The Slow Draft

On finishing: why the last paragraph is always the first one you wrote.

The notebook I don't write in.

I keep a Moleskine in my bag that I have never opened. It is expensive and its pages are very beautiful and I bought it in a shop in Jaipur five years ago. I am saving it for writing that deserves it, which so far has been none of my writing, and I suspect this is the point.

Against efficiency: a defence of doing things the slow way.

I hand-wash my clothes on Sundays. Not because I don't own a machine — I do — but because the act of wringing cotton in warm water is the only hour in my week where my hands are occupied and my mind is genuinely empty. Every productivity writer I've read would call this waste. I call it the only time I have an original thought.

A letter to my reader (singular).

I write for one person. I don't know their name, their age, or where they live, but I know they read slowly, they underline sentences they want to return to, and they have at some point in their life stood in a bookshop and felt the particular grief of knowing they will die before they finish reading everything they want to read.

Why I don't use the word 'content.'

Content is what fills a container. It exists to occupy space. An essay is not content. A poem is not content. A letter to someone you love is not content. The word itself performs a small act of violence against everything it describes, by reducing it to a unit of production measured in engagement.