We runners are obsessed with pace. We buy special watches, we download and analyze our data compulsively, we judge how much we liked a race by how fast we finished it.

So it’s no wonder that this kind of thinking has bled over into my writing, too.

Last year, when I finished the first draft ofThe Polaris Uprising, I wasastounded by the fact that I’d written it in five and a halfmonths.I’d been aiming for six months (and truthfully, I was preparing myself for the possibility that it could take e...