To recount:
Week 1 Slow Writing In November Instead Of NaNoWriMo?
Week 2 Week Two Of Slow Writing Trying to pin down what slow writing is.
Week 3 Slow Writing and Privilege
Last week I said the first two items in John Fox's A Manifesto for Slow Writing at Book Fox were worth giving some thought. And then I gave some thought to the first. Well, now I'm going to give some thought to the second.
Fox says in Item 2 that slow writing isn't about the completion of a project, it's about "becoming a certain type of person." He goes on, "The writer is successful if they can attune themselves to a certain kind of consciousness. The project-based method for writing is one that will only end in unhappiness. Slow writing is about being, not completing."
First off...it is not about the completion of a project. That is extremely significant for writers who are looking for ways to do just that. Slow writing, Fox is saying, is not for you.
On the other hand, what Fox is talking about is what I have been working toward since 2008 when work went to hell for me. I've grown to love sitting at my desk in front of my laptop for a few hours a day, even though what I do there does not get me the kinds of completion (book publication) I was getting pre-2008. I love researching all kinds of work-related things. Children's publishing is pretty much done with me, and I'm not despairing over that, because I've moved on to other kinds of writing, and I have those to explore and work with. I write, because I'm a writer. I am attuned to that consciousness.
During Week Two, I wrote about Nicole Gulotta who described "slow writing as not so much about reducing your speed as it is about reducing your scope. It's a lifestyle." I most definitely have changed my scope. I work differently now, because I'm doing different work. (Aside--I just noticed that Gulotta has a manifesto at the end of her slow writing piece, which is what Fox calls his article on slow writing. Why do slow writing advocates feel they need manifestos? I hate manifestos.)
Indeed, it does. Slow writing, as I realized last week, works best for the privileged writer. I am the poster woman for privilege, if you don't define privilege in terms of Ivy League educations, second homes on Martha's Vineyard, wearing brands other than Lee jeans, and traveling on every continent (How many are there?) but in terms of having someone else provide you with a roof over your head, food on your table, and time. I am that kind of low-level privileged.
My family has never had to rely on my income, which is a damn good thing, because even when I was making "regular" writing money, it wasn't all that regular. That's why I can spend a great deal of my time reading about and thinking about whether or not slow writing is a process that can help me produce more work instead of, ah, producing more work. That's how privileged I am.
The slow writing lifestyle probably isn't for writers who have to maintain a day job or who juggle with adjunct teaching jobs at several colleges in order to make enough money to live. It's probably not for the writer I read about a few years ago who had to line up grant money so she could afford to take maternity leave from writing for a few months. It's not for the writer I've seen on Medium who describes having to produce nineteen-plus pieces a writing a month to generate the monthly income she needs and how she's going to have to have writing stockpiled so that in the future, if she gets sick again and can't work for two weeks, she has something to submit, publish, and make money on.
I just don't see what I've been able to learn about slow writing helping any of those writers.
For myself, though, I'm going to lean into that slow writing lifestyle. For a few years, I've been doing something in December that is definitely what I'm now thinking of as slow writing. I can only do it, though, because I don't have to generate income next month.
More about that another time.
End Note: I checked out a preview of The Art of Slow Writing by memoirist and essayist Louise DeSalvo. It appears to combine various writers' experiences with some traditional time management talk about protecting time. I didn't see anything that defined "slow writing" as a distinct process. But I didn't see the word "manifesto," either, so that was promising.
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I liked The Other Side of Mrs. Wood by Lucy Barker a great deal. Though I don't consider myself a fan of stories about spiritualism, I wanted to read some historical fiction that wasn't a mystery, and this fit the bill. So well done.
Then I had to give up reading a book by a pretty well-known science fiction writer. The second of her books I didn't like. She just does not work for me, and we must agree to move on.
Yes, I was one of those people who read what is being called "that Vanity Fair article about Cormac McCarthy." The situation described is terrible, though it's not clear if the guy writing the article thinks so. I had to skim portions of the thing because of the lengthy asides in which the author intrudes himself into this woman's story. Does Vanity Fair not have editors? Opportunity cost is the value of what you're NOT doing while you're choosing to do something else. What you COULD be doing if you hadn't chosen to do this thing you're doing. I kept thinking about it yesterday while I was reading the Cormac McCarthy article. I'll never get that time back.
I read a number of flash fiction pieces at Fictive Dream. Here are some I particularly liked.
