I'm literally retyping my whole book.

Trusting in the power of slow.

Photo by Nick Abrams on Unsplash

Hi, friends. This has been and will continue to be a lighter month of Slow Dopamine, as I’m deep in finishing up a rewrite of my YA novel, currently titled 16 Forever, about a kid named Carter Cohen who’s stuck at age 16, well…forever. Whenever he reaches his seventeenth birthday, he’s sent back, mentally and physically, to the beginning of sixteen, remembering nothing of the past year. You may remember this as the one I mercilessly shit-talked when reading through the first draft earlier in the year.

It’s getting better, though! I’ve been doing something different and possibly foolish for this rewrite—after earlier this year reading Matt Bell’s fantastic book about novel writing, Refuse to be Done, I decided to write the second draft by literally retyping every word of the first. Yes. Every word.

As Bell says in his book:

“Here’s the part of my personal process no one ever wants to hear about but that is, in my mind, the most necessary and productive thing I do, the real way I transition from the mess of the first draft to the tighter, better-made second draft: I retype my second book from scratch, rewriting as I go, moving the book I’ve already drafted toward the one described by the outline I’ve spend the last weeks or months crafting.”

And so, after spending some time in the spring and summer thoroughly reworking my first draft into a better outline, this is what I’ve been doing. I have the old doc (draft number 1) and the new doc (draft number 2) up on my laptop. And rather than cutting and pasting the sections that are working from the old doc into the new one, I’ve been retyping them word by word.

It’s been a thorough, exciting, and tedious experience. Also a very slow one, which can be demoralizing at times. Go faster! my inner voice screams. At this rate, this book won’t come out till 2029!

But I’m trusting in the power of slow, trusting that all the work I’m putting in—revisiting every word and sentence of this book with new eyes and fresh wisdom—will pay off. And I think it will, making for a much better draft that will require less rewriting further down the line.

In this fast-paced world we live in, though, deliberately choosing a slower way of working can feel counterintuitive and even misguided.

Luckily, I just read another book with slow in the title! Soon after I started this substack in April, I saw that Cal Newport—author of Deep Work, which I love and have previously mentioned—had a brand new book out called Slow Productivity.

My first thought was, Damn you, Cal Newport! Now it seems like I copied you with my substack title! Once I got over that, though, I read the book. It was really great. And mostly different than the stuff I write about on here, okay??? So get off my back about this title thing! GEEZ.

Newport’s thesis is that our society’s current fast-paced, always-be-multi-tasking approach to work is actually less productive. He satisfyingly debunks lots of oft-repeated myths about famous people, like Galileo and Jane Austen, writing things really quickly and easily while doing a bunch of other stuff.

It’s a comforting read! It also includes advice for people working office jobs on strategies for blocking off distraction-free time in your day to allow you to get more done. I do not work in an office, but if I did, I would be very excited to apply some of these ideas!

The bottom line is we live in a society that equates being busy with being productive, and then equates being productive with being a worthy human being. It’s not true! Of course we all need to be working to earn income, but this book articulates well some ways we can slow down and be kind to ourselves while also probably getting more done. I recommend it.

And with all that said, I’m gonna dive back into my own slow work! I’m hoping to have a draft finished one week from today on Friday, December 20^th. Alas, I’ve been doing this long enough to know that I always set slightly unrealistic deadlines for myself and probably won’t actually finish till early January. I’m making good progress, though! So we’ll see.

I hope you’re all doing well and finding pockets of jolly during this uncertain time. And I hope your holidays are filled with light and laughs and restoration.

If you’ve got any 8-12 year-olds in your life, consider getting them the Monster Club books for the holidays. They’re fun, funny, emotionally-grounded adventures about monster drawings coming to life!

And, for the 12-and-ups in your life, get them Crying Laughing! A funny, sad, realistic book about improv comedy and dating in high school and dealing with a parental illness. As NPR said: “Rubin tackles Winnie's father's debilitating disease and other sensitive subjects with marvelous amounts of humor and heart. You will need tissues by the end of this book, but I promise it will be okay. Because, just as the title promises, you will also be Laughing.”

I may write another post before the year is out, but in case I don’t, I want to say that starting this newsletter has been one of my favorite parts of 2024. So THANK YOU for joining me here. In this information-saturated world, I don’t at all take for granted that you’re taking the time to read my words.

And as a token of my gratitude, I leave you with these end-of-year T-Recs!

I read and loved The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates last month. This is not an uplifting book, per se, but Coates writes in such a sharp, clear-eyed way about the narratives embedded in society and the power they hold that it somehow feels hopeful; they say the first step in solving problems is being aware that they exist, and Coates brilliantly outlines the scope and depth of some massive ones here. It’s a grounding read for this moment.

In case you’re dragging your heels in getting to Wicked, stop! It’s really incredible, instantly joining my short list of best movie musicals of the past two decades (in case you’re wondering, the others are Moana, Sing Street, and The Muppets). Making a musical is very difficult, and pulling off a movie musical is arguably even harder. So I was thrilled to see how much thought, care, and inventiveness went into bringing this to the screen. The visuals are captivating, and the performances are too! Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande anchor the movie in such genuine emotional truth in spite of the fantastical setting. Katie, the kids, and I loved it and remained captivated through all two hours and forty minutes.

And last but not least, the four of us just watched the first two episodes of A Man on the Inside on Netflix last night, and it was really delightful. Ted Danson, as a widower who gets hired as a spy to solve a theft in a retirement community, delivers his usual comedic brilliance. We all laughed out loud multiple times. High praise!

Okay, much love to you. Be kind to yourself. Take it slow. Be where you are. Go places without your phone.

See you soon!