On Writing Slowly

I wasn’t always a slow writer. I had to train myself to be one. In graduate school, I only wrote for deadlines, avoiding writing until I had to turn in a story for workshop. After I graduated with an MFA in the early 2000s, I worked as a secretary in the office of the Creative Writing program at The New School. I considered myself a writer, but this claim didn’t stand up under scrutiny. ( How to Use Vignettes as Stepping Stones to Build a Novel .) The critic Hilton Als taught for us. He sometimes stopped by the office, and we would chat. During one visit, he asked me if I was writing every day. “No,” I replied. “Why not?” he asked. I started to list the reasons. “You know,” Hilton said, cutting me off. “Toni Morrison, when she was working as an editor at Viking, would work all day, go home, feed her kids and put them to bed, and then write late into the night.” I didn’t have kids or a high-pressure job, and whatever excuses I’d made for myself became clear for what they were, evasions. I respected Hilton, and I loved his work. His words had an immediate effect on me. Nervous energy wakes me up early, and I thought I might as well use that energy for something useful. I began to write every morning. Not that I had much to show for it at first. I worked on one short story for six months, fiddling with it every morning. I never published it. From what I remember the story was about a middle-school substitute teacher. One day, some of students follow her home and spy on her. By the end of that time, I knew that I could write every day, that this was a habit I could keep. Though it didn’t solve the problem of how to write something longer, like a novel. I was never going to finish anything if I revised as I went, obsessing about sentences. To make some generalizations, there are some people who write a lot, […]

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