In her diary, Woolf writes, “Then we walked down the river, in the face of a cold gale […] & gladly came home to tea; & now sit as usual surrounded by books & paper & ink, & so shall sit till bedtime—save that I have some mending to do” (p. 34—February 14, 1915).

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I have only worked on long prose projects for six years. When I started writing, I did not think I would ever write fiction or essays. I wrote and read poems because they were an immediate way to relate to the world, which I felt so intensely around me. But also chose poems because I could see the whole of them. Even long poems, I felt, I could somehow hold. This was as much to do with my lack of trust in my abilities as anything else, but it has to do with how I experience the world (both the world of language and the material world).

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The analogue to writing prose, for me, is working with cloth.

Hand-sewing, as opposed to sewing using a machine, I have a different perspective. In part this is related to speed: hand-sewing lends me time to adjust every movement and to recalibrate the shape of the garment as I am making it. When I sew using a machine, I have to be more sure (or else much more deliberate than I normally am in terms of speed).

Writing prose is like a combination of hand-sewing and sewing by machine. Of course speed comes into it. But hand-sewing is like those moments when I can see the draft there in front of me and know how to connect it, what needs to happen to make its parts act in concert. While I write, I am often impatient for the thing to appear, the same way as when I sit down at the sewing machine. Hand-sewing forces me, by its own nature, to approach the work with less speed.

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Beginning a large garment (a wedding dress): we went to the shop and bought ten yards of white silk-cotton blend, she chose a pattern, we bought boning, buttons, thread, etc., and then she left and I walked back into the house with those ten yards of pristine fabric and could barely move, certainly not cut them. They were too expansive, too perfect. In the face of their sheer quantity I found it difficult to begin my task of assembly.

Once I cut the fabric the task became a sort of swimming: finishing cut edges, then seaming. As the dress began to resemble a dress I became more sure. But while it was still forming I felt my way and trusted my intuition and my sense of space. This did not mean I knew it would come out all right, but I hoped it would and I had some experience supporting that hope. Looking at garments and making garments had given me a sensed vocabulary of space and weight and light and construction.

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I have not, so far, ever begun with a plan. I don’t know what that would be like. By plan I mean a detailed outline, a sketch of each character, and a sense of plot. I do begin with research. I know about trade routes and what they carried; labor movements; what was eaten and how it was cooked; governments and their relationships with other governments; landmasses and their geographical/geological features; people who died in the same year/in the same country; how cloth was made and what kinds of garments it was cut into, what those garments said about someone; hairstyles and bathing habits.

I begin with a sense. A shape. Often with a set of images, which act as buoys or lighthouses, demarcating the area I sail. I have a tendency to inclusion: I can see how things are related and I often draft by addition. This then this then this then this then this and this and this and this. The way I begin drafting prose is unhelpful to me later, when I want to replicate or continue a piece: often I cannot retrieve the circumstances that generated it in the first place. I have to remember music, light, orientation in space, images, impressions of movement/temperature/pressure, smells. A constellation of data and sense information that together points in the direction I want to go.

None of this has, so far, led me to making writing that decides a single path and follows it. I have trouble with cause and effect; trouble with time. It’s possible this makes me an inefficient prose writer. Nonetheless, there are things that emerge within me as prose and this is the method by which they come.

So it is rarely like mapping what I already know is there. If it happens at all, that takes place once I have a draft of something down: when I want to connect pieces that are there in order to show their importance to one another. It is more like sewing, especially like sewing a large and complex garment, where at the beginning I founder in the sheer amount of material and cannot see where I am going.

That means most of the time when I write I am walking through a gale like Woolf’s, comprising doubt and unknowing and the sheer immensity of information and image and data and impression, not to mention language. I am trying to sense my way to what is important. Sometimes this is a process of argument (if this happened, then what might happen?) but rarely (and again, usually after a complete draft—or to restart a dormant one). Usually it is a process of accretion: this, combined with this, renders that. If, within these swathes of cloth, I fold it like this, what shape will it take? If I stitch here, if I join these edges.

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Briefly back to the beginning. Reading Woolf’s dairy I think about simultaneity, not only in my writing but in my life. How while I work I am also thinking that there are dishes downstairs which need to be washed, and the laundry should hang outside while it is warm. My process is immersive; I am reluctant to leave it once I am in it because there is a good chance I won’t be able to get back to where I was without a lot of work and a good stretch of empty time (and discipline!). Still underneath it, the bag of things to iron and the fact that at 6:30 we will be wanting dinner. (Of course, Virginia Woolf and her husband had servants who took care of many of these daily tasks for them. I have no servants.)

I have found, though, as making clothes has become very secondary to the work of writing and supporting other writers, that when I can convince myself to sit at the sewing machine I often am able to solve problems in my writing that I can’t when I’m sitting at my desk. This also takes place walking around, reading, washing dishes, showering, sweeping, building things. Reminding me that the cloth I write in is much bigger than the piece I can see/am sewing together at the moment.

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I began making clothes with more seriousness after I read a piece of theoretical writing by a pattern drafter who talked about her obsession with tubes: how all garments were tubes of different sorts (truncated or pinched or split or…). A tube was a manageable way for me to see a garment; it is the easiest thing into which one can transform a flat length of cloth. Sewing up two ends, what had been a plane or a linear motion is suddenly circular. Inhabitable.

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Gathering many facts/sensing many things about the moment that interests me—together with whatever memory or desire ignites the writing—I create a habitable space. The story happens there.