Hullo friends ☕️🍵
I consider myself a slow writer. It takes a long time for an idea that enters my brain to actually make it onto a page. For reference, of the stories knocking around in my head that would seriously like to be written, the oldest is fifteen years old; the newest came to me in Fall 2018. The same is true for most of my short stories. I first imagined The Oiran’s Song when I was thirteen; I finally wrote it when I was twenty-three, and it was published when I was twenty-five.
At the same time, I’m aware that I can write—churning out words, mechanically—very quickly. At Clarion I didn’t struggle too badly with the one-story-a-week requirement. A lot of this speed, in hindsight, came from writing fanfic. In particular, I was part of some LJ communities that ran weekly story contests, where I would take a prompt, write a story in a few hours, and post it, hoping to obtain the shiny reward: a ✨banner✨ to display on your site.
This year I’ve written some 40,000 words, across a novella and two fanfics (I know). To write those pieces, there were days where I managed 3-5k words over several hours. That pace, while physically exhausting, isn’t unusual to me.
So what gives? How can I be a slow writer, but write so quickly?
I swear this is my newsletter and not Karen Joy Fowler’s, but during our talk last December, she shared with me another key insight, paraphrased below:
“It takes me a long time to produce a book, so sometimes people will say I’m a slow writer. But actually, I don’t think I’m a slow writer. I’m a slow thinker. From the outside it looks the same. I’m not getting a book done very soon. But from the inside, once I’ve made some decisions, I can move quite quickly.”
Ah. I found the perfect summary to my contradictory experiences of writing speed.
I’m a slow thinker—but once I’ve got the story, I can write pretty damn quickly.
🏃🏻♀️
I’m going to use the rest of this newsletter to share two different forms my writing process has taken over time, just to shed some light on my experience of this writing-fast-thinking-slow-thing.
The first is the mode I’ve operated in for most of my life: binge-writing when I’ve got the time. Because, frequently, I don’t have time.
In 2013, shortly after attending Clarion, I started my first full-time job. It was a Customer Success role for a tech start-up. While not as grueling as the hours some of my MBA classmates put into their consulting and finance careers, the start-up life does entail some long days. As part of the support team, I held early-morning and weekend support rotations; if my client was in trouble, I worked however long was needed to fix things. I also sought more responsibility every chance I could. I wanted certain things out of my tech career—in particular, I was set on eventually moving into a more strategic role like product management.
This clashed with the writing high I got from Clarion, where I realized I didn’t want to dramatically “let writing go after becoming an adult.” In fact, I suddenly wanted to pursue publishing much more seriously. During my six weeks at Clarion I was steeped in story all day, reading and critiquing classmates’ work, indulgently writing my own. Starting full-time tech work was the total opposite of that. It meant that I could, very easily, not write at all.
So a lot of the time, I didn’t. After writing five stories in six weeks at Clarion, I wrote one story in the remaining four months that year—An Ocean the Color of Bruises, which came out in 2016. (Publishing takes time, y’all.) I remember feeling desperate to prove to myself I could still write even without the pressure of homework, but it took an immense effort to produce that draft. It ate up weekends. It was a slog.
I realized that was going to be my writing life.
For the next five years, as I built up my tech career and simultaneously tried to publish short stories, binge writing was the only way to keep up my writing practice. I am not a morning person, so writing before work was out of the question. After work I often simply didn’t have the energy. I once wrote a thread on decision fatigue that helped me understand why I simply couldn’t force it at the end of a work day:
If I wanted to get writing done, I needed to clear out significant swathes of my weekend. This necessitated tradeoffs with activities like seeing friends or, uh, resting. Especially when I was living alone, the desire to socialize or explore my city also competed for writing time. However, once I’d successfully blocked off that time, I freaking used it, usually generating upwards of 3k words in one sitting.
Once, a work friend of mine asked me what I did all Saturday. When I explained that I was sitting in a cafe trying to finish a story, she said, “That’s so sad! You only live once!”
I remember being struck by that. Writing is a lonely business. I was giving up a significant portion of my free time to do this. But there was no other way around it then—and I wanted this, even knowing the tradeoffs. I may be dramatizing this in my memories, but I think I must have smiled at that friend (tiredly, nobly), and said, “I know. But I have to.”
📚
I was a binge writer growing up, too. As a Nerd, school ruled my weekdays. I was always studying and lacking sleep, and in high school I kinda overdid it on extracurriculars too. (Though somehow I still managed to cram reading manga for hours on end.)
