How to be a faster writer
slate.com
slate.com
750 words is really fantastic if you want to practice writing every day, especially if you want to practice writing quickly. The site keeps a live word count and pushes you to write 750 words (roughly three pages) every day by tracking your streaks and awarding badges for hitting certain milestones. On top of that, the site tracks how many interruptions you have while writing your 750 words and how long it takes you each day to write.
I had a 149 day streak broken when I lost track of time and forgot to write until after midnight one day, but I'm back up to a new 40 day streak. I was shocked to learn that I'm usually able to write 750 words in under 15 minutes, and on some days I like to push myself to try to write as quickly as possible (I've gotten as low as 8 minutes one time). Of course, writing quickly sometimes means writing somewhat lower quality, so I don't always "race the clock".
If you have any interest in improving your writing skills, I can't recommend 750words.com enough. I started less than a year ago, and I've written a total of 185,022 words that I probably never would have written otherwise! Of course, by writing so quickly I've spent only 56 hours writing on the site, so I have a long way to go before I reach the 10,000 hour mark.
Often, though, I'll just write stream-of-consciousness and then I can end up jumping from topic to topic. This can still help me to organize and make sense of my thoughts and kind of bring closure to my day, plus these entries can be interesting to re-read (to me: I doubt others would be so interested). My brain likes organizing topics and finding connections, so I'm not sure I'd call even this "moving aimlessly from topic to topic" as I like to throw in some kind of segue.
Those are the entries that I write quickly. I have some ideas for fiction stories I'd like to write some day, and so sometimes I take more time in my 750words entry and do a bit of world building or character development, or I'll just write down some of the difficulties I'm facing in proceeding with a story idea, and that can help. Sometimes I'll google writing exercises and find one that looks interesting and do that for the day's entry.
The thing is, different writers have different modes of writing. Some are wholly capable of producing, in spans of 15 to 20 minutes, perfectly serviceable content on any topic imaginable. Others pore over every word, agonizing for possibly days on end. Nabokov, for instance, fell into that latter category; he was notoriously slow and picky about his construction, and his daily bursts sometimes yielded a sentence or two at most. Yet I doubt there's a credible critic around who would assail the beauty of Nabokov's results, or claim that he wanted for practice.
Then, after the speed writing is done, if the result is to be published, I usually spend another 30 minutes poring over every word and polishing it up.
The result is something people find reasonably pleasurable to read and I don't agonize over for hours wasting time.
Also, I find myself doing a lot of in-situ editing, as the article suggests. But rarely have I found that it's fully sufficient for work I really care about. And therein lies the rub: for 99% of my daily writing, the burst method works near-flawlessly. But for anything that I want to stand the test of time, a.k.a. publishable fiction or academic work, I will give the revision its fair course (and then some).
At the end of the internship, he asked me what I thought of the script. And I found myself able to speak with candor, precision, and something approaching intimacy about the way it had evolved over the months I had seen it. At that point I realized that he had basically Miyagi-ed me. Wax on, wax off. Paint the fence. Etc. It was a humbling, but (in retrospect) cool experience.
He knocked out his daily sketch in a very short space of time (15 mins?), having spent little more than 30 minutes in the chamber.
It was incredibly impressive, and would have seemed very casual were his focus while working on it not so intense. At one point he said words to the effect of "I might seem very rude in the next few minutes, but I must concentrate very severely on this".
If the plan is really high level, or embedded (i.e. topic intros), maybe that's different.
Write. A lot. In my case that means spending years chattering online on various discussion boards & blogs about whatever interests me. Use argumentative realms & subjects to hone the art of clear concise replies. This forces attentive writing in a forum where perfection isn't required (so what if you screw something up, it's just a blog post) but close thereto helps (kudos for a clear & helpful explanation, or delivery of a devastating retort, is satisfying & encouraging).
To wit: Gladwell's 10,000 hours. Wanna write fast - well? Then write fast - a lot.
BTW: Stephen King's "On Writing" is marvelous. Most of it is interesting autobiography, but the slim chapter on "toolbox" is worth more than the book's price.
[1] http://scripting.com/stories/2011/06/21/apiDesignersShouldBe...
It's interesting that sometimes you can mentally prep to get into a long multi-hour session of code writing. But in reality I never really do that. It's always burst-pause-evaluate. The tiny iterations stacked up on top of each other could be called "flow" or "in the zone".
1. Write a first draft. 2. Remove as much filler and redundancy as possible. 3. Fix syntax to match reduced content. 4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until content is 100% informative.
As a writer and programmer, my goal is to produce content that is both elaborate and efficient. Speed writing can help me with the first step, but without the editing I feel like I'm reading rambling.