Slow writing
Habits for a more measured and less frenetic approach
I’ve been writing too fast. Even that sentence, I typed in hurry. I wrote it, made a typo, and got frustrated at myself. I’m always in a hurry with my writing. That’s my problem. Hurrying. Racing. Scrambling. I should know better. I’ve taught writing for almost two decades and wanted to be writer since I was eight years old. I should know better. Or should I?
Fast writing is ingrained in every person who uses a keyboard. When children learn keyboarding, the key metric is words per minute. The more words per minute, the better. People put this metric on their resumes. Teachers assign students higher word counts as though that will make their papers better. Every November, people make a mad dash to write a book (NaNoWriMo). An ideology of speed surrounds writing and writers. A fetish of fast.
More words are not always better. Word counts do not make better writing. Rapidly pounding and tapping on a keyboard does not, inherently, produce good writing.
The process of making good writing is typically slow and, for lack of a better word, grinding. Good writing goes through multiple iterations, sometimes so many that it feels endless. The published, polished writing we read has been through many edits, some deep and many shallow. Good writing goes through fits and starts, false hopes, and vicious cuts.
How then do we reconcile the process of good writing with the keyboard’s ideology of speed? How do we avoid fetishizing word counts and words per minute? Answering these questions requires slowing down. Slowing down is a series of small, incremental steps. Here are five of my personal strategies:
Strategies for slowing down:
1) Writing by hand. This is the only way I know how to guarantee slowing down the craft of writing. Break out a pad of paper. I prefer yellow lined, personally. I have a jubilee of rainbow-colored notecards upon which I scribble sentences and paragraphs.
2) Moving hands away from the keyboard. It’s naïve to think all writing can be done by hand. We type all the time. I typed out this blog post. Instead, what I like to do is move my hands off the keyboard. Away from the home row keys. Sometimes, I place my hands on the sides of my computer. Other times, I literally put my hands under my armpits to slow down my typing (and my thinking).
3) Printing out writing and laying it on the floor or a table. This is a classic exercise that enabled me to learn better organization, both in my writing and thinking. When we type on a screen, especially a word processing document, two things happen. First, we tend to look at those words as finished because they look clean and neat. It looks polished so we think it’s polished. Second, when we type, we tend to write longer documents with longer sentences. When we write with pen and paper, we tend to do more planning with more detailed attention to organization.* Getting off the screen, then, helps. When we print out all the pages of our drafts and line them up, we can better see, literally and figuratively, the organization of our writing. And the subsequent problems with our writing’s structure becomes easier to identify.
4) Cutting and pasting by hand. This strategy is a paired activity with #2. Cut the paragraphs or sentences apart. Then shuffle them around until you’ve created a better organization.
5) Read your writing like a reader. One of the hardest, and most unpleasant, things to do as writer is read your own stuff. It’s the same as trying to listen or watch yourself. It’s uncomfortable because it forces self-confrontation. When you read, though, you can’t approach your writing as if you are the writer. Instead, you need to adopt the position of reader. For me, this means I need time between when I initially write and when I go back to revise. Marination time can be anywhere from overnight (the night’s jury) to three days. I don’t like to go more than three days when working on a piece of a writing because I lose track of the thread.
Most of these strategies are haptic in nature, meaning they invoke a sense of touch. I strongly believe that typing with word processing software reduces the variety and varied haptic aspects of writing. The overarching goal to the above strategies is to make writing more haptic. I hope you find these strategies useful. If you have other ones, please share them in the comment section. If you don’t find them useful, discard as you see fit.
*https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171409