When writing your book takes thirty-eight years (and counting)
Solvej Balle’s very gradual creative process. Plus: Announcing the Subtle Maneuvers Book Club! And a workshop for the Scrivener-curious
Last time, I officially announced my next book—Making Art and Making a Living, a nonfiction romp through the myriad ways writers and artists through the ages have funded their creative work (or tried to), coming next March; pre-order it here!—and mentioned that completing it took, oh, about three years longer that I had originally anticipated.
Three years—that’s nothing? At least, it’s nothing compared to what the Danish writer Solvej Balle has gone through to realize her acclaimed, ongoing novel series On the Calculation of Volume, which I started reading the other week (it’s amazing).
Not that I’m comparing my book to Balle’s! I’m just continually fascinated by the way that creative projects can seem to have a timeline of their own—almost a mind of their own—and here we have a particularly intriguing example.
Balle published her debut novel, The Lyre Bird, in 1984, when she was just twenty-two. A few years after that, she had an idea for a novel featuring a protagonist who found herself stuck in time, experiencing the same day over and over again. But she wasn’t sure how to make it work. “The more I thought about it, the more foolish the idea seemed to me,” Balle said in an interview for the Booker Prize website.
Over the next several years, Balle turned her attention to short prose and a collection of short stories. And yet she couldn’t shake the time-loop idea. She kept trying think through how it would work: who the protagonist was, whether to tell her story in the first or third person, and what the “rules” of her time loop should be. In a recent conversation at the London Review Bookshop, Balle said:
I was writing down all sorts of things and trying, and I had this feeling that if I start to write, I ruin the whole thing. I had this feeling that I had a bag of undeveloped film, and that all these films would have to lie together and develop themselves. Very strange.
Then, in 1993, a movie came out with the exact same premise. That’s right: Balle’s searching philosophical examination of time, the natural world, and human identity was pre-empted by Groundhog Day, the blockbuster romantic comedy starring Bill Murray.
At this point, a lot of writers would have given up. But, for Balle, the movie was a kind of relief. “I must admit that when I finally saw Groundhog Day, I actually liked it—it was fun,” she told the Booker website, “and it also felt as if someone had helped me with research by trying out some of the roads I did not want to take.”
Balle wrote the opening scenes of the novel in 1999—more than a decade after she first had the idea—but it was ultimately another two decades before she completed the first volume of what she had by then decided would be a several-volume series. (As of this moment, Balle has published five of a projected seven volumes in Danish. The first two have been translated into English, with volumes three and four coming in November and April.)
Balle’s perseverance is impressive—but what interests me even more is her relationship to the original idea, which she had at first dismissed as “foolish.” She told the Booker website: “I tried to get rid of the idea, but it kept coming back, so in the end I realised that the only way out was to write it. The idea generated so much material that I just wanted to explore it.”
Is this the ultimate test of a good idea—that it just won’t leave you alone? And that it acts as a kind of idea-generating machine, spinning out ideas around itself?
This is one of the remarkable things about Balle’s novel: the way that the protagonist’s endlessly repeating day becomes a container for so much diverse, beautiful writing: about her marriage and home life; about the natural world and its subtle shifts; about the life-affirming joy of funny little projects; and lots more.
It’s one of those books that feels weirdly almost inevitable. As a reader, you know, of course, that the novelist made all this up, that what’s on the page is the product of hundreds and hundreds of individual decisions—but it feels as if it couldn’t have been any other way.
Indeed, this is partly why the book took so long to write—because Balle had to “listen” to what the book itself wanted to be. In interviews, she repeatedly returns to this idea: that the writing of the book was actually more akin to a listening process. In a conversation at Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, she said:
I had to wait and wait and wait for Tara [the protagonist] to become her and not Solvej, and that was a listening process. It’s the only way I can explain it. That I had to listen for the rules, I had to listen for her personality, I had to listen for a lot of things. And I think it’s because it’s idea-based. Because the idea is a little bit like a machine that wants something on its own and you have to accept it, even though it’s a bad idea. [Laughs] So you have to accept it and see what it’s bringing in.
I love this. Previously, I riffed on a John Cage quote suggesting that this is the true meaning of discipline: giving yourself over to a project rather than expecting to get something from it. But I hadn’t thought about how the first and most important step may be acceptance: to recognize that your project “wants something on its own,” as Balle says, and that the artist’s job is to “accept it and see what it’s bringing in.”
ANNOUNCING THE SUBTLE MANEUVERS BOOK CLUB!
I started reading On the Calculation of Volume thanks to my ever-brilliant LA book club, whose inspired picks I’ve written about a couple times before. Readers: Is there anything better than a book club—a club that exists in order to read books and talk about them, perhaps over a glass or two of wine?
The answer, of course, is no—which is why I’ve decided to launch a Subtle Maneuvers Book Club this fall. Our first title will be the photographer Sally Mann’s new memoir, Art Work: On the Creative Life, which comes out next week.
I loved Mann’s previous memoir, Hold Still, which I wrote about here, so I’m really excited to see what more she has to say on her career and her creative process.
Here’s how it will work:
Art Work comes out September 9th. You can pre-order it now from Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon—or wait until next week and pick up a copy from your local bookstore or library.
Once you have a copy, please go ahead and start reading! I’ll be using the group chat to share my impressions of the book as I go along, and I hope you’ll join me in posting quotes, questions, and observations.
On Sunday, October 12, at 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern time, we’ll meet on Zoom to discuss the book and drink wine (wine optional).
The group chat and the Zoom meeting are open to paid subscribers only, but here’s a coupon to subscribe for 20% off (expires 9/15):
PLUS, A SCRIVENER WORKSHOP
Another Zoom event coming up for paid subscribers: On Thursday, September 11, at 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern time—immediately following my usual weekday Worm Zoom session—we’ll have a Scrivener workshop led by the novelist Jennifer S. Brown. Whether you’re Scrivener-curious or a current user who still hasn’t grasped its full capabilities (me), Jennifer will help us better apprehend this powerful and widely beloved piece of writing software.
Open to all paid subscribers. Join via the daily Worm Zoom link here. If you have specific Scrivener questions or issues you’d like Jennifer to address, email me and I’ll pass them along. Can’t attend? I’ll also be providing a recording of Jennifer’s tutorial.
WORM ZOOM CONTINUES!
Speaking of Worm Zoom: I’m coming up on 300 days of hosting this two-hour-long morning coworking session, and planning to keep it going at least until the end of the year. If you could use some extra accountability and camaraderie in your creative practice this fall, join us anytime.
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Oooo book clubbing with you! Can’t wait!
Wow! That last paragraph made me sit up/get up. Thank you.