Advice From Authors – Write Like a Jazz Musician

Writers Say the Best Path to Publishing Is Often the Slowest

Mar 26, 2010
Chris Evans

Write Like a Jazz Musician - Chris Evans

Writers hoping to publish should worry less about publishing and more about tapping into the spiritual, free-flowing parts of their minds-and do it at the writing desk.

“I would say that, especially for poetry and fiction, the trick is to get into that part of your mind that you don’t ordinarily use, the subconscious, and just see what comes to you as you go along,” says David Huddle, author of Only the Little Bone, The Story of a Million Years, The Writing Habit and other books of poetry, fiction and essays. “It’s a little bit like a jazz musician, improvising, you know. You start out and you have a phrase or two, but the rest of it you have to make up, and that’s the really great part of doing it.”

For his part, Huddle says he does most of his work in his initial draft.

“I’d say that most of it happens in the initial writing,” Huddle says. “I have learned over many years how to keep working on a poem longer and longer, and keep going back to it, rereading it, changing it, making even little changes, or big changes.

“(With) both a topic and a deadline, you’ll come up with something.”

Suzi Wizowaty, author of The Round Barn, said she also believes in creating art slowly.

“I do try to work five days a week,” says Wizowaty, who is also a Vermont state legislator. “I have at times tried to set aside one day (each week to write), and it doesn’t work. I need the momentum. I need to have it be working in the back of my mind all the time. That’s how I prefer it, if I’m able to do that. And I usually am, off and on.

“I am a very slow writer. It takes me about five years to write a book. So I can’t obviously work, set up my life entirely the way I would ideally like. But I try to.”

Wizowaty says the slowness works for her.

“Why am I so abysmally slow? I do write many, many drafts,” she says. “Ten, twelve drafts. But it also is . . . I see the characters, I know the way they talk, and plot is very hard for me. This is why I’m not as successful a writer as I might be.

“Many people see the plot easily. I have to take long walks in the woods and talk to my characters. What did you do then? What did you think about this? And What if this happened? And let them tell me what their reactions would be. I don’t know what happens. I have these people, and I don’t know what happens to them. And so, that takes years to figure out. So it’s very slow. It’s very inefficient.”

Wizowaty laughs and adds, “But it’s how it is.”