I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.
The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else
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I’d like to think the longer I take over the whole process the better my work becomes. I might write some passages really quickly but take time redrafting and tinkering.
I feel the same. However, my fear is that I then don’t write enough. That I use tinkering as an excuse to rewrite instead of just rewriting or writing more.