Is fast writing good writing?

This is probably one of the most frequent and inconsequential debates in the writing world: Can you write a good book quickly?

Writers have been arguing about the merits of turning out a book quickly since Ogg painted his story of his bear hunt on the cave wall faster than Gog’s story of his buffalo hunt. Gog responded by braining Ogg and eating his heart. Paleontologists interpret that as Gog saying, “Fast painting is crap painting.”

This is an argument that could go on forever, except that it doesn’t have too, because the answer is very simple.

First, let’s look at the arguments. 

On the “fast is fine” side stands Dean Wesley Smith. He’s the author of more books than anyone can count, and he’s the leading advocate for writing as fast as you can. He’s written a book in seven days and wrote about the process. He’s published more than 30 issues of “Smith’s Monthly,” containing 100,000 words of fiction written over the previous month. During the tail end of 2018, he’s preparing to write 10 novels over a 100 days.

Smith has also written posts and books attacking what he calls the myth of revising. He recently advised a novelist seeking advice on rewriting his book to go back to the first draft.

Ernest Hemingway

On the other side stands a number of great writers, including Ernest Hemingway.

A post from Open Culture lists Hemingway’s 7 rules for writing. These weren’t rules per se, but suggestions he made over the years.

Here’s his advice about rewriting:

If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter. It also keeps it fluid longer so you can better it easier.

The Case for Rewriting

Here are what other authors have to say about revising their work:

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

Saul Bellow

When I turn in a manuscript, I know it is the story I wanted to tell and it isn’t within my power to tell it a better way. If it is praised, I am grateful. If it is roundly criticized, I console myself by saying I did the best I could do.

Mary Higgins Clark

The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses — to secure each sentence before building on it — is that original writing fashions a form. It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop. Perfecting the work inch by inch, writing from the first word toward the last, displays the courage and fear this method induces. … The reason not to perfect a work as it progresses is that, concomitantly, original work fashions a form the true shape of which it discovers only as it proceeds, so the early strokes are useless, however fine their sheen. Only when a paragraph’s role in the context of the whole work is clear can the envisioning writer direct its complexity of detail to strengthen the work’s ends.

Annie Dillard

I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.

William Faulkner

If you’ve been a journalist, the one thing you know is that everything can be fixed. I spent a year on the rewrite desk in San Antonio.Sometimes you’d get a story, and it was like deboning a fish. It’s messy work,but nothing fatal — you just had to think about it.

Laura Lippman

I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.

James Michener

I almost always write everything the way it comes out, except I tend much more to take things out rather than put things in. It’s out of a desire to really show what’s going on at all times, how things smell and look, as well as from the knowledge that I don’t want to push things too quickly through to climax; if I do, it won’t mean anything. Everything has to be earned, and it takes a lot of work to earn.

Peter Straub

What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.

G. M. Trevelyan

This is what I find most encouraging about the writing trades: They allow mediocre people who are patient and industrious to revise their stupidity, to edit themselves into something like intelligence. They also allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.

Kurt Vonnegut

I write two pages of arrant nonsense after straining … Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading.

Virginia Woolf

If you work hard on something, and think about it very deeply, new ideas sort of bubble to the surface. I find that while rewriting even just retyping a page new things come in that I hadn’t thought about before. Rewriting is important. I don’t think you are finished after only one or two drafts. Rewriting is not only polishing sentences; it is also a process of searching for new things to improve your story.

Bernard Waber

Anthony Trollop and Alexander McCall Smith

But Smith is not alone. Anthony Trollop saw writing as a trade. “Let their work be to them as is his common work to the common laborer. No gigantic efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,” he said, adding cynically,  “as men have sat, or said that they have sat.”

Trollop treated writing as a job. “The surest aid to the writing of a book was a piece of cobbler’s wax on my chair. … much more than the inspiration.” He set firm office hours. He wrote in the morning. He placed a watch beside him and wrote with the goal of writing 250 words every 15 minutes. A thousand words per hour. Over two and a half hours, he wrote 2,500 words, averaging 750,000 words a year. The proof is in the results: Over the 35 years of his writing career, Trollope produced 47 novels, 17 works of nonfiction, 2 plays, 44 short stories, and numerous articles, lectures, and letters.

His speed was noticed during his lifetime. The Spectator noted “He writes too fast.An average six or eight months is too short a time for the gestation and production of a first-class novel.”

Unfortunately for his literary reputation, describing his working methods damaged his literary reputation for at least a generation.

One person who does not have to worry is Alexander McCall Smith, who combines the best of both worlds, writing first-draft work that’s also wildly popular. I can summarize his position with this quote from The Globe and Mail from Canada:

All this from a man who has only been a full-time author since 2006, when, at 57, he took a three-year-leave of absence from his job as a professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh. He rises before the sun each morning to tap away on his laptop in two- or three-hour bursts – much of it publication-ready.

“I do very little rewriting,” he said.When he’s in full creative flight, he can churn out 3,000 words a day while simultaneously juggling work on two or three books. He’s perpetually jotting down bits of poetry, random ideas, snippets of dialogue and observations on life in the Moleskine notebooks he carries everywhere.”

The Verdict: You Do You

It is possible to write a novel quickly, but its quality depends on your experience, your willingness to learn, and your imagination.

The act of writing requires only that you sit down and do the work.

Getting better depends on your willingness to see what you put down and learn how to do it better.

As for your imagination, that seems inherent and not something you can learn. That’s the X factor that’s built into your wiring, just like your sense of smell and taste, and your appreciation for art and music. Some have it, some don’t.

But you won’t know how well you can tell a story quickly until you sit down and do it. That’s the key takeaway: You won’t know until you try.

After all, what have you got to lose?