4 Ways to Speed Up Your Writing
Today I'm sharing four ways to speed up your writing.
Do you sometimes wish you could write more quickly? Often we can develop habits that slow us down and hold us back.
When it comes to writing our stories, not that speed is everything, but it certainly doesn't hurt to be able to write faster with everything we all have going on all the time. In this post, I want to share four ways that you can speed up your writing process.
These are all ways that I share with my students. So let's go.
Method #1: Use placeholders
Method one is placeholders, placeholders, placeholders. All right. If you have come to a point in your writing where you're going to get slowed down, this is what I want you to do; mark it in your draft and move along.
It doesn't matter whether it's something you need to do research on and you think, oh, I need to research that right now, or something you actually know well, but is just going to take you a while to describe.
Or you may just be at a loss for words in that section, or maybe it's just going to be really emotional for you and you aren't in that frame of mind right now, whatever it is, you have permission to skip ahead.
Highlight it, add a sticky note, whatever you like, and keep going knowing that you can always return to that part later to fill it in. And you will.
I like to put it in brackets—not parentheses, but actual brackets—if I'm typing, because then later I can do a search and find all the brackets and see every place where I have put a placeholder and need to swap it out for what goes there.
And by the way, these placeholders can be for small things or big things. It could be for a character's name, but it could also be for a big scene you need to write, the whole battle scene or something like that.
You could put insert something here that keeps her from going to work today, or you could put, insert a scene here where she realizes that she's spent her whole life afraid.
Placeholders don't just have to be a substitute for a couple of words. They can be a substitute for a whole chunk, and you can put any note to yourself that'll help you later figure out what needs to go there.
Method #2: Write at your most creative time of day
Method number two for speeding up your writing is to write at your most creative time of day, whatever time you are at your best mentally.
And you know what I mean by that, whether it's early morning or late at night or in the middle of the day on your lunch break, see if you can carve out time to do your most important writing then.
See if you can make that time sacred for you and your writing.
For me that's writing early in the morning before I get busy with other things—doing my job, taking care of my son. By late afternoon, my brain doesn't feel nearly as clear. By 3:00 PM I'm pretty checked out.
That's when I do other tasks that I don't need to be on for like research or filling in a spreadsheet or paying bills—things that don't require me to be as creatively on point. So I reserve that morning time for my creative writing.
I know that you have obligations. A lot of us have day jobs, and we're trying to write around that. So I want to be realistic when I make this suggestion.
You may not be able to write at your perfectly ideal time because you're getting your kid off to school, or you have a meeting three days a week during that time at work.
But insofar as you can work around those things, I think often there are ways to bend things one way or another.
I worked with one writer who was actually a creative writing professor at a university, but she joined my program because she herself was facing a lot of resistance in getting her novel done.
And what she told me she did is just make a regular meeting at the time of day when she was her best and put it in her calendar. It looked like she had a meeting with colleagues, but the meeting was with herself. No one could book her during that time. It was intentional for her because it was how she was going to get her novel done, which she did.
So when are you at your best? If it's morning, maybe you wake up a little bit earlier to get your writing done. If it's afternoon, maybe you sneak out a little early to get it done. Whenever it is. See if you can find it in pockets in your day.
Method #3: Set goals that work for you
Number three, for speeding up your writing is to set goals that work for you. Not everybody is motivated by the same thing. In fact, sometimes the wrong goal type can shut us down entirely.
Maybe you find having a daily word count you're supposed to reach to be helpful. Some people are quantitative like that. Or maybe you find word count intimidating, and you would rather have a different goal type to show up to every day.
Maybe you're someone who likes the idea of writing from this time to this time every day, or maybe you're someone who thinks, oh, that makes me feel trapped and stresses me out. I'm worried I'm going to have other things I need to do. And I can't commit to that.
You know yourself and you know your personality and there are all kinds of writing goal types that work. So find one that works for you. Don't try to shove yourself into a particular goal type, square peg round hole style, just because you think that's what you should be doing.
So let me tell you a couple of different types of goals and you can see what might work best for you.
We obviously have word count. That's exactly what it sounds like. You set a number of words and you go for that each day, but you don't have to do that unless that works for you.
You could also do page count. When I am writing by hand, which I do with first drafts of my novels, I can't do word count because I'd have to literally count up the number of words I've written on a notebook page, and I'm not going to take the time to do that. That would be silly.
But what I can do is page count and that's worked really well for me in the past—deciding I'm going to write five handwritten pages a day, or I'm going to write 10 handwritten pages a day if I'm feeling really ambitious.
Another goal type is to say I'm going to write for a certain number of 25 minute sessions today. This is the Pomodoro Method. If you haven't heard of it, it's the idea that you work in 25 minute sprints and then you take a break.
So you can find those pockets of 25 minute sprints to do some writing, wherever they may be. You say, I'm going to do two of them, or I'm going to do three of them.
And they may sound short, but that time adds up really quickly. A couple of those a couple days a week, and you've written a few hours that week.
Another goal type I really love for anyone who's working on a narrative—a story, novel, or memoir—is the scenes method. A scene is just the building block of a story, right? It's just a chunk of something that happens over a period of time to a group of characters or one character.
There's no set rule about how long a scene should be. A short scene could be 400 words. Long scene could be 10,000 words. There's a lot of variation when it comes to scenes and how long they are and what happens in them.
I don't want to give you any rules around that, but suffice it to say a collection of scenes makes a novel or a collection of scenes makes a memoir.
For me, my scenes tend to average around 1200 words, which means if I write about 50 of them, I've written a novel draft because a novel draft is around 70,000 words minimum. If I write 50 to 60 of these scenes, I've written a novel draft.
How you use this as a writing goal is you would say, I'm going to write one scene a day, or I'm going to write one scene on Mondays, one scene on Wednesdays and one scene on Fridays. Or I'm going to write two scenes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You get the idea.
You can do whatever you want, but instead of setting a quantitative goal, like word count or page count, you're saying, I'm going to get this scene done on this day, and it doesn't matter if it winds up being a short one or a long one.
You're not going to worry about that. If you get it done in 30 minutes, great. If it takes you three hours, okay. The point is you're just going to finish the scene.
Method #4: Give yourself some space
I know it's counterintuitive. The last thing you want to do when you're trying to write faster is leave your work, but taking some distance from it can actually help the ideas come.
Sometimes I'll even say that my writing superpower is having figured out how to walk away from my computer or notebook.
I go on a walk or I take a shower, I go to yoga, and I just put the question that I'm working on out there to the universe and with within a few hours, I've often figured it out.
Not because I was sitting in front of my computer thinking about it, but because I was letting my subconscious work it out. I was letting it percolate while I was doing something else.
Ready to write your dream book?
I've given you a few tips for how to write more quickly, but what does an actual writing calendar look like for somebody who wants to finish their book in three months?
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