I think the main point was not about a mechanical process to write as little as possible. At least i did not understand it that way. I got that the "final" sentence or piece of text is hard to come by, and "good" writers iterate a lot, that's why their output comes so slow - one paragraph per month, for example. Another signal why i think this was the correct interpretation - throughout the article, they present slow thinking and not stopping to an impulsive idea, and considering it the input to the bigger text (that authors write).