Knowing that makes a lot of sense. Sometimes his prose can read like a sentence that was started but he’s too much effort in to give up on. It probably helps his writing to do it by hand - you can’t edit quickly on the fly with paper (unless you’re cutting stuff out). I could see this as being part of his process - just write and let the editing happen later.

Whatever the process it is, long as his books may be, it works.

If writing by hand is good for your brain (and I suspect it is), the slowness may be part of the reason for that.

If I was a writer, I wouldn't use paper not because I want to write faster but because my brain works best in iterations. I want to try out an idea and see how it feels and course correct. Doing so after writing a hundred pages would be tedious. But then what do I know, I haven't actually written any books.

David Foster Wallace was a longhand manuscript writer too.

I gave up on the Baroque Cycle, personally, because it felt like it was taking as long to read as it was taking to hand-write.

The point is to write better, not faster.

I wonder if Brandon Sanderson writes by hand :-D

I wonder if fiction writing at that level is like coding. You can learn to type and navigate really fast, but unless you're working on blub software, if you're doing something interesting and novel, you won't actually get to the goal faster. The bottleneck is the ideas, the structure of the story and the development of the characters, amongst many other concerns.

Speed is the enemy.