Why I Write Slowly

So I breezed past agent Janet Reid's blog today and found this post. (She quotes from a speech by William Deresiewicz, given at West Point.)

The part that concerns me are the two paragraphs of this speech that Janet posted:

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing. [bolding mine]

I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.


Note the part in bold above. That's me. That's what I have to do to produce good work. My first ideas (and often my second, third, and fourth ideas) are usually sloppy and shopworn. Riddled with flaws. I need time to work my way into a scene, to blow out the chaff, find the valuable kernels in the midst of the fluff. And if there aren't any, then I start again.

I don't rush through scenes, chapters, first drafts, and then go back to rewrite. Writing and rewriting are inseparable for me. If I have a first draft, it's at the sentence level, and frequently I start revising a sentence before I reach the end of it. This is how I find the story: by constant, slow fiddling. By story, I mean not just plot, but all the layers and connections and emotional sub-text that give scenes texture and dimensionality. And not least, the language with which to tell it.

Without this process, I probably would not write anything worth reading.

So I accept the process as what works for me. It gets results. What bothers me--has always bothered me--is that it's such a slow process. I used to think something was wrong with me that I wrote so slowly.

I realize that fast writers are going to take exception to Deresiewicz's opinion that "the best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write."

I'm willing to admit that writers exist who can write both quickly and well. I try not to be envious of them. Some days I even succeed in that.

But I also think there are n number of writers who simply don't take the time necessary to mine their own potential and produce their best possible work.  I see statements like this all the time on writers' boards:  "I wrote the first draft of my 150K novel in two months, and then took three months to revise it. Now I'm querying agents."

Six months later they wonder why they keep getting rejected.

So whatever your process--a constant, fiddly rewriter like myself, or a get-down-the-first-draft-then-fix-it like so many others--ask yourself, when you reach the end, "Did I slow down enough to think, to make the right connections, to find the treasure, to mine for gold? Did I miss the motherlode entirely? Could I make this better by giving myself more time?"

Chances are, you can.

As for me, now I don't feel stupid or handicapped anymore. I feel vindicated. I'm in good company. This is remarkably freeing.

Except now I'm worried about whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that even I write faster than James Joyce....