"I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing"
About this Quote
Koontz is smuggling a small act of rebellion into what sounds like simple craft advice. In a culture that fetishizes speed - sprint drafting, productivity hacks, word-count screenshots - he’s staking his authority on slowness. Not the romantic slowness of waiting for inspiration, but the disciplined kind: composition as continuous revision, where the first pass is already a negotiation with the final reader.
The intent is practical and slightly defensive. Koontz is preempting the myth that real writers vomit out a draft and “fix it later.” His method treats momentum as fragile; if you race ahead on shaky sentences, you’re building a story on stilts. Page-by-page polishing keeps the voice consistent, the tone calibrated, the suspense engineered at the level where his genre lives or dies: the paragraph.
The subtext is about control. Koontz writes books that have to land emotional beats and plot turns with clockwork reliability. “Quick draft” implies mess, discovery, maybe even chaos - virtues in some literary circles. Koontz is quietly saying: that’s not my job. My job is delivery. The polish isn’t cosmetic; it’s structural. It’s how you keep dread, tenderness, and velocity in the same lane without veering into melodrama.
Context matters, too. Koontz is a mass-market titan who’s spent decades being underestimated as “just” genre. This workflow doubles as a credo: craftsmanship is the rebuttal. When the stakes are reader trust and narrative propulsion, slow becomes a strategy, not a temperament.
The intent is practical and slightly defensive. Koontz is preempting the myth that real writers vomit out a draft and “fix it later.” His method treats momentum as fragile; if you race ahead on shaky sentences, you’re building a story on stilts. Page-by-page polishing keeps the voice consistent, the tone calibrated, the suspense engineered at the level where his genre lives or dies: the paragraph.
The subtext is about control. Koontz writes books that have to land emotional beats and plot turns with clockwork reliability. “Quick draft” implies mess, discovery, maybe even chaos - virtues in some literary circles. Koontz is quietly saying: that’s not my job. My job is delivery. The polish isn’t cosmetic; it’s structural. It’s how you keep dread, tenderness, and velocity in the same lane without veering into melodrama.
Context matters, too. Koontz is a mass-market titan who’s spent decades being underestimated as “just” genre. This workflow doubles as a credo: craftsmanship is the rebuttal. When the stakes are reader trust and narrative propulsion, slow becomes a strategy, not a temperament.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Dean
Add to List
