I have a friend who writes very fast. He produces essays the way a musician produces scales — daily, without fuss, with a confidence I find both admirable and suspicious. His work is good. But it is not the work of someone who waited.
I do not write fast. This is not entirely by choice — I am constitutionally slow, prone to revision, unable to call something finished until the sentence sounds right read aloud three times — but I have come to believe that my slowness is not a defect to overcome. It is a methodology.
What Speed Costs
The fast writer has advantages. Volume. Momentum. A body of work that compounds. The reader who writes three essays a week to my one will have twelve times as many by year’s end.
But speed has a cost that is harder to see: it tends toward the already-formed idea. The fast writer writes what she already knows. This is not a criticism — it is what fast writing allows. You can only write quickly what you can think quickly. The slow writer has no such option. Slowing down forces the encounter with the not-yet-known.
When I sit with a sentence long enough, I often discover that I do not actually believe it. The sentence sounded good in the head but on the page it collapses under examination. This is useful. The fast writer may not find this out until the essay is already published.
The Sentence as Unit of Thought
I have come to think that the sentence — not the paragraph, not the essay, not the book — is the right unit of composition. A sentence is small enough to hold in the mind whole. You can turn it. Check it from behind. Feel whether it is true.
Flaubert famously spent entire days on a single sentence. This is not efficiency by any standard we would recognize, but the work survived. It survives because each sentence was truly inhabited. The writer was inside it, not running past it toward the next thing.
I am not Flaubert. But I am trying to learn from the posture: one sentence at a time, present to this sentence, before the next.
What Slowness Gives
The gift is noticing. When you write slowly you notice the repetition you would have passed over. You notice the cliché that felt comfortable because it was worn smooth by use. You notice when the tone shifts in a way that betrays uncertainty — and that noticing is useful, because uncertainty in prose is always about uncertainty in thought.
Slowness also gives you time with the subject. I often find that by the end of a slowly-written essay I understand the subject better than when I began — not because I have done more research, but because the writing itself was the research. The thinking happened in the writing rather than before it.
This is, I think, what writing is for. Not the transmission of already-completed thought. The discovery of thought in the act of making it articulable.
A Small Discipline
I write one session a day. Usually an hour. Some days fewer words come than others. On the worst days I revise rather than generate. But the hour passes always in the presence of the work, attending to it, waiting for it to show me what it is.
This is slow. It is also, I think, right.