The Virtue of Slow Writers
As a writer at work on a book that’s taken far longer than expected—a story collection begun in 2008 now a novel in-progress—I’m interested in how, in a world that values speed, the slow writer learns to tolerate the uncertainty that comes with the long project. Is it possible to tune out the noise of doubt and the proverbial ticking clock when writing goes into overtime? Having lost count of my revisions, and in need of advice, I went looking for other slow writers and discovered that more often than not, a book’s gestation takes place over years, frequently decades. I found too that the slow writer embraces the protracted and unpredictable timeline, seeing it not as fraught or frustrating but an opportunity for openness and discovery. As J.R.R Tolkien said to W. H. Auden, on the 12 years he spent writing Lord of the Rings, “I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me.”
The world can be impatient with slow writers. Nearly published , wrote in , “It has been a long, lonely vigil. We’d nearly forgotten he was out there.” Garner’s , “Dear Important Novelists: Be Less Like Moses and More Like Howard Cosell,” argues the “long gestation period” among the period’s young writers ( was written over nine) marks “a desalinating tidal change in the place novelists occupy in our culture.” The writer, hidden away in monkish solitude, is no longer a commentator on events of the moment in the vein of, say, . Bellow wrote four massive books in 11 years, and in doing so, Garner says, “snatched control, with piratical confidence and a throbbing id, of American literature’s hive mind.” Comparing Eugenides’s books, he notes, “So much time elapses between them that his image in dust-jacket photographs can change alarmingly.” Write slowly and not only do you risk being forgotten, you may no longer be recognizable.