Summers, however, were glorious wide-open stretches for writing. In Manila, at least in my high school, summer jobs for students weren’t a thing; neither were volunteer opportunities or extra-credit courses to put on your college apps (a fascinating phenomenon my US-based cousins went through). You could take lessons—I did painting and sketching summer workshops for years—but that still left all this time that wasn’t eaten up by academics.
Thus summers, for me, were a lot about reading and writing copious amounts of fanfic.
I remember part of my daily summer routine involved sitting at our little yellow table in the kitchen and banging out one fanfic after another. I also did this during sembreak, which occurred around Halloween every year. (I have distinct memories of setting a goal of “Write five fanfics” during one 10-day break. Ah, to have that bravado and energy.)
I haven’t really had a summer just to write since I entered college, but I did experience something like it in 2018, between quitting my job and starting grad school. I spent a lot of that time traveling, but I also had about six weeks that I reserved mostly for writing. In that timeframe I wrote How to Swallow the Moon, Windrose in Scarlet, and A Spell for Foolish Hearts (a story which will appear in my collection. Apologies for the unsubtle, but-I-swear-it’s-not-calculated, plug!)
Caveat: that burst of creativity in 2018 was preceded by a year of Not Writing At All. That’s a story for another time, but my lovely break in 2018 reminded me of what it was like to have whole days just to write.
🗓
This brings me now to an alternate process I’ve done: writing every day.
I’ve flirted with the notion a couple times. I wrote for 100 days straight in early 2014, just to see if I could. This did ultimately produce a draft of The Oiran’s Song, which I’m grateful for. I kinda hated how it made me feel, though, so I stopped.
I did it again last summer, while at my internship in Pittsburgh. I felt I needed to try something different for my process, so I decided to write against a word count every day. My daily minimum was Two Words (hats off to Kelly Link for the idea).
I was grumpy about writing for much of the summer, but I did produce two messy stories (one’s in dire need of revision; the other I’m shopping around, albeit slowly) and quite a lot of false starts for Longer Projects.
Basically, I’d proven to myself a few times that I can write every day, but it’s never really felt good or driven great results.
Until this year, that is. I’ve been writing nearly every day since March.
What changed? The biggest thing is that I have a fabulous accountability group that just kinda happened (hi, I love you guys). It’s been extremely motivating to write together. Additionally, several factors worked out to make this possible:
I started daily writing during the last quarter of my MBA. While I had classes, homework, job interviews, and social activities (socially distanced walks! Zoom parties!), I did have more time than when I was working or during the first 1.5 years of my program.
Quarantine removed the need for me to…step outside of my room, ever, so I suddenly had extra time in my day, especially since I lived alone and only needed to fend for myself.
My job will determine which city I move to, so after graduation I moved back home. I’m in a comfortable living situation.
I’m currently still job hunting, so I’ve structured my day such that mornings are for writing, errands, and exercise, and afternoons are for jobs, self-study, and side projects.
Most amazingly of all, I have somehow become a morning person. I think part of this is that I hardly adjusted my internal clock from EST to PST. I can sense that it’s mostly solidified into a habit, because—necessary breaks aside—I start to feel antsy if I don’t get my daily writing done.
Importantly, the binge-y aspect of my writing has not changed. My definition of daily writing here includes not just drafting, but also research, reading, editing, and occasionally things like revising this email. On days when I am drafting, it’s mostly in the quickly-create-the-scene, sentence-over-sentence, oh-wow-I-crossed-two-k-words-today?! manner that I’ve always done it.
I don’t know if this will last. In fact, I’m almost certain it won’t once I start working. But I’ve learned that (1) it’s possible for me to be a fake morning person if something’s motivating me to get up earlier; (2) daily writing can actually feel good. I suspect it’s the only way I got any work done during this wild year; it’s also given me more positive feelings towards writing overall, which I’m grateful for.
Again, I recognize this may well be a temporary thing, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. In the meantime, I’m honoring this luck by making good use of it, and writing down everything that might help when my routine changes yet again. Crucially, I feel strongly that I want to keep touching the work every day (go ahead, smirk). Whether it’s two words or 2k words, the momentum matters, and I’d like to keep it going.
Events and things!
Quick reminder that I’m doing a reading with the Sturgis Library next Tuesday, July 21st at 7 PM EST online. To get the link, please email Corey at sturgisreference@comcast.net. Hope to see you there!
Reccs and things!
For more on binge-writing, I’d recommend this essay by Kameron Hurley.
My Clarion 2013 Class with a bear sculpture at UCSD. I started my first full time job three days after getting back from the program.
Thanks as always for reading! If you liked this post, feel free to share it with others, or sign up if you haven’t yet. If you have thoughts on writing slowly or binge writing, feel free to share them below. I also recently set up an ask box for this newsletter, so if you have questions, you can submit them here.