Tag: writing practice

What It Means to Write Slowly

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Writing slowly is not the same as writing less. It is not a productivity position — a rejection of output targets or word count goals. It is a description of a particular relationship between the writer and the work: one in which the writing is given the time it actually needs, rather than the time available before the next deadline.

This distinction matters because the pressure to write quickly is not only external. Writers internalise it. The habit of producing at speed — of moving from brief to draft to published without the pauses that thinking requires — becomes a way of working that eventually becomes a way of writing. The fast writer produces fast writing: prose that is competent and complete but has not been given time to become what it might have been.

Writing slowly is the practice of resisting that pressure — not always, and not without cost, but deliberately and with an understanding of what the resistance is for.

What Slowness Makes Possible

Writing slowly makes possible a particular kind of attention that speed forecloses.

The writer who moves quickly through a draft is attending to the forward momentum of the piece — to getting the argument down, to filling the structure, to reaching the end. This is necessary work, and it is what first drafts are for. But it is not the only work the piece needs. The argument that has been got down quickly has not been tested. The structure that has been filled has not been examined. The ending that has been reached may not be the right ending.

Slowness creates the space for a different kind of attention: the attention that asks whether the sentence is doing what it needs to do, whether the argument is as strong as it can be, whether the piece is saying what the writer actually thinks rather than what they thought before the writing began. This attention is not possible under pressure. It requires the writer to stop moving forward and look at what is already there.

This is also the attention that produces surprise. The writer who moves quickly tends to produce the piece they planned. The writer who moves slowly tends to discover, in the pauses, that the piece wants to go somewhere slightly different — that the argument has a consequence they had not anticipated, or that the example they chose illuminates something beyond its intended purpose. These discoveries are not available to the writer who does not have time to notice them.

What Writing Slowly Is Not

Writing slowly is not an excuse for not finishing. The piece that is never completed because the writer is always refining it is not slow writing — it is avoidance. The distinction is between a writer who takes the time a piece needs and a writer who uses slowness as a way of not committing to a finished piece.

It is also not the same as writing carefully. Care is a quality of attention that can be brought to fast writing as well as slow — the careful writer who works under deadline produces better work than the careless writer who has all the time in the world. Slowness is not care; it is the condition that makes certain kinds of care possible.

And it is not a rejection of productivity. A writer who produces fewer pieces but brings each of them to a higher level of completion is not less productive in any meaningful sense — they are producing more value per piece, even if the volume is lower. The confusion between productivity and output — between the quality of what is produced and the quantity — is one of the things that makes slow writing hard to defend in contexts where writing is measured by the piece or by the word.

The Cost of Writing Slowly

Writing slowly has real costs, and they are worth acknowledging rather than dismissing.

The most obvious is income. A writer who produces less, produces less income — particularly in content writing, where payment is typically by the piece or by the word. Slow writing is a luxury that not all writers can afford in all circumstances, and the advice to write slowly can sound like advice from a position of financial security to writers who do not have that security.

The second cost is relevance. Online writing rewards speed partly because the subjects that generate traffic are often time-sensitive. The slow writer who produces a careful, considered piece on a topic that was current three weeks ago may find that the audience has moved on. Slowness and timeliness are genuinely in tension, and the tension cannot always be resolved in slowness’s favour.

The third cost is the habit itself. A writer who has learned to produce quickly finds slow writing uncomfortable — not because it produces worse work, but because the absence of forward momentum feels like failure. Relearning to sit with a piece, to let it be unfinished while the thinking continues, is a skill that has to be developed against the grain of established habit.

Writing slowly is not a prescription for all writing in all circumstances. It is a description of what certain kinds of writing require — the essay that is working through a genuine question, the piece that is trying to say something that has not been said before, the work that matters enough to be given the time it needs.

For that writing, slowness is not inefficiency. It is the condition under which the work becomes what it is capable of being.

The Problem with Writing Advice

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Writing advice is everywhere, and most of it is correct. Write every day. Read widely. Cut what you don’t need. Know your audience. Show don’t tell. Find your voice. These are not wrong. Applied at the right moment, by the right writer, to the right piece, most standard writing advice will improve the work.

The problem with writing advice is not that it is incorrect. It is that it is decontextualised — offered as universal principle when it is almost always specific to a particular kind of writing, a particular stage of development, or a particular problem the advice-giver happened to have. Advice that solved one writer’s problem becomes a rule. The rule gets repeated until it feels like truth. And the writer who follows it faithfully, in a context where it does not apply, produces work that is worse for having followed it.

Why Writing Advice Gets Generalised

Writing advice generalises because writing is taught and discussed in communities — workshops, courses, online forums, writing guides — where generalisation is necessary. A piece of advice cannot be given to thirty writers in a room with the caveat that it applies to twelve of them and not the others. It gets stated as a rule, because rules are teachable.

The advice that generalises most easily is the advice that addresses the most common problems. Write every day addresses the most common problem: not writing enough. Cut ruthlessly addresses the most common problem with drafts: too much material, not enough precision. Know your audience addresses the most common problem with published writing: writing that does not consider the reader.

