This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 158: Being A Slow Writer.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today I want to talk about something with which I have been struggling — and that is being a slow writer.

I think this starts from an expectation of myself and also expectations from other people. Now, those expectations of myself I set for myself. So growing up, whenever I had a task to do, sure, I would procrastinate a little bit, but I was always able to get the task done on time, and even if I started it at the last minute, I would have an adrenaline rush that would push me through to the end. I don’t know if I’ve told this story here before, but my senior thesis in college, I’d been reading about it and taking a few notes here and there, but I didn’t actually start outlining and writing it until the night before it was due, and I pulled an all-nighter on this huge rush of caffeine and adrenaline and turned it in and it won some kind of award.

It was this whole thing, and in my experience that proved to me that A.) I could write quickly when I wanted or needed to, and B.) I would write better if I wrote faster. This followed me all the way through high school, through college, through the workplace. I hate to admit this here, but I’ve had jobs before that weren’t horribly demanding, and often I could, if it was like a data entry job, I would wrap up my day’s work in the first hour or two, and then have a lot of time during which to insert activity here, whether that was stocking shelves or organizing the marketing merch room of where I worked or thinking about my novel, taking notes for my novel, et cetera. But all of that changed when I worked on creative projects.

There was a marked difference — a markED difference, if you want to put an emphasis on that — there was a difference in not only the speed with which I could do the work, but the way that I experienced time passing as I did the work. And so I’ve always been writing and I feel like if you’re listening to this podcast, you’ve always at least been interested in writing and maybe tried it a little bit yourself when you were younger, and if you’re anything like me, you would start up creative projects and get lost in it, and time would cease to exist. There was no ticking of the clock. It was just me in the zone creating. I still get that every once in a while when I’m allowed to work uninterrupted on a creative project. I don’t experience that with work-work. I don’t experience that with data entry or coming up with marketing campaigns. I only ever experienced that — I called it a “flow state” — when I was working on something creative and challenging that I was truly passionate about.

At first, it didn’t matter if you’re a five-year-old kid making your own picture book, there’s no pressure to get it done within a certain number of days. You just finish up your homework and then start in on the project you’ve been dreaming about all day, and then you get called for dinner and you squirm through dinner until you can go work on your project again. This was true too. Later through school, I’d always have to get my homework done first and then I could work on my own projects as a treat, and on Saturdays, those were the best because no school ( at least, here in the United States, no school on Saturdays), and I could sit down and just immerse myself completely with no sense of time going by. So I didn’t know I was a slow creative writer until a lot later when the creative writing projects I was working on started to have deadlines.

I’m not talking about a matter of minutes or even days. So for an example, I first started Girl In Space, which is my fictional audio drama (which you can listen to if you want; I’ll have a link for it in the show notes for today’s episode). I started Girl In Space back in 2017, and when I started it, I just created the first episode. I was going to just make a 30-minute pilot experimentally recorded, release it and just see what happened, see if I liked that kind of storytelling, see what it felt like to do sound design, all of that stuff, and I put hundreds of hours into that first episode. It may not sound like it, but I was kind of learning as I went, and I was learning about Foley and I was learning about voice acting, and I was learning about the equipment and what story structure looks like on an episodic basis, not a novel basis like I had been doing before.

When I finally finished recording that episode, I was like, okay, that took me hundreds of hours, but that’s just because I didn’t know what I was doing The next episode, it’ll be a lot faster. I was very sure of this. And so I published the first episode of Girl In Space again back in 2017, and kind of build it as a biweekly show, by which I meant, oh, it’ll come out every two weeks. A lot of the podcasts that I enjoyed listening to at the time, The Black Tapes and Tanis and some others, kind of released on the same model, and so I was like, “Well, if they can do it…”

The problem was that I hadn’t written the entire series script ahead of time. I was seriously writing an episode and then recording it and then editing it and then doing sound design and then producing it and then releasing it and marketing it before I even started writing the next episode.

