Slowness Is a Method, Not a Temperament
People assume I am slow because I am patient by nature. I am not especially patient. I am slow on purpose, at a speed I set the way you set the speed of a survey walk against the terrain, not against a mood.
Slowness gets described in writing advice as a virtue you either have or develop through some vague process of maturity, learning to sit with things, learning not to rush. This makes slowness sound like a personality outcome, which is a poor account of what is actually a decision made fresh for each piece of work, based on what that work needs, not on who you have become.
Count speed
On a transect, you do not walk at one fixed pace for every survey. You walk fast over ground with nothing on it and slow over ground with birds you need to identify and count accurately, and choosing the wrong speed for the terrain produces a bad count either way: too fast and you miss birds, too slow and you double count the ones that moved while you were still looking at them from the last position. The speed is an instrument, matched to the terrain, and a good surveyor changes it four or five times in a single morning without thinking of any of those changes as a shift in temperament.
Call this count speed applied to prose: the deliberate matching of drafting pace to the density of the material, chosen and changed within a single project, sometimes within a single session, rather than inherited from whatever speed feels natural to you as a person.
Where I set it fast and where I set it slow
On my most recent book, the chapters describing routine survey mornings, the ones with no structural weight, I wrote at what I would call transect speed over open ground: two thousand words in a sitting, minimal rereading, because the material was even and there was nothing dense enough to miss by moving quickly. The chapter describing the single worst storm of the study period, the one where three nesting sites were lost in a night, I wrote at under two hundred words a sitting for eleven sessions, rereading each session's output twice before adding to it, because that chapter carried the weight the rest of the book was built to support, and moving fast over it risked exactly what moving fast over a transect risks: missing what was actually there because you were counting from too far away.
Neither speed is more virtuous than the other. The fast chapters are not lazier and the slow one is not more serious as a matter of character. They are matched to different densities of material, the way a competent surveyor is neither a rusher nor a dawdler by nature, just someone reading the ground correctly session to session.
The honest objection
Someone could object that this makes slowness sound purely tactical when, for many writers, going slow really is about temperament, about anxiety, about a genuine difficulty producing sentences quickly regardless of the material's density, and that recasting this as a chosen method erases a real constraint some writers work under. I do not want to dismiss that. Some slowness is not a method at all, it is friction, and friction deserves its own honest name rather than being dressed up as a deliberate craft choice after the fact. The test I use to tell the two apart is whether my speed changes with the terrain. If I am slow on the easy chapters too, at the same rate as the hard ones, that is not count speed, that is something else operating, and calling it a method would be lying to myself about what is actually happening.
What changes once speed is a decision
Once slowness became a setting I chose per session instead of a fixed identity, two things followed. I stopped feeling guilty on fast weeks, because fast was correct for that material, not a lapse in seriousness. And I stopped over-crediting slow weeks as proof of depth, because sometimes slow was correct and sometimes it was just friction dressed up as care, and only the count speed test, checked against the actual density of what I was working on, could tell me honestly which one I was looking at that week.