In Praise of Slow Writing (and Reading)

“[T]houghtful and quintessentially Southern … The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt unfolds like a magnolia, slowly revealing a languid beauty.”  —Publishers Weekly

In my household, we have pet snails. Around six common garden snails call our terrarium home, each the size of a dime, the first of which my nine-year-old daughter found in her fairy garden. Just this morning I snail-watched. A snail crept across a rock with liturgical slowness, antlers stretched to the heavens, taking no notice of the glistening trail it left behind. I value the slow life, too. In fact, as a writer, I’ve embraced the value of slow writing, not just as the result of a busy life, but as part of my process.

As you can imagine, slowness is not a popular method to champion on purpose. When I tell people it took me nine years to write my debut novel, The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt, they usually nod sympathetically, as if to say Well, at least you survived that. To be honest, while writing, I was also unsure what to make of my slowness. There was no guarantee my novel would one day be published—statistically the odds were against me, actually—and many days I wondered if I would be mired forever in the ever-looping intestines of my manuscript.

But now, I see the wait was worth it. The care I took with language; my willingness to march into yet another round of revisions, especially when I didn’t know whether or not the next revision would make the book better; and my readiness to gain the gift of distance by putting the manuscript aside for a few months at a time—all of this was instrumental in preparing my novel for publication.

Fellow writers know it takes time. For those of us who plod on for years, we’re in good company. J. R. R. Tolkien reportedly took twelve years to write The Lord of the Rings. Six years for J. K. Rowling’s first book in the Harry Potter series. Four for Audrey Niffennegger’s The Time Travelers Wife. Of course, when I see that it purportedly took Emily Brontë nine months to write Wuthering Heights, I’m forced to admit that you don’t necessarily have to spend a decade on a manuscript. Maybe we all need to escape to a windswept house on the moors to write, free of social media and other modern distractions.

American culture is obsessed with speed and instant gratification. The slow path is not encouraged. It’s frowned upon as a barrier to productivity—and we all worship at the altar of productivity, usually without even knowing it, so deeply saturated it is in our lives. But I have to look no further than some of my favorite books to see that moving through the world at a ruminative pace has rewards of its own. Because the sibling of slow writing is slow reading.

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, for instance, is one of those novels you’d call a “slow read.” It’s a work of great wisdom, replete with thoughtfulness as rapt as prayer. You’re not going to zip through it on an airplane. You’re not supposed to. In its opening chapter, Robinson’s book actually teaches you the rate with which you should be reading it.

Take the first two sentences of the novel: “My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.” Robinson begins with that short, declarative statement: “My name is Ruth.” You swallow it with one gulp of your eye. But then, in that next sentence, Robinson stalls, as if to say Not so fast, friend.

The second sentence is an excavation of the first. To know Ruth, you must know the history of her care. It’s no wonder that in the next few sentences Ruth describes a “house dug out of the ground.” There are layers to this literary world, a landscape underneath the ground that, as a reader, you’d best pay attention to. Here’s another way to look at it: to begin with, Robinson gives us one name, Ruth, but on the heels of that come five more names, swift as minnows.

That second sentence, the one with all the names, reminds us of the begats of the Bible—Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas—except in this case Robinson’s genealogy is decisively matrilineal. The novel is coaching us here. For every one name, you’re going to need to understand five more. This, the novel suggests, is gonna take some time. So you better slow down from the start.

If novels can teach you how to read them, maybe novels can teach you how to write them, too. It’s possible that my own novel did this for me. My book, The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt, follows a seventy-five-year-old Southern woman named Judith Kratt as she writes an inventory of her family’s heirlooms. Judith is the book’s first-person narrator, and the cadence of her speech is slow. Her speech mirrors the pace of the small South Carolina town she lives in, with its rambling fields, abandoned barns, and once-grand homes sliding into disrepair. It was perhaps a given that it would be impossible for me to rush the writing of this novel. Judith wasn’t going to have it any other way.

Will it take me nine years to write my next novel? Maybe not. (Somewhere in the distance, I can hear my agent and editor breathing sighs of relief.) There are a variety of reasons, related to my life and my craft, that my next book will likely go faster. But who knows—I have to let the process unfold as it will. I have to let this new novel teach me which speed it requires.

I think of my snails again, especially the one I watched this morning. How that snail left a shining trail to mark its path. How that trail might be what patience looks like, the sparkle of the slow life, the sheen we never see when we’re scrambling through life on hot feet. I’ll continue to champion slow writing as a process. It has to be a conscious decision, after all. It takes will to practice slowness amidst the churning of our lives. We have to be in slow motion against a backdrop that screams past us. If we do, we have the time to notice one another, to shake hands over all the big and snail-sized marvels around us. As we shake, here are the words I press into your palm: Go slower than the world urges.

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Andrea Bobotis is the author of the debut novel The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt, forthcoming from Sourcebooks on July 9, 2019. A native of South Carolina, she holds a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Virginia. She lives with her family in Denver, Colorado, where she teaches creative writing to youth at Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

Website: www.andreabobotis.com

Instagram: @andreabobotis

Facebook: @andreabobotisauthor

Twitter: @andreabobotis

About THE LAST LIST OF MISS JUDITH KRATT

The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt follows a spinster sister as she untangles the dark legacy of her family’s possessions in a South Carolina cotton town.

Judith inherited all the Kratt family had to offer—the pie safe, the copper clock, the murder no one talks about. For decades, she’s been the keeper of the family house in South Carolina, safeguarding its valuables and its secrets. But Rosemarie, her wayward younger sister, suddenly returns home, sparking Judith to write an inventory of all that belongs to them. As Judith writes, she finds that cataloging the family heirlooms can’t suppress their histories, not when Rosemarie is determined to expose what Judith had planned to take to her grave. The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt is an atmospheric debut that explores the power of objects, the weight of memory, and the ties between who we are and what we own.

 

You can purchase The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt here:

 

Tattered Cover (Denver, CO): http://bit.ly/2FxHmdA

Fiction Addiction (Greenville, SC): http://bit.ly/2WtAdlr

BookBar (Denver, CO): http://bit.ly/2uylGJ6

Amazon: https://amzn.to/2SguOAE

Books-a-Million: http://bit.ly/2MZr8NX

B&N: http://bit.ly/2SywIvE

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Andrea Bobotis

Writer | Teacher

www.andreabobotis.com

Author of The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt (forthcoming July 9, 2019)

Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips