript, Alter quotes Desai that she “was horrified,” and “hadn’t understood what a dire situation it was.”
Writing is strange in that way: the writer can drown in her own generative powers. At first I wanted to describe Desai as “unproductive,” but that is not the right description at all. What is the right word for someone who produces, in a mechanical sense, yet has nothing to show for it? Very little of the bottom line in art is subject to being counted. The torture of Desai’s condition is being so talented and prolific, and still finding herself unable to marshal that productivity in service of the work that needs to be written. “The story had no center,” Desai said. The work keeps falling apart until it doesn’t.
Although she had established her reputation before she began, I have to imagine that the last few decades contained profound valleys of self-doubt for Desai. The article describes the understandable fear that her publishers would give up on her–and her suspicion that the novel was uncompletable.
I am happy that the story of her work on the novel ended the way it did. If, as early reviews suggest, the novel turns out to be great, it would not be the first time that the duration of a novel’s compositional odyssey is proportional to the quality of the finished work1. Many writers struggle to finish a work–but only the great ones have something to show for it at the end.
And it is a special thing that artists still have the chance to struggle in the way that Desai did: getting to, as she puts it, “leave real life for artistic life,” chasing a vision that is totally unproven yet completely seen–and supported by grants and residencies while doing it. Let there always be a path for some writers to chase long-term, impossible goals.
What appears to have sustained Desai were her relationships, among those with her mother, also an acclaimed novelist, who read drafts all along the way. And in uncertain circumstances, the writer must be open to help wherever it appears. During a low period in the book’s writing, a painter friend sent Desai a picture of a dark, faceless figure. It became a binding image in the novel–and stayed by Desai’s side while she worked.
The reverse–the novel that gets worse the longer it is struggled over–is just as possible. Although an uncompletable novel is not the same thing as one that is unreadable. ↩︎