On Writing Slowly

I have never been a fast writer. I have tried, in the way one tries to like coffee black or to enjoy running in the rain, and I have failed cheerfully at both.

What I have learned, in place of speed, is patience. A page a day is a book in a year. Two pages, and you have a life's work by fifty.

The romance of the writing life is not in the sprint. It is in the returning — to the desk, to the same characters, to the same stubborn sentence you cannot quite fix.