In Praise of Slow Writing

Some things take time. They just do.

Dear Word Friends,

With the new year underway, there’s a pile of new year/new you offers slamming my Inbox with fevered pitch. Yours too?

Some of these offers tempt me. Who doesn’t want to learn from meditation teacher Tara Brach, for instance, how to navigate these tumultuous times from an awake and open heart, meet pain with compassion and stand steady in the face of life’s difficulties through 2025: A Year of Courageous Loving? Seriously. Sign me up.

But buyer beware: stay away from the programs and challenges that seek to turn you into a book producing robo-writer in 10 days.

If you haven’t yet made a New Year’s resolution, and if you’re someone who’s interested in writing a book (or anything, really), I suggest this one: slow your roll.

You heard that right.

May 2025 be a year of slow writing.

Not everything in our rapid-fire techno culture is better at warp speed. Reader-ready writing remains one of those things.

I write in praise of slow writing not just because I’m painstakingly slow when it comes to writing long. Like many of us, my life is built around earning a living and caring for a multi-generational family, so claiming space for writing has been a hard-won fight at every stage.

However, that’s not my motivation for this week’s missive.

I’m calling for slow writing on behalf of readers. 

The fast-writing offers I see hawked on Substack and elsewhere (“Write Your Bestselling Book in a Single Morning Before You Even Get Out of Bed!”) make me twitchy.

Producing content is not the same as writing a book—a process that necessitates pondering. Observing. Metabolizing. Reading What You’ve Written. Revising.

Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

Writing is work.

It’s a conundrum in this fast-paced world. But it’s a tension to manage. Not a problem to solve.

Creativity wants spaciousness, and count me among those who never feel like they have enough. But even when short on bandwidth, we can cultivate a spacious mentality in relation to the words we send into the world.

To be sure, fast writing has a crucial role to play. Take, for instance, op-eds, which must be timely in order to see the light of day. But even there, we cannot spew the unconsidered. Facebook may not support fact-checking, but we do. That applies to our own words, too.

Fast writing plays a key role for new and established writers of fiction and nonfiction alike. Write quickly at first, I advise my students and coaching clients. Get it down before that nasty inner critic has a chance to catch up and censor your words.

I’m a devotee of freewriting first thoughts (writing longhand without crossing anything out or picking up the pen from the page). I’ve seen up close the impact of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) on fiction writers who are finally able to write their first draft. I’m terribly fond of generative prompts and use them liberally. Love word count goals. Love timed writing as ways to get ideas out of my head. Shout out to all those offering support around these practices, and to all those practicing these techniques.

But fast writing, when published for public consumption, is as durable as fast fashion, as nourishing as fast food.

In the words of curmudgeon Samuel Johnson, “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

My new best frenemy ChatGPT is now sitting beside me feeding me a bevvy of quotes too good not to share, but I’ll share just a few:

“All writing is rewriting.” Ernest Hemingway.

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” Terry Pratchett.

And on the subject of first drafts: Nine times out of ten, first drafts are shitty. They’re supposed to be that way.

Here’s Anne Lamott, patron saint of giving oneself permission to write shittily in order to cast off the perfectionism that plagues most writers I know: “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”

Right. Start, but don’t end there.

“It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.” C.J. Cherryh.

Hemingway again: “Write drunk. Edit sober.”

Which brings me to why we write in the first place. Toni Morrison always (according to me) says it best: “Writing is really a way of thinking—not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic, or just sweet.”

I like how Flannery O’Connor puts it, too: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

Also, Julia Alvarez: “I don’t write to get something off my chest. I write to figure out whatever it is that’s puzzling me.”

Yes. And, me too.

To be a writer is to sit with uncertainty. I recently heard Melissa Febos say that certainty impedes writing. She advises writers who are in the middle of a draft and unsure where it’s going to tell ourselves, “It is not time for me to know this yet.”