Rock, Paper, Scissors by Claudia McGill. I liked the frame on this.
A Friendly Confession by Lori Cramer. I'm not a fan of one-para flash, but I did enjoy this one.
The Goalless Draw by Gerard McKeown. There's something going on under the story for this narrator.
Then I read some microfiction at Centaur:
Mushrooms by Kathryn Kulpa. This is like a whole novel in a paragraph!
Manual for an Indian Novice in a Small Indian Town by Isabel Zambrano. It sounds as if somebody really needs this manual.
I meant for this be a food reading week, because I'm already baking for Thanksgiving, but then I stumbled upon the flash and micro opportunities and only managed to read one food piece and that explains why this is a chaos reading week.
The "Bake Off" Guide to loaf cakes: Secrets from a pastry professional by Michael LaCorte at Salon. This is one of the best food articles I can recall in terms of the pastry professional having secrets a standard cook might really be able to use. I do have a question here if we're talking about loaf "breads" like banana bread (mentioned toward the end) or something else. I never liked loaf breads in the past, but became a fan the last few years, which was what attracted me to this article. The word "loaf."
Welcome to Bluesky, but Maybe Take it Down a Notch? by Miriam Jayraratna and Kathryn Baecht. Why, yes, I did jump ship to BlueSky, which could be a blog post one day. While I am getting benefit from the place, it's not as terrific as it's made out to be. But there doesn't appear to be any AI involved, which was the straw that broke the camel's back for me at Xitter.
Remember Week 1 Slow Writing In November Instead Of NaNoWriMo?
And Week 2 Week Two Of Slow Writing? That really should have had a more descriptive title, since it deals with trying to pin down what slow writing is. But Zen tells me not to dwell on the past.
So we are moving on to Week 3, where we admit that slow writing is going to be problematic for some people, particularly those who need to generate income. To do so, I'm going to refer you to A Manifesto for Slow Writing by John Fox at BookFox.
I want to put out there that I have trouble with manifestos. They are way too doctrinaire for my tastes. It's not that I'm such a nonconforming rebel. But I can't even tolerate 90 percent of writing prompts I see, because eh, I don't want to write about that stuff. So, sure enough, I can't fall into step with some of this particular manifesto. But the first two items are definitely worth some thought. Only one of which I will address today. Because, as I said las t week, I practice slow writing here by writing about small aspects of a whole, rather than force feeding everything into one long piece, overwhelming for both you and me.
Fox says in his manifesto, "Resist the commercial pressure to pump out manuscripts at breakneck speed." He then goes on to discuss Marilynne Robinson who went twenty years between publishing two well-known books. I'm not sure that that's a good model, because most writers at some point accept that they aren't Marilynne Robinson. Fox ends this part with "Everything in the writing industry pushes the writer forward at a quicker and quicker pace, and this machinery must be actively resisted." Manifesto indeed!
This is a cry-to-arms that can only be answered by those writers who can resist because they are privileged enough either to be making decent money from their work or to not need income from it. All the other writers are dependent on the machinery to make whatever they can. Self-published writers, who aren't dependent on the writing industry, are in an even worse spot as far as being able to choose slow writing is concerned.
A few decades ago, it wasn't unusual to read about self-published writers who were trying to pump out short novels multiple times a year. They did this because, without access to the book distribution avenues traditionally published authors had, they couldn't sell very many copies of any particular title. Many of them also weren't paying for editing, design, or professional cover illustration, the lack of which could have hampered sales as well. Since they couldn't sell many copies of any one particular title, they tried to have multiple titles available. Sales for each book multiplied by the number of books=trying to get a decent income.
I don't read about that much anymore, since the self-publishing world learned that in order to compete with traditionally published books, self-published writers would have to seek out and pay for editors, design people, illustrators, and even marketing...all the things traditionally published writers got automatically through their traditional publishers. You could say that having to do that slowed these writers down. But it was the administrative work of publishing that did it, not "slow writing."
Internet platforms like Medium and Substack provide the possibility of generating income for self-published writers of humor, essays, short stories, food writing, travel writing...you name it. They are self-publishing their work right there, though Medium includes publications that act, to some degree depending on which one you're dealing with, as gatekeepers should you want to submit to them. The income generated, though, is small. Sometimes ridiculously small. To date, I've only made fifty-five cents on Dinner at Shirley Farr's House, one of my more sophisticated pieces. (Keep in mind that there is always the possibility that I'll make a few more cents on this somewhere down the line and that if it had been published in most literary journals, I wouldn't have made anything.)
