On Being an Inefficient Writer

How writing 3,000 words a day almost killed my love for writing, and how inefficiency saved it

On the top floor of a high-rise corporate building, in a cramped room, sit twelve of us like zombies, staring at our screens, obsessively pounding our keyboards.

Zoom in close enough, and you will find me. On my screen, you will see an article titled ‘How to Get Gum Out of Carpet: 7 Methods That Actually Work.’

As soon as I hit submit, the article goes straight to the design team to be styled, and then from there to the SEO team to be optimized, like it’s on a conveyor belt.

As for me, I’m already onto the next article. I would keep at it until the quota of 3,000 words was met for the day.

Write. Submit. Repeat.

Fast. And efficient, above all else.

If writing was this mechanical, soulless task, I didn’t want anything to do with it, or so I thought at the time.

I quit my job and took a break from writing ANY words whatsoever.

Later, I rediscovered my love for the craft by breaking every rule the content factory had set. I wrote slowly, without a quota, almost inefficiently.

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Writing is a deeply inefficient activity. There’s no linear path from rough idea to polished prose. It wanders, and more often than not, ends up somewhere you never planned.

You think one thing, build on it, and then abandon it because it stops making sense halfway through.

You read back what you wrote yesterday and realize it isn’t what you meant at all.

You let a sentence sit unfinished, longer than feels reasonable, because it isn’t ready, and rushing it wouldn’t make it ready any faster.

You experiment with your voice, sounding like someone else entirely a few times, before something finally sounds like you.

You take detour after detour, and the breakthrough only comes once you’ve taken enough of them.

This inefficiency isn’t unique to writing. It’s characteristic of almost all creative work.

Talking about his creative process, Christoph Niemann, a German artist and animator behind decades of New Yorker covers, once said:

On the one hand, I wish I didn’t waste so much time, but on the other, I really try and savor the inefficiency. I can be efficient with my work day and technology and everything, but one thing you must not – and cannot – be efficient with is creating. Once you start thinking about what works faster or better, you start ruling out mistakes, and that’s really awful. So I really try to be as inefficient as possible.

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In Paris, in the 1920s, a young Hemingway had a habit. Most afternoons, after working on his book, he’d walk through the gardens and go to the museum to look at the paintings there.

One artist in particular, Cézanne, stood out to him. Hemingway would stand in front of his paintings for long stretches, studying them closely.

In his memoir, ‘A Moveable Feast,’ he goes on to describe this experience:

“I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides, it was a secret.”

He needed his stories to have dimensions they didn’t yet have. The most efficient thing would have been to turn to another great writer for inspiration, but instead, he chose a painter to learn from.

He couldn’t have found what he needed by rushing it, by optimizing his time, or by taking the fastest route. He got there by wandering, by waiting, and more than anything, by being inefficient.

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