March Drafting Discoveries

The delights of writing slower than I'd planned.

image: Calcitrix

We want to write faster, but insight is a tortoise.

During the month of March, I’ve committed to working on the novel every day, no matter what. I had grandiose dreams of finishing the whole book, but those have not come to pass. That said, a lot has happened, both on the page and off.

Every single person I’ve ever interviewed for the Secret Library Podcast (and Oh! Murder’s show too) has bemoaned how long it takes to finish a book, wishing they could speed up the process, while also admitting they’d have missed out on valuable insight and discovery if they’d been on fast forward.

None of us want to miss the insight, but we all want to reach the finish line as soon as we can. It’s the infinite conundrum that also applies to reading. We want to plow through books we love, yet we also want them to last forever.

Here’s what I would have missed out on learning had I ground through the last month instead of letting the book breathe a bit along the way: