Why do I work so slowly?

The Katawa Shoujo discord I used to frequent runs regular writing competitions, where you are given a random prompt and a deadline, and you produce a story which is judged along with the other stories produced by your fellow writers and a “winner” is chosen. I only managed to enter twice, despite being a supporter of the concept and really enjoying the stories I wrote as a result. Why? Because I write slowly and have many ideas which I struggle to find time to work on.

How slow is slow? It took me about a year to write 25K words, which is extremely slow compared to many of the writers I know. Why so slow? Too much thinking! Take this one line from “Hang on…” :

His belly is being ungrateful, forgetting past favours, and delicious smells are floating on the gentle breeze.

It tells you that he’s hungry and there’s food to be had. It’s also a callback to one of my favourite books, One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. I spent a silly amount of time thinking about whether it fit the story to make such a reference.

Denisovich is in a labour camp, Hisao isn’t but he is somewhere he doesn’t want to be, with a condition he doesn’t want. Choices have been taken away from both of them, they don’t have control over how they live their lives. Denisovich’s day turned out well and I’d planned for Hisao’s to end well too. The book celebrates the ability of the human spirit to find joy even in miserable conditions and I wanted to make sure I reflected that in my story.

So I spent a stupid amount of time thinking about 17 words in a ~500 word one-shot and what’s even worse is that it doesn’t matter to anyone but me! But I’m not in the slightest bit apologetic: if I’m not true to my own nature when writing then what is the point?

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