Like the self-published book-length writers in days of old, self-published writers at Medium increase their income by writing a lot. And I mean a lot. There are people there who try to write and publish every day. I know this, because one of the things many people write about is publishing on Medium. One woman wrote an article about the month she published as many stories there as I had in over three years. How-to articles are popular at Medium, especially articles on how to publish on Medium. A particularly interesting one was by a fellow who explained he spent three hours per article, which included Internet research and writing. There have been articles from writers complaining that some editors of publications don't respond the same day they submit. These writers have publishing schedules!
At Medium you get paid a tiny amount for each reader you attract to a story. You may not have attracted a lot of readers for each piece you published this month, but if you published thirty pieces at a small number of readers per piece, you might be able to get some kind of payday for your effort. Additionally, if you publish a lot, some magic algorithm thing might happen and you could have your work promoted, that could attract followers, if you build up a few thousand followers those people will be seeing your work regularly and if a certain percentage of them read it...income!
Does this kind of rapid writing produce stellar results? Would slowing down maybe enhance things? Let's not go there.
My point, as I did state at the beginning, is that slow writing, which appears to be mainly a lifestyle not a true method of working, is going to be a hard sell for those writers who really need to sell regularly.
I did finish one book that will remain nameless, because I had to skim the second half to get through it. It
was just so slow. Normally I wouldn't mention it here, but I liked the book's concept very much. It was an adult book about a former child detective who is being drawn into an adult case. We had her child scooby as adults there...a sibling...characters that would have appeared in a child detective book but grown up now. Perhaps that's why it was so slow. So much went into developing that aspect of the book that the mystery plot, which is what moves a story along, took second place. We might be talking a story in which the elements are not in balance.
Heavy Snow Han Kang in The New Yorker You can't read this without a subscription, but if you can get hold of the magazine it's in (Nov. 10), it is quite an experience. Truly we're talking a something-happened-to-somebody situation, which was L. Rust Hills' definition of story. Assuming anyone remembers him. He wrote a good book about writing, though good luck trying to find much about it or him.
The Countess of Warwick: A Society Cyclist by Sheila Hanlon at Sheila Hanlon/Historian/Women's Cycling Yes, I am still reading about women cycling in the nineteenth century.
DNA Analysis Upends Long-held Assumptions About Pompeii Victims' Final Moments by Ashley Strickland at CNN Was I a really morbid kid, because I liked reading about Pompeii? Yeah, I think I was.
Sure, I Voted For Someone Whose Policies Might Kill You, But Now's The Time To Put Aside Our Differences by Lisa Borders at McSweeney's. "I personally think it's awesome that my house in Central Massachusetts might be waterfront property sooner rather than later."
How To Write A Book That Nicole Kidman Will Turn Into A Limited Series by Tom Smyth at McSweeney's. Hey, I liked The Perfect Couple. Kidman played a writer who we actually see working. A lot.
One of the positive things I think awards do is bring books to readers' attention that they might not otherwise have heard of. In this case, one of the honor books particularly interests me.
The Bodyguard Unit: Edith Garrud, Women's Suffrage, and Jujitsu by Clement Xavier, Lisa Lugrin, and Albertine Ralenti speaks to a number of my interests--women's history, early twentieth century history, and martial arts. I'll be looking for it.
Well, there's a question or you.
First off, slow writing can refer to a method of teaching writing to children. I don't teach writing, so I'm not going to comment on this, other than to say this is not what we're talking about.
When looking for slow writing information on-line, you will come across material on how slow writers can speed up. We're not interested in that.
What we're talking about here is related--somehow--to other slow movements, particularly slow work.
The best piece I found on slow writing this month comes from Nicole Gulotta's The Art of Slow Writing: Pacing Yourself in the Digital Age. Gulotta describes slow writing as not so much about reducing your speed as it is about reducing your scope. It's a lifestyle. You mindfully integrate your writing life into your personal life, paying attention to how you can work during different stages of your life. I'm probably experiencing confirmation bias, since what she's talking about is very similar to the situational time management I've been writing about here for more than ten years.
Gulotta also mentions Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown, which I did an arc on a couple of years ago, connecting his thoughts to writing.
I definitely have a specific writing lifestyle these days, and it probably does relate very much to slow writing. But before I get into that, next week I'm going to cover some slow writing conflicts.