Writing — Fast and Slow
Two writing styles with very different results — and a clear winner
The first essay I wrote on Medium took over 3 months to write.
The topic of this essay was “free will” — an idea which I found important to understand, but my own thoughts were brimming with contradiction.
I spent the first couple of weeks digesting everything I could about the subject. I then started writing out my own ideas — but each time I’d assert something, another perspective from my research challenged my assumption.
The result was new draft after new draft.
I started as a libertarian, went to a determinist, then kind of landed on a slightly different kind of compatibilism to the standard argument.
This process took time and was mentally exhausting.
The post you’re reading right now, on the other hand, didn’t exist up to this point until less than 5 minutes ago. (I won’t edit or refine any of the above to illustrate my point. In fact, I’m not going to edit or refine any of this article and aim to publish it in under 10 minutes).
An investment of time of probably over 100x on my free will essay reaped no reads, no claps, no comments, no resonance.
Whereas the articles I’ve written since have been more or less an open stream of consciousness. I started with the title and just started pouring out what was in my head.
This kind of content has had infinitely higher engagement so far in my medium journey — which is both interesting and perplexing.
I call the first type of writing — slow writing, and the latter — fast writing. This is inspired by the name of the popular book “thinking, fast and slow”.
Maybe the slow writing didn’t resonate because it was such an esoteric subject. Maybe it just didn’t find its intended audience. Maybe Medium as a platform isn’t designed for such essays.
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure why the results have been this way — it’s impossible to tell with only one slow essay in my list of stories.
One thing is for certain — my desire to write the slow essays has been heavily impacted.
I suspect that writing slow is more beneficial for the author — while writing fast is more beneficial for the reader.
I also wonder if the fast writing style allows the subconscious creative energy to flow more readily than a more conscious, deliberate exercise of the conscious mind.
In any case, as a new writer trying to “find my voice”, I’m much more curious to see where the fast writing will lead to.
Not just because I’m lazy, but because it’s so interesting that what can reasonably be described as word vomit has the potential to do better than even the very best of my conscious efforts.
