If writing by hand is good for your brain (and I suspect it is), the slowness may be part of the reason for that.
replyKnowing that makes a lot of sense. Sometimes his prose can read like a sentence that was started but he’s too much effort in to give up on. It probably helps his writing to do it by hand - you can’t edit quickly on the fly with paper (unless you’re cutting stuff out). I could see this as being part of his process - just write and let the editing happen later.
replyWhatever the process it is, long as his books may be, it works.
This actually explains why I've never been able to get into his writing despite rave reviews and countless recommendations by people I know. Something about his writing always just felt tedious to me. Im an avid reader btw.
replyHis earlier stuff was much better. If you tried Snow Crash or Diamond Age and didn't like them, he's not the author for you, but if you tried his more recent crap like Anathem I would strongly advise you not to judge him based on it.
replyGive his earlier works a try and you may find he used to be able to write well (ie. he used to actually edit his work), before he stopped caring and just wrote 1000 pages of unfiltered garbage.
I gave up on the Baroque Cycle, personally, because it felt like it was taking as long to read as it was taking to hand-write.
replyDavid Foster Wallace was a longhand manuscript writer too.
replyThe point is to write better, not faster.
replyI wonder if Brandon Sanderson writes by hand :-D
replyI wonder if fiction writing at that level is like coding. You can learn to type and navigate really fast, but unless you're working on blub software, if you're doing something interesting and novel, you won't actually get to the goal faster. The bottleneck is the ideas, the structure of the story and the development of the characters, amongst many other concerns.
replySpeed is the enemy.
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