Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Junot Díaz, in an interview at The Rumpus, talking about taking time to focus on your craft:
As for my slowness as a writer—that’s been a struggle, no question. We live in a culture that values and rewards machine-speed productivity. Even the arts are expected to conform to the Taylor model of productivity. Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly. For many years I felt pressure and even felt bad that I wrote so slow. But what can you do? As an artist you’re on a journey of discovery and sometimes that journey takes a long time, doesn’t subscribe to [a] train schedule, to the punch-clock. And I need to read a lot to make my pages happen. A book a page seems to be standard rate of exchange. I read a book, I get one page. But it’s clear to me that us slow-poke writers are a dying breed. It’s amazing how thoroughly my young writing students have internalized the new machine rhythm, the rush many of my young writers are in to publish. The majority don’t want to sit on a book for four, five years. The majority don’t want to listen to the silence inside and outside for their artistic imprimatur. The majority want to publish fast, publish now. The professional aspect of the practice is stressed over the artistic dimension. I was recently teaching in a school famed for its writing program and a lot of my students—not all of them—got more excited talking about advances and agents than they did the books they’ve read recently. In this atmosphere, I’m a total outlier. That really struck me—how many of my students wanted to be writers but how few of them practiced the kind of reading that would help sustain all the writers we’re producing. But there were a few who did read and who believed in it, and those were a great joy, believe me.
