Writing, Fast and Slow
This past week, I finished drafting my latest work-in-progress, tentatively called Generations. Typing out “The End” was quite the emotional moment for me: reader, I cried. That’s something that hadn’t happened to me before, and I suspect it’s because I am becoming more of a softie. Or maybe the draft is tear-inducingly bad. Only time will tell.
I started this project as part of NaNoWriMo 2020, which saw me frantically chasing after my daily word count goal in order to make it to 50k by the end of November. I made it, but barely. At that point, the story was not even close to halfway done, and the last half-year was when most of the manuscript came together. By the time I’d wrapped the whole thing up, the word count was 113,000.
Some writer friends have called my pace “fast”, and depending on where you’re standing—as a writer, reader, or consumer of any form of art or media—that may seem like a good thing. We’re part of a culture that places an inordinate amount of value on speed, using it as a proxy for productivity or prolificness, which under hustle culture is deemed desirable. Fast drafting can also be viewed as good for silencing a strong internal editor—for some, that is the main draw of participating in NaNoWriMo.
Of course some folks are of another mind: they think writing fast produces inferior work. A prominent SF author tweeted something about this earlier today. The tweet has since been deleted, so I’m redacting the person’s identifying info:
I’m not too interested in what’s fast or slow, whether one’s writing pace affects the quality of the work, or whether a more productive author is necessarily a more dedicated, more hardworking author, mostly because these terms are relative and meaningless. There is no “fast” or “slow” when it comes to writing. Six months on Generations seems fast compared to something else, like the year-plus it took me to draft The Sleepless. But we’re not even talking about revision time, which for this project could take another six months if not more. And that’s just me. Every writer has their own process, and every book requires its own process. The work takes the amount of time it takes. Some books take years, some take weeks, with varying degrees of quality. (What is “good” writing also feels like such a slippery term, but that’s a topic for another day).
The conversation about “fast” or “slow” writing sometimes feels like an artificial way to stratify and judge writers and the works they produce. No one’s making an argument against “development time”—yes, it is good to let ideas percolate!—and no one can point to what’s sufficient time for developing ideas or improving on a draft. I think it’s more interesting to talk about how some writers can afford to draft slow, and how some don’t have that luxury.
Photo by Julian Hochgesang on Unsplash
The question of “fast” or “slow” should be less a conversation for asserting hierarchies and subjective criteria, and more of a discussion of how the publishing ecosystem incentivizes speed. Without going into hard numbers about it, many writers simply need to write fast to get paid fast. Hardly anyone is paid enough and so folks have to hustle to make a living. That means producing more and more work as often as one can, in the hopes of a sale. That pace doesn’t make anyone a better writer, nor does it make the work worse. That’s just the pace some need to maintain in order to get by. Why is that the pace? And what are the factors that cause it? I think that’s the more productive conversation to be having.
Image credits: Scrivener and Twitter screenshot by me.