The Joy of Writing Slowly
Why Anything Worth Writing Takes Time
Do you want to start your novel? Foundations of Novel Writing begins Oct. 1. Get your novel off the ground in this 8-week course designed for first-time novelists. Learn more or sign up here. (Save $50 when you enter the code TCW50 at checkout.)
Paid subscribers can listen to this post here.
If you are old enough to remember childhood Saturdays spent reading for hours, you may also remember Saturdays when the only thing on TV was golf, Soul Train, and Shirley Temple movies. I owe much of my early reading to those TV-challenged Saturdays, combined with a serious equestrian accident (a fancy term for “I fell off my horse and my horse fell on me”) that left me bedridden for months. With nothing on TV, physically bound to the bed by one of those old-school traction mechanisms that kept one leg suspended in the air, I had few options other than reading. I was in sixth grade at the time. I read, I wrote in my diary, I dreamed.
Even before my accident and after my recovery, my family had no money for ballet lessons or gymnastics, and I had no interest in sports, so until I was fifteen and got my first time-card job, there were no “extracurriculars. I had plenty of free time, which I often filled with writing, reading, cutting pictures of Matt Dillon and Andrew McCarthy out of Teen Beat Magazine, and pasting said pictures in my Goals for This Year scrapbook. (In retrospect, I can see that I suffered from rampant optimism).
Nobody talked about “productivity” back then. A day spent reading lazily or coloring or building forts in the kudzu was considered a day well spent. That was a different era, of course. The word productivity has been such an intrinsic part of our lives for the past decade at least, it’s easy to fall under its spell. All those listicles on how to hack your morning, hack you life, and hack your creativity. All those apps promising to make you a more efficient writer. I don’t want to admit how many hours I’ve spent going down the rabbit hole of one app or another. While a select few have been helpful, the vast majority of them have taken far more of my time than they have given back.
The truth is that writing—especially novel writing—is often a slow process. Although you can learn to be a better writer and you can create better writing habits, you can’t really hack your writing. There’s no way to streamline writing to the point of complete efficiency if you hope to create any kind of art.
First, to be a good writer you must make time—copious amounts of time over many years—for reading. You should read widely and well, in the genre in which you wish to write, but also in other genres. You must also make time for thinking. And when you sit down to write, you must make time for discovering the story. You must accept that there will be false starts, funky sentences, faulty plot points. You must give yourself time to be flawed, and time to figure out how to fix things.
The first thing you dash off may feel inspired, but it usually won’t be a great book until you have spent time rethinking, revising, reimagining. If your final draft hasn’t shed a lot of pages and a character or two, then you probably haven’t done the real work of revising.
Some writers with a steady, serious work ethic and a supportive publisher manage to write a novel each year. I admire them. Although that level of efficiency has eluded me, I certainly believe it is possible to write and revise a novel in a year if you treat the writing as a serious practice, several hours per week, butt in the chair and all that. On the other end of the spectrum are writers like Dona Tartt, whose mindbendingly beautiful The Goldfinch was a more than a decade in the making.
In 2013 Tartt told Julie Bosnan of The New York Times that she had written scenes for The Goldfinch as far back as 1993. “That’s the way it’s been with all my books,” Tartt said. “Things will come to you and you’re not going to know exactly how they fit in. You have to trust in the way they all fit together, that your subconscious knows what you’re doing.”
The subconscious is a slow-burn kind of instrument. A race for productivity squeezes out the air a novelist needs to allow his or her subconscious to do the hard work of stitching disparate observations, ideas, and characters together into a thing of wonder. Writing is associative. You draw images, ideas, memories, from the life you’ve lived, the places you’ve traveled, the people you’ve known, the books you’ve read, the art you’ve experienced. It takes time for these things to find their form together. It takes time for you, the writer, to figure out how they all fit and what it means.
The productivity evangelists would fear the real, time-consuming work and joy of writing. After all, isn’t it a failure of time and efficiency to spend so much time studying something that will ultimately fall by the wayside, to spend so many pages on a scene that will ultimately be cut? A novelist’s research happens daily, in the people we encounter, the places we go, all the minor observations that build, over time, to create a perspective on the world.
Take the slow and steady approach in my annual writing cohort, Novel in Nine.
While you are collecting experiences and observations, while you are reading and becoming more knowledgeable and more adpet at language and syntax, your subconscious is there in the background, seeking out the associations that will come together to make a creative whole.
Here’s the hard, beautiful truth about writing: No matter how well you plan, many of the paragraphs and pages you write will eventually end up on the editing room floor. Not because you weren’t writing as efficiently as you could be, but because you grow during the course of writing a book. As you write — as you do the hard, thoughtful work — you learn which way the book needs to go. You discover what is dragging the story down, and what you need to build it back up.
If your goal as a writer is simply to be productive, you will always let yourself down. If your goal is to do your best work, you will be a much better, more genuine writer. Maybe what we need, to go along with slow food and slow living, is a slow writing movement.
I urge you sometime this week to find a quiet space, or at least a place where your mind can feel quiet. (While I need silence to write, I have friends who are calmed by the mild chaos of a cafe). Once you have found your place, once you have uncapped your pen and opened your notebook or your laptop, write slowly. Don’t think about how many pages you’re going to “produce.” Don’t check your word count. Don’t abandon a tangent because you think it really has no place in your novel, story, or memoir. It may very well have a place. And if it doesn’t, it still has value. It came to you for a reason. The act of writing it down has meaning.
Just write. Slowly, with equal parts ease and concentration. Take your time. Allow the writing itself to bring you joy.
Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of six novel and two story collections. She helps writers complete their novels the slow and steady way in the transformational nine-month program Novel in Nine.
You can read about my most recent book, The Wonder Test, here.