How I quintupled my words per day.
5Xing your writing speed
When I first started writing fiction, the hardest part was getting the words down. Fortunately, I came across a practice that 5xd my writing speed.
But before I got there…
ideas would pop into my head when riding my bike, pouring pints at work, staring into my drink during bad birthday speeches, and in the middle of conversations where I should have been listening. Basically, anywhere where I couldn’t put my ideas down.
This experience seems to be shared by all amateur and aspiring writers I've met. And when you're starting, getting those dang words down is what matters.
55 to 275 words per day
After about 2 years of slowly plodding through my first sci-fi book, I stumbled across a trick that revolutionized my writing. I don't use that word lightly. In those first two years I wrote 40 000 words. After applying this habit, I wrote the remaining 50 000 words within six months. That’s 5 times the amount of words per day.
The method
I came across it in Stephen Pressfield's fantastic motivator, The War of Art (good wordplay there, Mr. Pressfield). Between those hallowed pages, Mr. Pressfield recommends working on your project for a short amount of time, but every day. It has to be long enough to get something done, but not so long as to be daunting or unachievable when life comes banging on your study door.
I started doing 20 minutes a day, five days a week. To start with, most of it was garbage and sometimes I'd barely get 100 words down. But 100 words x 5 days is a whole lot more in week than none.
The magic
And then it started to change. My vision would lock in on the screen and my fingers would fly. I started hitting a couple of hundred words a day, and some of it good. Sometimes it felt like I wasn't really the one writing, I was just a conduit for the story to get itself out. I think those moments are what every writer lives for.
I've spent over a decade getting into all manners of spiritual dabbling. I've knelt in Church and crawled into Sweat Lodges; I’ve drunk Ayahuasca and fasted on vision quests; I’ve sat still on meditation retreats and screamed my guts up within a ritual circle. And honestly, I've rarely felt so close to 'It' as when the words just come and the story goes.
Back to reality.
Anyway, as the weeks carried on it became harder to not write in a day than to find the time to. This habit saw me through another 90 000 word sequel that I completed in under a year, and a 140 000 word fantasy manuscript that took 8 months. I can't wait till I'm banging out Wheel of Time sized tomes in under a week.
A basic practice
A minimum of 20 minutes is enough time to accomplish something, and it's easy to slot into a busy day. Make sure you shut the door, tell everyone you will not be unlocking it so don't even bother, and turn your phone off. If you're easily distracted, disconnect your computer from the internet too.
5 days a week will set the habit quickly and those words will add up fast, but go for at least 3.
You’re aiming to build a habit and get over resistance, so go for quantity. Let the story do its thing. You can improve your craft as you go, then fix it during revision.
That's it, go write something (anything, one day it’ll be great).
Did this help?
Maybe you’ve got your own magic?
Let me know below!