If you go through Girl In Space, if you look through the release schedule, you’ll see that ,at the very beginning, the episodes kind of come out, quote, “on time”… but then you get to episodes 11 and 12 and then the season finale, and there’s a long, long time in there, and the length of the episodes changed just a little bit from maybe 20 minutes to 30 or 40 minutes. But the whole time while I was writing, I hated it suddenly for the first time, now that there was public expectation for this show. I hated how slow it was going. I hated how long it was taking. See, I had built up this expectation of, oh, well, if this is due the next day, I can just like my senior thesis in college, I can just do it the night before and it’ll even be better because I’ll have done it under pressure with lots of adrenaline.

For some reason — I don’t know if this is true for you, so let me know on the comments what your experience has been — but for me, I can’t rush my creative work, which I know on the surface sounds indulgent. Maybe it’s more that I don’t want to rush my creative work, but we’ll get to that in just a second. As my releases for episodes of Girl In Space got farther and farther apart, I began to feel a number of different things, and I feel them even more now as I write season two. It has officially been… oh my gosh, seven or eight years now — I can’t even fathom that — since I released the first episode of Girl In Space, and people have been waiting patiently (and not so patiently) for season two, and I’m still writing it. I’m aware of how long it takes, and I’m aware of how that makes me feel, and I’m aware of how it makes me come across as a creator.

I’m especially aware when I get (probably) very well-meaning but demanding comments and emails and one-star reviews that say, “Where’s season two?” “You promised season two, why did this show die?” And over the years, I’ve learned how to deal with criticism, and so it doesn’t really hurt anymore when I get someone who’s upset with me for not releasing season two yet. But I still feel shame — shame that I’m not faster, especially when I look at other creators who it appears to me are just churning out novel after novel or podcast episode after podcast episode or film after film.

It’s so easy to look at everyone else around you as an aggregate individual and be like, “They’re releasing a new podcast every day. What is wrong with me?”

So yeah, so I feel shame in being a slow writer. I feel like I lack something that other writers have. I feel like maybe I’m lesser, or I’m not good enough. I can’t cut it. I feel like I am perceived as being lazy, and that really hits home for me. That’s a huge fear of mine — is that people will think I’m lazy. I can tell you, I am not lazy. I work a lot, but a lot of the work that I do isn’t something that people see, necessarily. And so I’m afraid that I come off looking lazy, and that generates more shame in me, and at the very end of all of this, there’s a deep sense of self-loathing or self-hatred, and I want to be honest about that. I do try to be positive and encouraging on this show, but realistically, when I feel like I’m behind on a project or when I feel like I’m not writing fast enough or well enough, I begin to really dislike myself.

When that happens, I’ve learned over the years to talk to a friend. I talk to my husband and partner, Tim. I talk with my siblings. I talk with other writer friends, and that helps because I think deep in our guts, we all experience the same insecurities and fears as writers. I think we’re all a little bit afraid that people think we’re not enough, we’re lazy, we are lacking in talent, but we know — well, hopefully we know — that we’re not. And if we don’t know that we’re not, hopefully we have loving and trustworthy guides along the way who’ll get us back onto the path of being okay with ourselves.

So why am I a slow writer? I can tell you that with projects, school projects, work projects, anything I’m getting paid for, anything that’s not a passion project, I am a little bit of a procrastinator. I’ll put things off and then I’ll get it all done in a rush of adrenaline. And like I said earlier, it will often be better than if I had stretched it out over a certain period of time.

I’m also really bad at time management. It was funny — I was going back through old episodes of the Write Now podcast just to get a feel for what I’ve talked about before, and I have episodes on time management and priorities, and I’m like, “How dare I talk about these things when I can’t do them myself?” The one thing that has worked for me, priority- and routine-wise, has been habits. That removes the friction of having to push myself into doing anything. So every morning I have my routine, and I’ve been doing this for several years at this point now, without fail — I wake up, I make a cup of coffee, I feed the cats, and I sit down to write. When I sit down to write, I do bullet journaling. Every once in a while if I feel like I have something in my brain that needs to come out, I’ll do some morning pages, but I’ll write for about 10, 15 minutes in my journal and then I’ll turn to my project and I will work on that until lunch every day, seven days a week.

