"As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough - I wrote faster than I would write a letter - two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it"
About this Quote
Breathless acceleration shapes the confession: once the work started, words outran even the quick ease of a friendly letter. Two to three thousand words before noon is not a boast about stamina so much as a portrait of compulsion. The phrase I cannot help it lifts the sentiment out of productivity talk and into vocation. The writing is not merely willed; it seizes the writer and dictates the pace.
Helen Hunt Jackson knew both lyrical craft and moral urgency. A respected poet who turned fiercely toward reform, she used prose to press the American conscience about Native American rights in A Century of Dishonor and sought a wider empathetic reach through fiction in Ramona. The speed described here reads like the momentum of a settled purpose. After years of apprenticeship in style, subject matter arrived with the force of necessity. The hand could barely keep up with the conviction.
The comparison to letter writing reveals intimacy as much as velocity. Nineteenth-century letters were rapid, personal, unpretentious. To write faster than a letter suggests that her public work carried the same unfiltered immediacy as private speech, as if addressing a friend across the table rather than a distant audience. The result is a tone often noted in Jacksons prose: earnest, direct, hospitable to feeling, yet propelled by argument.
There is also a psychological truth embedded in as soon as I began. Beginning breaks the dam. Hesitation vanishes once the first sentence lands, and the mornings yield to flow. It is the state artists describe as being written through, where craft and conscience align so fully that discipline feels like surrender. The line sketches the cost and the liberation of that surrender. Speed here is not rush but release, the measure of how urgently the story or indictment wanted to exist, and how completely the writer gave herself to letting it.
Helen Hunt Jackson knew both lyrical craft and moral urgency. A respected poet who turned fiercely toward reform, she used prose to press the American conscience about Native American rights in A Century of Dishonor and sought a wider empathetic reach through fiction in Ramona. The speed described here reads like the momentum of a settled purpose. After years of apprenticeship in style, subject matter arrived with the force of necessity. The hand could barely keep up with the conviction.
The comparison to letter writing reveals intimacy as much as velocity. Nineteenth-century letters were rapid, personal, unpretentious. To write faster than a letter suggests that her public work carried the same unfiltered immediacy as private speech, as if addressing a friend across the table rather than a distant audience. The result is a tone often noted in Jacksons prose: earnest, direct, hospitable to feeling, yet propelled by argument.
There is also a psychological truth embedded in as soon as I began. Beginning breaks the dam. Hesitation vanishes once the first sentence lands, and the mornings yield to flow. It is the state artists describe as being written through, where craft and conscience align so fully that discipline feels like surrender. The line sketches the cost and the liberation of that surrender. Speed here is not rush but release, the measure of how urgently the story or indictment wanted to exist, and how completely the writer gave herself to letting it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Helen
Add to List