These are real problems, and the advice that addresses them is genuinely useful — for writers who have those problems. The writer who already writes every day does not need that advice; following it changes nothing. The writer whose drafts are already lean does not need to cut more; cutting further will damage the work. The writer whose instinct is always to over-explain the reader does not need to know their audience better; they need to trust the reader more.

The difficulty is that the writer receiving the advice cannot always tell which category they are in. The advice sounds universal. The context in which it does and does not apply is rarely given.

The Advice That Does the Most Damage

Not all writing advice is equally risky when misapplied. Some advice, followed wrongly, produces work that is slightly weaker. Other advice, followed wrongly, produces work that has been fundamentally misdirected.

The most damaging advice is the advice about voice. Find your voice, the advice goes — as though voice were something misplaced that could be retrieved by looking in the right places. The writer who takes this literally tends to produce one of two things: writing that is strenuously eccentric, in which the effort to sound distinctive is visible in every sentence; or writing that has been so thoroughly scrubbed of the writer’s actual habits and preferences that it sounds like no one.

Voice is not found. It emerges from sustained honest writing over time. The advice to find it is not wrong about the destination — a writer’s voice is something worth having — but it is wrong about the process. Directing attention towards voice tends to produce self-consciousness, which is the enemy of voice. The writers with the strongest voices are almost never the writers who were most focused on developing one.

The second most damaging advice is show don’t tell — not because it is wrong, but because it is so frequently misunderstood. It is advice about fiction, specifically about the difference between dramatising an experience and summarising it. Applied to essay writing, where telling is often exactly the right mode, it produces writing that circles around its point rather than making it — that accumulates detail in the hope that the reader will infer the argument rather than stating the argument and trusting the reader to engage with it.

What to Do With Writing Advice

The useful approach to writing advice is to treat it as diagnostic rather than prescriptive — as a prompt to ask whether a particular problem applies, rather than as a rule to be followed regardless.

When a piece of writing advice is offered, the question worth asking is: what problem does this solve? If the answer is a problem the current work actually has, the advice is worth following. If the answer is a problem the current work does not have, the advice can be set aside without guilt.

This requires knowing the work well enough to diagnose it honestly — which is harder than following a rule, but more useful. A writer who can identify what their work actually needs is in a better position than a writer who applies all available advice faithfully and hopes for the best.

Writing advice exists because writing is hard and writers want help. That is a reasonable want, and the advice is often genuinely useful. But the writer who follows advice without asking whether it applies to their work is not developing judgement — they are outsourcing it. And judgement, in the end, is what writing requires.

The best writing advice is the advice that teaches a writer to need less advice.

The Writer Who Reads

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Reading and writing are discussed as related activities, which they are, but the nature of the relationship is less often examined. The standard advice, read widely, read in your genre, read the writers you admire, is correct as far as it goes. It does not go very far. What reading actually does to a writer, and how it does it, is a more interesting question than the advice suggests.

The most direct effect of reading is the least interesting: vocabulary, exposure to sentence structures, familiarity with how different kinds of prose move. These accumulate passively. A writer who reads enough will absorb a working knowledge of how language can be arranged without consciously studying it. This is real and useful, but it is also the minimum. It is what reading does for any attentive person, writer or not.

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What It Means to Write in Public

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Writing in public is not the same as publishing. Publishing is a technical act — a piece moves from private to visible, from draft to live. Writing in public is something more considered than that. It is the decision to think on the page in a way that others can see, and to stand behind that thinking as your own.

The distinction matters because it changes what writing is for. A piece written purely for publication — shaped around what will perform, what will be shared, what will attract the right kind of attention — is oriented towards reception. A piece written in public is oriented towards truth. Not absolute truth, but the writer’s honest attempt to say what they actually think, knowing that the attempt is visible and will be judged.

These two orientations produce different kinds of writing. And increasingly, the first has come to dominate.

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What I Do Before I Write a Word

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Before you write a word, there is a set of decisions that will determine whether the writing goes well or poorly. Not the writing itself — the thinking that precedes it. Most writers skip this stage, or compress it into a few minutes of vague intention, and then wonder why the draft stalls, repeats itself, or arrives somewhere other than where it was supposed to go.

This framework applies to purposeful writing — pieces with a defined brief, audience, and destination. Exploratory writing is a different practice, and a different conversation.

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The Myth of Inspiration — On Waiting to Write

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The myth of inspiration is one most writers accept without question. Ask someone why they haven’t written the thing they want to write, and the answer comes quickly: they haven’t been inspired yet.

They’re waiting. For the right moment, the right mood, the right convergence of energy and idea that will carry them through a blank page and out the other side with something worth keeping. They believe this convergence will arrive eventually, and that when it does, the writing will come easily — fluently, almost effortlessly, the way it looks from the outside when a writer describes their process in an interview.

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What I Don’t Do When I Write for the Internet

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Most advice about writing for the internet focuses on what to add: more keywords, more structure, more optimisation, more output.

Over time, I’ve found the opposite to be more useful.

This post is not about technique. It’s about restraint — the decisions I consciously don’t make when I write for the internet, even when they might promise faster results.

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