I’m not saying that this is the right way or the only way to do this. I want to make that very clear. I grew up — I don’t even know if I want to say I grew up, but — during my writing education, which arguably started when I was a child, but during my writing education later on in life, when I got serious about studying the craft and understanding the process, I read books like On Writing by Stephen King that said, in order to be a, quote, “real writer”, you have to write every day. That’s not why I do this. I do this because if I miss a day, it breaks the habit. And I know that if I miss a day, I feel terrible about myself. It’s like if you need to go for a daily walk and you skip a day and your legs and your back just hurt — it’s like that with me and writing for my brain. Because I think that a question needs to be asked about, if I’m good at creating projects for other people, for jobs, for school, et cetera, quickly, why am I such a slow writer when it comes to creative projects for myself?

What is going on there? Why am I a slow writer? I didn’t know the answer to this until about a year ago. I’ve ghostwritten books before in very short amounts of time — and again, those are projects for other people, and they were easy — well, not easy; they were still very challenging — but I didn’t struggle in self-loathing with them as I do with my own creative projects. And I think to understand why I write slowly for my own creative projects, I had to go back and ask myself, why do I write? Why do I write? Why do you write? I really want you to think about that because for me, it turned out the motivation and the underlying reason had a lot to do with it.

When I was doing schoolwork or projects for college or work or whatever, I knew that I was accountable to somebody. I knew I had to turn in this paper to this professor by this date, and I wasn’t obsessed with it because… all right, here’s confession time. I wasn’t obsessed with it because I was worried I would get a bad grade, but because I was a people-pleaser and I didn’t want to let anyone down. And that worked for me for years. I got A’s on tests, I won awards, clients were happy, I did good work and I got paid, which was nice. (Not for the grades.) I got paid for my work… usually. So what kept me working quickly was knowing that I had a deadline and that somebody would notice and think less of me if I didn’t turn in this project, this assignment by the deadline, I was that much of a people pleaser. I don’t know why I say I “was” that much of a people pleaser, because I still am that much of a people pleaser.

So with my own creative projects, I wasn’t caught up in people pleasing or hitting deadlines. I was caught up in something else — and this is the answer to the question why I write. And that is because for me, writing is how I process life. Like the example I used earlier with going for a walk every day, if I don’t write every day, I start to feel terrible. There were weeks and months, maybe even years in my twenties (and maybe my early thirties) when I wouldn’t write for long periods of time and I would get depressed and sick. And I know this sounds… whatever, a little hokey, and it was probably psychosomatic, but… I feel better; I feel healthier when I am writing. The world doesn’t feel real until I am writing.

I take notes in class because writing things down helps me think and process. It makes the information I’m learning real. People used to look at me taking notes in class, and then later in the workforce during meetings, and be like, “Wow, those are some detailed notes!” And I was embarrassed to tell them, well, this is the only way I can understand what’s happening, is if I write it. So writing for myself was very different from writing for other people. Writing for myself was a way to understand and process the world. It was essentially how I lived, even though both acts — writing for someone else and writing creative projects for myself — involve putting letters onto paper or a screen, forming words and sentences and clauses. They’re very — at least for me — very, very different. I had a chance to experiment with writing quickly or being pushed to write quickly through several projects over the last few years, and these are creative projects.

I used to build websites for people and ghostwrite books and do all sorts of things, but two years ago, I decided that I was going to just embrace the poverty lifestyle and just write full time, get my projects out, and see where that took me. And I had some interest in a Girl In Space novel, so I put season two of Girl In Space on hold. I think at that time I was up to episode seven of season two, and I was writing, chugging along, and I paused that so that I could work on getting this novel out. Writing that novel and knowing that my agents and the editor wanted to see it by a certain date — they wanted to see this much by a certain date — it was… I don’t know how to put this. I don’t want to say it was a nightmare, because it just wasn’t fulfilling, the writing that came out.

