How do you read? How do you write?

Speed reading and speed writing are often looked down upon. People who don't do it seem to be pointing their fingers and saying things like "quality over quantity" and "your brain can't comprehend things at that speed."

I don't speed read. I want to, for specific applications like manuals and textbooks and finding my place within something I've written or am reading for a friend so I can remember the threads and continue.

I might be called a speed writer. I have learned that I need to get a project out fast if I'm ever going to finish it. Once I lose the momentum, I'm done. And sometimes one writing session a day isn't good enough. I want to immerse myself in the characters and only stop when I come to the end of the work.

The thing is, no one puts actual numbers on speed when they're looking down their noses at it. When you're reading, you read at a fairly constant rate, I'd guess, minus interruptions, distractions, and diagrams. When you're writing, the rate is variable depending on how the words are coming. One minute I might write above 50 wpm, and then I might pause half a minute searching for that word that fits the action in my mind.

Writing is the only profession where people put down others for the amount of work they turn out. I remember one lecture where the speaker talked about Toni Morrison versus Danielle Steel. If you only compare number of novels, Toni Morrison has 10 and Danielle Steel has about 90. [The lecture was about layering, and how Morrison said more in those pages, and how they were better quality...] Toni Morrison was born in 1931, and Danielle Steel in 1947, so Morrison even had a head start, right?

The problem with that comparison is that Morrison writes literary fiction. That audience is a specific market. Steel writes popular fiction. If you're looking for money to tell you which one is succeeding, Steel wins. If you're looking for circles of critics, they'll probably point to Morrison.

Readers will likely report Steel's books to be easier to read, because they're not layered so heavy as Morrison's. If you read a book fast, would you get all the nuances? More if you read a popular fiction book, I'm sure, than a literary tome. But wait- is this more of the dumbing down of America? How most of the population reads [adult] books that are on an 8th grade level? Do all of us even know what that means?

Slower doesn't always mean better. If you read too slowly, you get tripped up on the letters and syllables and never get the picture behind the meanings. If you stay at a subvocalization level, you always hear the words inside your head and never let your brain read faster.

If you write slowly, it doesn't mean you have layers or nuances or whatever else you want to call it. You might just write slow. And, like me, you might forget what page you're on, and what the next plot point would be, and how the book will end. You might get distracted by that next shiny idea like the dog who yelled, "SQUIRREL!"

Writing takes work. Writing takes tenacity. And writing takes a certain amount of speed to get it all on paper. A few rare writers self-edit each word before it comes out on the page. It's a style of writing that is mostly mental and still takes a great deal of time. Most of us write a rough draft that has an emphasis on the rough. Most of us rewrite that book a few times. Then we dig deeper into edits, and finally get to the line by line phase. The entire thing might take a year or more. But the second novel will be faster. And by the time we write as many as Morrison or Steel... we might know what we're doing enough to write faster. Don't let critics get by saying that "quality over quantity," because it just isn't true.

Publishing has changed, too. If you take five years to work on one novel, the public doesn't want to wait five years for the next one. Many popular fiction readers (no matter the genre) don't want to wait a year for the next one to come out. How many times have you finished a book and then looked for the next to find the proposed date of publication? If that were five years, what would you do?

Have you seen many literary fiction writers who write series like that? I think many of them take a subject and write what they need to in just one novel.

I have a friend who reads so fast she knows she skips details. She simply reads the book over when she's done. She's too impatient to wait to get it all until the end. The next time through she enjoys the book at a more leisurely pace.

Look at how you read. Look at how you write. Do you have an image in your mind? Can you share it with others? Sometimes I don't have words at first for what worked and what didn't in what I read, but I'm working on that. I'm also not going to apologize about whether I write fast, so long as when it's done I've gotten it right. Which means I better get back to the editing pile.