For most of my twenties I wrote the way the internet taught me to: quickly, constantly and slightly out of breath. A thought arrived, I typed it, and somebody somewhere was already replying before I had finished deciding whether I believed it.
Last autumn I tried an experiment. Nothing I wrote would be published until it had sat in a drawer for at least a week. Not a metaphorical drawer — a real one, in the oak desk by my window, filled with printed drafts and a pencil that never seems to stay sharp.
What the drawer taught me
The first thing I noticed was how much I cut. Sentences that felt urgent on Monday looked decorative by Sunday. Adjectives fell away. Whole paragraphs turned out to be throat-clearing, the writerly equivalent of tapping the microphone.
A sentence written slowly is a sentence that has been allowed to change its mind.
The second thing was quieter. I started to enjoy the waiting. A draft in the drawer is a small promise to your future self: you will see this again, and you will see it more clearly.
Slow is not the same as late
None of this means missing deadlines. Miruta has gone out every Sunday for eleven years. Slowness, for us, is about where the time goes — into rereading, reworking and reading aloud — rather than how much of it there is.
If you try one thing this week, try this: write something, print it, and leave it alone for three days. Then read it with a pencil in your hand. You will meet a version of yourself that is a little calmer, and a great deal more precise.
