There is a piece of furniture in my apartment that took eight years to arrive. Not from the factory — that took six weeks. Eight years from the moment I started looking, through several wrong purchases, a long stretch of saving, and the slow, embarrassing process of figuring out what I actually wanted in a room.
I think about this when I read advice about moving fast. Most of the advice is good, and most of it does not apply to the kinds of things I care about. The piece of furniture is one of them. Some bodies of work are another.
The arc you cannot rush
A friend of mine has been working on the same novel for eleven years. People sometimes ask whether he is almost done, in a tone that implies he should be by now. He is not almost done. He is, in his own description, finally in the middle. The last decade was the part that taught him what the book was about.
It is fashionable to mock this. The world rewards visible motion: the launch, the pivot, the announcement. A book that takes eleven years looks, from the outside, like a person who is stuck. But there is a class of work that requires more thinking than typing, and the thinking does not, alas, run on a schedule.
What slow means here
I want to be careful with the word slow. I do not mean lazy and I do not mean precious. I mean: willing to let an idea be wrong for a long time before you find out what is right about it. Willing to throw out a year of drafts. Willing to, occasionally, do nothing while the problem reshapes itself underneath you.
This is not a comfortable mode to operate in. It is much easier to ship something half-good than to wait for the whole-good version that may or may not arrive. But the whole-good version has a different feeling when you find it — the feeling of something settled — and you cannot, I think, get there by any other route.
Some ideas need years before they make sense. Most of the people I know who do interesting work have learned to live with the lag.
I think more often now about which projects in my life are the slow ones, and what it would mean to honor them. Not all of them deserve a decade. But the ones that do, deserve it without apology.