3 October 2022
And yet, a book surfaced. All because of the power of incremental writing, a kind of compound investment. I wrote every workday, five days a week, for a scheduled half-hour. Be in the chair, manuscript up, cursor blinking, even if on that day the word pipe is clogged. A half-hour's writing might be only 300 words, 500 words, sometimes a mere 100 words. But a half-hour's writing over 7 or 8 months: a book's worth of words.
That's the subtle little secret to traveling from a work's first word to its last: walk, don't run. I don't recommend a pandemic to move you to a long composition, but some of its isolations were helpful, at least in half-hour retreats. The allegorical wisdom of the tortoise vs. the hare-wise indeed.
