The picture of the novelist toiling over a sentence and hurling scrumpled paper across the room is part of the romance of the art.

Where you and I dash off an email, letter or article, the writer is presumed to take inordinate time, selecting words as if they were peaches on a market stall. Novelists are not meant to work at the speed of Formula One, so when they produce books as if they were taking a touch-typing test, fingers moving faster than a concert pianist on the keys, people are wary. How can anything written at such incredible speed also be good or, indeed, brilliant?

No-one has suffered more from the suspicion that swift writing raises than Joyce Carol Oates, of whom it was famously said - and tediously repeated - "that's not writing, it's typing". I have since heard the insult applied to others, and every time it makes me wince. Only the jealous or the ignorant would think or say such a thing.

The rate at which novelists work was raised the other evening in the Eastgate Theatre in Peebles, where John Buchan's adventure stories were under discussion. His romping thrillers featuring Richard Hannay were produced in about six weeks, partly to provide entertainment for the troops in the trenches, but also, as Buchan revealed, because prior to setting down a word, he had worked out the entire story in his head. Another like him was Muriel Spark. If you look at the manuscripts of her novels held in the National Library, there is barely a crossing out, her words flowing as if they were music. At the time of composition, Spark would work like a dervish, but in the weeks before she opened the jotter and uncapped her pen, she would be found wandering around, looking aimless, as the novel took shape in her mind. For writers such as her, a phenomenal memory was essential. She followed in the footsteps of Jane Austen whose manuscripts are almost as tidy, proof if it were needed that she had a ferociously clear mind, and knew to the last word what she wanted to convey, and how to do so.

Some books, of course, take years to write, and are much the better for it. But for some of the world's best-known writers, haste was in their genes. It is as if hurrying actually helped them create, theirs being perhaps a race against the intrusion of reality or doubt. As you read Graham Greene or Elmore Leonard, Simenon or Stephen King, John Updike or Alexander McCall Smith, there is an overpowering appreciation of the fluent mind and untrammelled imagination at work. There is nothing chiselled or laboured in their prose. And while at times style suffers from the galloping tempo, the same can be said of many a writer whose overworking or excessive deliberation creates sentences as clagged as clay. One doubts that literary sprinters would produce finer fiction if they were given a decade in which to polish and buff it.

It could be that for earlier generations, the hand-written page was a great help. By comparison, today's keyboard and screen allow you to reread everything as if it were in print, thereby making the temptation to tinker or rewrite almost overwhelming. I was struck by Kate Clanchy saying that she writes only 500 words a day, an allocation that includes emails. I have no idea if that ration is reshaped or left intact when she returns to it. What one can say for certain, however, is that when there was only paper and ink the discipline of finding the right words needed to be stricter. Of course there were writers such as Balzac who wrote like a hurricane and relied on altering almost every sentence at proof stage, to his near ruin. For the most part, though, fast writers are confident writers, their fictional world so vividly imagined and real to them, it need only be transcribed for the rest of us to share.