And I even had Tim even read drafts and he’s like, this is not you. This does not sound like you. He said, this is really not good. And I was like, I was hoping you would say it’s passable, but in my heart, I knew it was not good. It was not good. I sent the first four chapters off to my agent and the editor last year, and I got back a “revise and resubmit”, which actually is very kind and generous of them. And the editor said, the pacing’s all weird; it doesn’t feel like the podcast. I don’t know what’s going on with the tension, but. She’s very generous. And she said, just rewrite this and then we’ll talk some more. And I was like, okay, thank you. Oh my gosh, okay, sorry. And I felt like crap about it. But in the grand scheme of things, getting a revise and resubmit is an honor. If an editor takes the time to say, “Hey, I received this and I liked parts of it, and here are some notes and some things I’d like you to fix,” that’s a big deal, and I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful for that because I’m very grateful. But it really bothered me that it wasn’t good.

During that time, while I was writing the novel, which I think I got about 137,000 words in at that time, I was writing on what I called a NaNoWriMo schedule. I think most of you at this point are familiar with NaNoWriMo. It stands for National Novel Writing Month, which takes place every November, during which people write about 1,500 words a day in order to write a full 50,000 word novella or small novel within the 30 days of November. And I found that while I was pushing a productive pace, my writing wasn’t good.

I think my goal for each day was 1,700 words. I think that’s what it came out to. So when I was writing my 1000 – 1700 words every day, something changed, and I wasn’t writing to exist anymore. I wasn’t writing to live, I was writing for a deadline. I was writing fast. And you could tell I learned a lot from that experience, about myself, about writing, about the publishing industry, about story structure. I learned a lot in writing that novel. I also got into a kind of a bad place, mentally. I talked earlier about being a slow writer, bringing on feelings of shame and lack and self-loathing. Yeah. I deal with that every day. My heart races with anxiety as I think, “I’m so slow, I will never get this done.” Logically, I know that makes no sense; that small steps can add up to a long journey.

I know that intellectually, but in my heart, there’s just this heaviness and this despair that I’m not good enough. I’m not fast enough, I’m not as fast as everyone else. I’m lacking. Sometimes I am more okay with it than other times, and one of the things that I’m trying to work on this year is acceptance. Acceptance of who I am and what it means to be a writer and what it means to live a writing life. There are a lot of things that, over the years, I thought were wrong with me, that I took on and adapted habits and systems to overcome, but I think a lot of that comes from a toxic place of productivity, an inhuman expectation for what it means to produce one’s life work. I’m not under any delusions that I’m some kind of “grand master artist”. I’m fine with that.

I love writing for fun genre stuff. I love writing family-friendly adventures. I have no delusions that I am a “great American writer”, and I don’t necessarily want that. I’ve done a lot of thinking and a lot of journaling and a lot of research, and I’ve begun to think, what if I’m not terrible? What if I’m not awful? What if I’m not the problem? What if the problem is a society that expects an author to churn out three new books in a year so that they make money? What if the problem was that I just didn’t do a good job setting expectations with my audience for how long it was going to take, realistically, for me to produce a second season of Girl in Space. Because I totally own that — I got real excited and people-please-y when announced that I was making season two, and I was like, yep, it’s going to come out in June, 2022, which is now two years ago… and I’m still not done writing it.

What if it’s not my creative process that’s the problem? I’m the happiest and healthiest in my writing as I have ever been when I allow myself to go slow, when I allow myself to live into the words and live onto the page, when I’m not desperately trying to clock in 1,700 words a day. I have to remind myself, what if being a slow writer isn’t a flaw? What if it’s not some kind of lack that I need to overcome? What if it’s not a problem to fix? What if it’s not some kind of moral failing? What if I can still be a good person and a good writer and also a slow writer? I realize there are real-life ramifications, but there are things that I care less about. Sure, I could make more money if I produced creative projects faster, but that’s not why I am doing this.

