The Slow Writer

He lived alone in a small apartment. One day he received a national writer’s prize and brought the small silver plaque home. He opened his Ledger of Holdings to record it. When he reached the line for its location, he looked around and calculated that the plaque would require the sacrifice of three books, perhaps four. He first considered On the Verge of Memory, by Herbert Quain, whose bulk alone seemed to justify it; he had read it only three times. After a moment’s thought, he spared the book, dropped the plaque into the wastebasket, and struck the entry from the Ledger of Holdings.

He was back to owning 10,354 objects—9,649 of them books.

He wrote each morning at 4:30. He wrote by hand, on a yellow legal pad made by a French paper manufacturer. He wrote very slowly, at the pace of a learning child or a careful artisan. He used a fountain pen with an extra-fine nib. The sound of the tip scratching the paper carried the work forward—the sound of a soothing stream in the quiet hours of the morning. He stopped writing only when the rising noise of the city overtook the sound of the pen.

Once the manuscript was finished, he used an old Olivetti typewriter to retype it word by word on clean sheets of white paper from the same French manufacturer. This work was reserved for the busy hours of the morning, when the gunning shots of the typewriter could take their revenge and stamp the words into the world. It was the cocky, confident sound of adolescence, still in need of maturity. That was why he typed double-spaced and within generous margins, so he could later edit and steer the work with the perspective of time and distance.

His third and final step involved retyping the piece once again, this time on a computer, taking into account the numerous edits and copious annotations. He discovered the pleasure of mechanical keyboards and tried many—to the dismay of his *Ledger of Holdings*—until a Chinese board with pre-lubed linear switches offered the silky ease of senescence, lifting the weight from his words and the effort from his readers.

And this is how his work came to be: through a series of slow, deliberate, and repetitive steps, like learning to cook, to dance, or to draw. In a way, he didn’t write his pieces; he practiced them.