The slow drafts are usually the ones worth finishing

A draft that comes together fast feels like a small triumph while it’s happening. You sit down, the sentences arrive in something close to the right order, and an hour or two later there’s a whole thing on the page where nothing was before.

What that speed costs the writer doesn’t usually show up until later, once the satisfaction has worn off and they go back to read what they made. More often than I’d like, what’s there is the easy version of the idea, the one that was already sitting close to the surface, rather than the one the writer actually needed to find.

What’s at stake in the difference isn’t really time, though time is the part everyone notices first. A writer who takes six weeks over a draft instead of six days hasn’t necessarily done anything better with those weeks. What’s at stake is whether the extra time was spent testing the idea against its own weak points, or simply spent circling the same easy version, tidying its sentences without ever asking whether the underlying thought held up.

A slow draft that never questions itself is no better than a fast one. The value isn’t in the slowness for its own sake. It’s in what the slowness usually forces a writer to notice, given enough room to notice it.

The slow draft is a different animal, and a much less pleasant one to sit through. It stalls. It gets abandoned for a few days and picked back up reluctantly. Whole sections get written and then quietly deleted because they were true but beside the point. Nobody enjoys that process while it’s happening, and I understand completely why so many writers give up partway through it and go looking for a faster way in.

But in nearly every case I can think of, my own included, that slow and uncomfortable stretch is where the actual thinking happens, and skipping past it just means doing the thinking later, usually in public, in front of a reader who deserved better.

Since my son Brendan and I started this editing practice back in 2014, I’ve read more first drafts than I can count, and a pattern shows up often enough that I’ve stopped calling it a coincidence.

The manuscripts that came together in a burst, all at once, tend to be the ones that never quite get finished properly. Something about them stays unsettled, and the writer either abandons the project or hands it to an editor hoping the trouble will turn out to be a surface problem, fixable with a few better sentences. Usually it isn’t.

The manuscripts that took the writer far longer than they expected, the ones with whole discarded chapters and long gaps between sessions, are far more often the ones that actually reach a finished, publishable shape. The slowness was doing the work the fast version had quietly skipped, and it took the time it took because that work can’t be rushed without becoming a different, thinner kind of work.

Anne Lamott described the same pattern in her own writing, in an essay that’s now close to thirty years old and still gets passed around writing classes for good reason. She wrote about drafting in stages, the first one just to get the material down, however rough, and only afterward the drafts that shape it into something worth reading.

The insight she was after, she said, usually turned up unannounced, buried somewhere past the point where the writing had stopped being interesting to her. As she put it, “there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.” The slow, unglamorous middle of a draft isn’t the part standing between the writer and the good material. Most of the time, it’s the road the good material was hiding behind.

None of this means slowness is a virtue by itself, and I’d be careful about anyone who tells you the opposite, that a draft is only trustworthy if it made them suffer for months. Plenty of fast drafts are perfectly fine, especially for writers who already know the material cold and are simply getting it onto the page.

What matters is whether the draft was allowed to change its mind partway through, to stall out on a sentence until the writer figured out what they actually meant by it, to sit for a while and reveal what was missing once the initial excitement had faded.

That’s the distinction speed alone can never tell you. The Writing Center at the University of North Carolina puts a version of this plainly in its own guidance to student writers: “wait awhile after you’ve finished a draft before looking at it again,” because a page that looked finished the day it was written rarely looks the same a week later. That waiting is its own kind of slowness, and it does work that no amount of careful first-time writing can substitute for.

I’ve come to think the writers who finish the most work aren’t the fast ones or even the especially disciplined ones. They’re the ones who’ve made a kind of peace with how uncomfortable the slow stretch feels and kept going through it anyway, trusting that the discomfort is doing something rather than simply wasting their time.

That trust doesn’t come naturally. It has to be built up, draft by draft, by noticing often enough that the stretch you wanted to skip past turned out to be carrying the part of the piece that mattered.

I still recognize the pull of the fast draft. There’s real relief in reaching the bottom of a page and feeling done, and I don’t think a writer should be talked out of that relief altogether, or made to feel guilty for the pieces that genuinely do arrive whole. But when a draft is fighting you, refusing to settle, sending you back to the same paragraph for the third or fourth time, that resistance is usually worth respecting rather than overriding.

A draft that resists for weeks and finally comes right is a different object from one that arrived whole on the first afternoon, carrying a kind of soundness the fast version never had the chance to earn. More often than not, that’s the draft worth finishing.