You may have noticed, everything I create, I release for free, without ads. I’m not doing this for money. Money is nice, when I want to buy a coffee or something, but I would rather sit here in my stained sweatpants at my secondhand desk, writing something that feels good to write than receiving royalty checks and pumping out things that I didn’t actually believe in. Now, this is not a slight against writers who need to hustle for a living. I want to make that very clear! As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized there is no one correct way to write. There is no one correct reason to write. Different people write for different reasons. Some people outline, some people pants the whole project. And if there is a right and wrong way to do things, I am certainly not the judge of that. I don’t want to be the judge of that.

I just want to write in a way that feels good to me in a way that doesn’t leave me burned out and exhausted and hating myself. I have to remind myself that I have made the choice to accept that I am a slow writer because for me, quality is more important than quantity. For me, good does not necessarily mean fast. And when I try to rush a project, when I try to write fast, I end up further behind. I end up having to rewrite. I end up hating the project and scrapping it. I think I’m at a place where my options are to write slow and steady, to write fast and terrible, or to not write at all, and I know which one of those is in line with how I want to live my life.

Again, this is not some kind of moral imperative. This is not necessarily moralizing on “slow and steady wins the race”. This is not, “If you write more than X number of words a day, you’re going too fast.” This is not that. I know so many talented and accomplished writers who can churn out a book a month. I’m very jealous of them. I’m very envious. But I don’t think less of them. They are doing something that works for them. They’re supporting their family. They’re writing stories that they want to write. I celebrate that, but it’s not something I can do, with the way that my brain works and with the reason that I write.

I started recording this episode because I wanted to walk through, even for myself, what it meant to be a slow writer, and to kind of probe the edges of how I felt about that. It does feel like a wound sometimes, and I’m afraid that poking at it will make it worse. But this has been, at least for me, a helpful exercise in understanding that I write the way that I need to write for the reasons that I write. And so if you are a slow writer like me, I hope that you also are able to find a sense of acceptance and peace with your process.

Now, if you want to learn how to write faster, go for it. If that is something that bothers you and something that you want to fix, I encourage you to do what is right for you and your process and where you are in your writing journey right now. I’ve just realized that for me, after decades of trying to push, trying to write faster, trying to produce more, it’s not good for me. It doesn’t scratch the writing itch. It doesn’t imbue my life with the meaning that I need it to. It’s not in-line with why I write.

I would love to hear in the comments below: how do you see yourself as a writer? Are you a slow writer? Are you a fast writer? How do you see yourself, and outside even of terms of speed, how do you see yourself as a writer, and how does that vision and definition of yourself as a writer work alongside the reasons that you write?

When I go back to the reasons that I write, I realize that in order to fulfill those reasons, I need to take my time and I need to go at my own pace. And realizing that and working on accepting that (hopefully) will help diminish the shame and feelings of not-enough-ness and self-loathing that crop up when I get comparative. I can’t rush my life’s work, and I need to learn how to accept that.

One of the reasons I am able to create this show for you and provide it for free and free of ads is the generous support of people on Patreon. I’m sure you’ve heard it a million times at this point, but Patreon is a secure third party donation platform that allows you to donate $1 per episode, $2 per episode, whatever works for you, to help defray the costs of recording and producing this show, hosting and equipment, and all of that stuff. I would like to give special thanks to Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Amber Fratesi, Charmaine Ferreira, Dennis Martin, Mike Tefft, Poppy Brown, Summer, Tiffany Joyner, and Whitney McGruder. Thank you all so much for your generous support of this show. I am extremely grateful. Thank you. If you would like to become a patron of the Write Now Podcast, you can do so by following the link in the show notes for today’s episode, which I believe is Episode 158. Or if you don’t like Patreon or if you want to do something else, there are also links to PayPal and Kofi (or “Coffee”, or however you pronounce it) in the show notes for this episode as well.

Again, I would love to hear your thoughts and your experience and how you identify yourself as a writer. If you’re a slow writer, a fast writer, or something else entirely, let me know again in the comments for this episode on my website, which is out at sarahwerner.com — that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R dot com. Or if you’re listening to this show on an app that allows comments, let me know there. I would love to hear from you.

And with that, this has been Episode 158 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, fast, slow, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’m cheering for you.