Hi. Thanks very much for coming and doing this, I appreciate it. I’ve been looking at some of your . . . You’ve done the webcasts where you record yourself writing, and something I’ve noticed—maybe it’s just because of the thought process going on in your head—but you seem to type fairly slowly for somebody who’s written multiple thousand page novels. Is that intentional, and it sort of goes along as you’re thinking, or is it something that you wish that you could speed up? Have you ever actually formally trained on how to type quickly?
I can type very quickly. I can get up to, I think, 87 or something like that. I work by the process. The creative process is slower than the fingers. I’m not actually a very fast writer. I’m not a slow writer. I’m about middle of the pack. People talk about how quickly I write. I don’t write quickly. I write a lot.
I do this compulsively. I love to tell stories, and one quirk of mine is that in order to take a break from telling stories, I just tell a story I’m not supposed to be telling. Which is where a lot of the interesting books—I’ll talk about a few of them in a few minutes, because Dwayne has them for sale—that’s where a lot of those things come from. And so, yeah, I do not wish I could speed up.
In fact, I don’t even want to be able to read faster. I actually started taking a speed reading class in school, and the first thing they said is: you need to stop hearing the words as you read them, in order to read faster. And I said, I don’t want to stop hearing the words. That’s part of the beauty. And I actually dropped that class like that because I realized that’s not what I want. Speed reading is not what I want. I don’t want to go faster through the Wheel of Time—that doesn’t make any sense. And it’s the same thing with the creative process.
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