Slow Writing

We live in a fast-paced world. Technology is changing at an exponential rate, our satellite phone calls bounce into space and back again in a heartbeat, and a Japanese bullet train can take you from Tokyo to Osaka in 150 minutes. Sometimes I feel hopelessly behind, because unlike virtually everything else around me, I am slow.

I’ve always been slow. Just ask my mother how long I sat alone, two years old, at the Christmas dinner table after everyone else had left, finishing a piece of pie. Ask me how long it took me to finally start wearing bootcut pants after they became trendy—and now, I’m still wearing them years after everyone else has moved on. I eat slowly. I read slowly. I even walk slowly.

This is mainly just because it’s my nature, but it’s also because I love to savor things. Food. Words. Moments. If I try to rush, I always have the vague feeling that I’m missing something, or that I’m not putting in enough time to bottle my experience so I can remember it later on.

When it comes to the writing life, sometimes operating at my speed can put a person at a disadvantage. I’m slow to absorb feedback about my work and implement changes. Most of the time, a suggestion that doesn’t grab me right away has to sit in my brain for months before I decide I should act on it. The longer it takes to write a book, to send out queries, the longer one has to wait to realize the dream of being published. And then editors impose deadlines, and those are a lot more intimidating for those of us who don’t tend to sit down and write five thousand words in one sitting.

I hated NaNoWriMo. No offense to the millions out there who swear by it, but I tried it once, and I will never do it again. And I’m pretty sure the only reason I hated it was because it’s too fast. Winning NoNoWriMo requires the writer to write fifty thousand words in one month, or an average of about one thousand six hundred and sixty-seven words per day. Take even one day off, and you risk falling behind and never catching up. (Although I’ve seen writers do twenty thousand words in the last two days in order to win.)

What hell is this? For most people this isn’t exactly a breakneck pace, but I couldn’t stand it. The problem wasn’t even necessarily the number of words I had to produce. I have many days when I write that much. But my trick is, I never obligate myself to write them. If I’m having a productive day or working on a long scene, sometimes I will do a few thousand words. But I also have many, many days when I don’t write at all. I spend a lot of time when I’m working on a book doing nothing but thinking about it. But NaNo doesn’t account for that, because that isn’t putting words on the page. In NaNo world, if you take a walk one day and just think about your characters instead of writing, you’ve fallen behind. You’ve already started to fail. You’re going too slowly.

For the record, the year I participated in NaNoWriMo, I won. And I hated at least four fifths of what I had written. I ended up scrapping a project that I’d really been enjoying until I forced myself to write more than half of it in one overly hectic month. Now, it’s possible that I would have abandoned that book at some point, no matter what. But writing so quickly that all the pleasure was sucked out of it, writing flat, uninspired words just for the sake of writing more flat, uninspired words was one of the biggest disappointments of my writing life.

I learned a valuable lesson about myself and what writing means to me, and why I’m doing it. It gives me no satisfaction at all to see my word count going up. I don’t even pay attention to that. I write in order to be immersed in my story, to learn something about people and life. Once again, I think it comes back to what I said about savoring things. I love to write. I love to curl up outside with my battered notebook and find my place in my manuscript and spend a few hours there. The slow pace is the whole point, for me. The slower I go, the longer I get to spend in my story world, with my story characters. There’s nothing better.

So I’m raising a glass right now to all of us slowpoke writers out there. We know what we’re doing. We’re not falling behind; we’re smelling the roses of our own words.

Slow and steady might not always win the race, but it can finish a book.

—

Martine Fournier Watson is originally from Montreal, Canada, where she completed her master’s in art history after spending a year in Chicago as a Fulbright scholar. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in journals such as the Beloit Fiction Journal, Roanoke Review, Scrivener Creative Review, The Bellingham Review and Sixfold. She currently lives in Michigan with her husband and two children.

When she is not curled up writing, you can find her walking in the woods, playing Sudoku, trying to read all the books in the world, or stalking famous authors on Twitter. https://twitter.com/MFournierWatson

https://www.martinefournierwatson.com/

THE DREAM PEDDLER

The dream peddler came to town at the white end of winter, before the thaw . . .

Traveling salesmen like Robert Owens have passed through Evie Dawson’s town before, but none of them offered anything like what he has to sell: dreams, made to order, with satisfaction guaranteed.

Soon after he arrives, the community is shocked by the disappearance of Evie’s young son. The townspeople, shaken by the Dawson family’s tragedy and captivated by Robert’s subversive magic, begin to experiment with his dreams. And Evie, devastated by grief, turns to Robert for a comfort only he can sell her. But the dream peddler’s wares awaken in his customers their most carefully buried desires, and despite all his good intentions, some of them will lead to disaster.

Gorgeously told through the eyes of Evie, Robert, and a broad cast of fully realized characters, The Dream Peddler is an imaginative, moving novel of overcoming loss and reckoning with the longings we keep secret.

“Astonishing . . . The Dream Peddler unfolds like a gorgeous poem, leading us deep into the lives of its characters, and exploring the vast underground legacy of our own desires. This is the must-read book of the year.” —Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips