On the Virtue of Slow Writing

There is a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from a sentence you have fought for. Not the kind that arrives whole and perfect in the first draft — those are gifts, and rare — but the kind you have returned to, again and again, trimming and turning it in the light until it says exactly what you meant, and no more.

Most writing today is fast writing. It is writing shaped by the rhythms of publication, by the anxiety of relevance, by the algorithmic hunger for recency. It gets the words out. It makes the point. It moves on.

The Problem With Speed

Speed is not always the enemy of quality. There are writers who think best at pace, whose sentences arrive in something close to their final form. But for most of us, speed is how we avoid the difficulty of actually thinking. We write around the hard thing. We settle for the approximate word because the exact one requires sitting with the problem a little longer than is comfortable.

The essay, as a form, has always resisted this. The word itself — from Montaigne’s essais, his attempts — contains the admission that we are trying, not concluding. An essay is a mind in motion, not a verdict delivered.

To write slowly is not to think slowly. It is to think more than once.

When Montaigne sat in his tower and wrote about his kidney stones, his fear of death, the customs of cannibals, he was not trying to be productive. He was trying to understand. The writing was the understanding. There was no draft one and draft two; there was only the long, recursive process of a man figuring out what he actually thought.

What Others Have Said

This is not a new observation. Flaubert was famously agonised over individual words for days at a time. He put it plainly in a letter to a friend:

Whatever you want to say, there is only one word that will express it, one verb to make it move, one adjective to qualify it. You must search for that word, that verb, that adjective, and never be satisfied with approximations.

— Gustave Flaubert: Letter to Guy de Maupassant, 1876

The standard has not changed. Only our willingness to meet it has.

What Slowness Permits

Slow writing allows for the question you didn’t know you needed to ask. You arrive at a paragraph certain of your direction, and somewhere in the middle of it, a sentence appears that changes everything. This only happens if you are paying attention — and paying attention requires time.

It allows for the right word, rather than a nearby one. The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is, as Twain noted, the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. This sounds precious until you feel it in a sentence, that small electric click of precision.

It allows for doubt. Fast writing is often confident writing, because the speed doesn’t leave room for the caveats to catch up. Slow writing lets uncertainty in. And uncertainty, handled well, is not weakness — it is honesty.

I don’t write slowly because I am slow. I write slowly because I have learned, through considerable waste, that the essays I am proudest of are the ones that took the longest to get right. Not because length is merit. But because the time was how I knew I hadn’t given up on them.

The essay you rush is not the essay you meant to write. It is a draft of it, published.