Patience
For this guest blog
post, I thought I would do something a little different and talk about a
readerly and writerly virtue: patience. In daily life, patience is something
that I need to practice more and which seems increasingly hard to do in the
face of the flood of information around me. Wait until Wednesday for my UPS
package? OK, sure, but I’m going to watch the tracking updates in case it comes
early. Irritated with the point someone
is making? I’ll just look at something else on my phone. We’re in a culture
which continues to increase in speed, and the more one expects something to
come soon, the harder it is to be patient.
One of the comments I’ve
seen from early readers of Moth and Spark
is that it’s a bit slow at first. My first reaction was “What? There are a
dozen dead bodies by the end of the first chapter!” But I do write with a
slower, more deliberate pace than many writers. Much of this pacing probably
comes from reading nineteenth century novels and from an academic background
which values consideration and devalues hastiness.
But since I started
thinking about this, I’ve realized that this is also a preference of mine. I’ve
read several books recently that rushed by with the protagonist in one danger
after another. It seems like the first chapter can’t end without a death, a
chase, a knife fight, or so on, and the second chapter has to pick up
immediately. Then, after that first frantic breath, it slows down a little.
As a reader, I’m finding
myself increasingly dissatisfied with this. Books that start out fast and
continue fast and just zip along in the reading leave me feeling unsatisfied at
the end. I finish the book, and it’s like coming down from a blood sugar rush. It’s
as though I’ve gobbled a package of chocolate chips instead of eating a truffle
one small bite at a time, letting the chocolate melt, savoring the tastes. (As
an aside, characters who rush headline from one adventure to another can start
looking pretty stupid for not thinking through things. And for me, once the
protagonist is stupid, the game is over.)
For me, part of the
pleasure of reading is the immersion. I don’t want to rush back into my own
world. I want to spend some time somewhere else, to linger in this new place
where I don’t know what will happen next. I want to explore. Of course I want
events and changes in my story as much as anyone else, but I’d rather ease into
them than merge onto the freeway at 80 miles an hour on page 5. When I drive
fast, I don’t see anything except what’s immediately around me.
It’s really easy for
readers to get impatient. Whether it’s anticipating the behaviors of the
As a writer, I also need
to practice patience. Mostly this is patience with my writing process: patience
to wait when the well runs dry, patience to think through something before
writing a lot of words that will later be cut, patience to finish a scene fully
instead of rushing on to the next one. But it’s also patience with my own
story. I need to have the patience to let the story take me where it wants to
go.
I’m not talking here
about plot ideas. I’m fully capable of letting lots of plot ideas take over and
ending up with a knot that I can’t untangle. I need to have less patience with
some of those. I’m talking about the “aboutness” of the story. It has its
currents, and when I try to alter the flow, bad things happen. To continue with
the watery metaphors, I get beached or capsized, there’s a flood, or I cause a
beautiful waterfall further downstream to dry up. Then I arrive where the
waterfall should be, wonder what the hell happened to it, and have to go back
to knock down the dam.
I get to choose how to
tell the story. But I don’t always get to choose the story that’s being told.
Just as I need to allow the story to be told on its own terms when I’m reading,
I need to allow it its own terms when I’m writing.
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