"And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War"
About this Quote
Foote’s boast is calibrated to sound like a confession. “Slow writer” reads humble, even self-deprecating, but the math turns it into a quiet flex: a million and a half words, earned at 500 a day, is not merely productivity, it’s penance. He’s framing historical writing as a long siege, not a sprint, and inviting you to respect the labor precisely because it seems almost unreasonable in a culture that treats output as proof of talent.
The line also smuggles in a theory of authority. By emphasizing duration, Foote isn’t just explaining a timeline; he’s underwriting his credibility. Twenty years becomes a credential, a substitute for footnotes (and it’s hard not to hear the subtext, given Foote’s reputation as a narrative historian who prized story over academic apparatus). The implicit argument: trust me because I stayed with it. The Civil War, in this telling, demands a novelist’s patience and stamina, not a scholar’s citations. That’s both seductive and slightly dangerous.
Context matters: Foote became a mass-cultural historian through Ken Burns’ documentary, where his drawl and certainty made history feel like lived experience. This quote matches that persona. It romanticizes craft - the solitary writer chiseling daily - while turning time itself into rhetoric. The Civil War remains America’s open wound; Foote suggests you don’t report on a wound quickly. You sit with it until the scar tells its story.
The line also smuggles in a theory of authority. By emphasizing duration, Foote isn’t just explaining a timeline; he’s underwriting his credibility. Twenty years becomes a credential, a substitute for footnotes (and it’s hard not to hear the subtext, given Foote’s reputation as a narrative historian who prized story over academic apparatus). The implicit argument: trust me because I stayed with it. The Civil War, in this telling, demands a novelist’s patience and stamina, not a scholar’s citations. That’s both seductive and slightly dangerous.
Context matters: Foote became a mass-cultural historian through Ken Burns’ documentary, where his drawl and certainty made history feel like lived experience. This quote matches that persona. It romanticizes craft - the solitary writer chiseling daily - while turning time itself into rhetoric. The Civil War remains America’s open wound; Foote suggests you don’t report on a wound quickly. You sit with it until the scar tells its story.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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