Literary speed …

… The Narrative Physics of Novels - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It can be dismaying, all the same, for a novelist to compare the slowness of the writing with the speed of the reading. Novels are read in a matter of days, even hours. A writer may labor for weeks over a particular passage that will have its effect on a reader for an instant — and that effect may be subliminal or barely noticed. The vibrations of thought and feeling that a single sentence in its context can release in a reader may be too rapid for measurement. “It leapt off the page” is what we say of a happy reading experience.