Festina Lente

To Caesar Augustus was attributed the line σπεῦδε βραδέως or when he was less in the mood to sound smart in Greek and instead preferred the vulgarities of Latin festina lente, which translates to the aphorism: make haste slowly.

Recently, I’ve been reviewing blogs and vlogs of writers who experimented with the daily techniques of Neil Gaimon and other such who prefer longhand to word processors and there’s a frequent theme that keeps coming up: though the pen slows down what they write it also speeds up what they get done.

I’ve been toying with an aphorism like festina lente to explain it: the faster you move through the sentence, the slower you move through the paragraph. Specifically, the quicker the cursor moves the more errors you introduce into the text, the more time you have to take backing up to change things, the slower you move through the paragraph. The semi-permanence of ink and the slower rate of putting words on the page, the more time you give your brain to think on what you’re doing, the fewer mistakes you make along the way.

To explore this further, I’ve taken up the fountain pen for the first couple drafts of a story. Sometimes, I even use the pen just to explore an idea. The process of writing it out and thinking about it shows me what’s possible and where I can take things.