On Writing Fast

A little reflection about the turnaround time.

Hi friends.

I’ve been slowing down at this residency so much I feel nearly paused. It has gotten me thinking about speed and how quickly we produce things. And why some work takes a long time and why some work comes more easily or at least faster. And the relative value of that work.

I met someone recently who was trying to cross a finish line on a project they’d been working on for years and years. There were specific reasons why it was taking as long as it did: additional research that had to be performed in archives and with interviews, and then more technical knowledge that had to be acquired in order to understand that research. But also there was an underlying desire for absolute perfection they found themselves mired in whenever they sat down to write. If they’d been working on something for so long, it had better be really damn good by the time they’re done. They needed to say everything they needed to say, and they needed to say it perfectly. It was messing with their head a little bit and things were taking too long, but also it was the only way through for them.

I cannot argue with their process because it is different than mine. I sense there is something about working on something for so many years that requires a different kind of ego attachment to it all. I only know how it works for me: When you write a book that has a quicker turnaround time, you will make other kinds of choices. The book will not be about everything but it will be about something.

By the way, my sense is that they will write an incredibly rich and textured book. One that I would never have the time or focus or inclination to write. We are different writers and that is OK.

They write long, and I write short. What will the book say about you in the end?

At the beginning of my career someone advised me to be the kind of writer who wrote a new book every two years. It would behoove me to write fast, they said. I could a create a different kind of career for myself.

I found that line of thinking interesting for a few reasons:

It would help me to grow quickly as a writer by trying new things. I hadn’t gotten an MFA but I didn’t think it mattered. (I still don’t.) I felt I could learn new things just by reading and writing and experimenting, and also studying interviews with other writers, too, and attending literary events and paying attention. I could do this over and over, until I got somewhere new with my work.

Being on a faster timeline would also get me in the habit of writing every day or at least always be in the state of thinking and working on something. Each time I started a new project I felt like I was stepping into a fast car, putting my foot on the gas and not stopping for nothing till I reached the border. And when I finished one book, all I had to do was just hop in another car and start another ride.

Also, two decades ago when I really committed to this life, people’s attention spans were already diminishing. I knew it, I could see it. There was a sense from this original conversation that it would be beneficial to me to be regularly putting work out there because the more often people heard about me, the more they would remember my name. (I remember people used to talk about how you needed to hear about a book three times in order for it to register in your memory, and then after a while it was five, but now it feels like it’s ten or a hundred or who fucking knows. Our poor brains.)

And finally, if I was the kind of writer who wrote fast and published regularly, even if the checks were small, I would actually be getting paid for my work. And maybe I would be able to survive off my work for at least a little while, and a little while was all I needed to get to the next place. I was addicted to doing the work and would do anything to keep writing.

Creatively it made sense for me. I wanted to write fast because I felt like I had so many things in the world to say and I wanted to say it now. If I moved quickly I might not get it exactly right—at least not right away. But I could tap into passionate, of-the-moment, instant inspirations, and that felt exciting to me. It felt deep and dramatic and sexy and like I was making my art. And I was.

But as I have written above it was clearly a part of professional and strategic decisions, too. And at the intersection of art and capitalism, we always end up sacrificing our ego. And you can either let it devastate you, ruin who you are, stop you in your tracks, or you can move onto the next place, and keep writing, keep journeying, keep pursuing.

Keep writing.

I don’t know why I’m writing you about all of this in this space. In a way it has more to do with the business of writing than the process of it, which is what I try to focus on here. But I guess it has to do with the life of a writer, which feels relevant.

I think we write what suits us and feels important but also there is perhaps a different personality type that pursues one over the other. We writers have lots of commonalities (especially in our complaints!) but we are also different kinds of people who want different kinds of things from our work.

So I guess this Monday morning the question is simply just to think about what we want from our work. And it may not have anything to do with getting published at all. But what does writing something fast get us over writing something slow? And what does taking our time do for our writing and our growth?

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.