Three Strategies For More Writing In Less Minutes
We had some wonderful sweeping discussions after the GiveGetWin Tour event in New York. Stepping out of the secluded wine bar we held the after-event in (and thus narrowly avoiding St. Patrick’s revelry), Zach Obront, Janet Lai Chang, Jason Shen, and I got some chicken.
The topic turned to writing. Everyone at the table writes more or less, and it’s at least a somewhat important part of all of our lives. All of my compatriots-in-chicken at the table are good writers and disseminate important thought and pull the world ahead with their pen or keyboard.
The topic turned to my recent wager, where I’m now firmly committed to writing daily for the next two years. I offered around to see if anyone else was interested in getting in on the bet — no? — but then, broadly, how much time does it take everyone to write?
And it comes that everyone at the table takes considerably longer than me to write.
Now, this is partly a function of strategy and style. All of Obront, Shen, and Chang engage in more careful polish and generally (from my perspective) hit their stride more often in their pieces, having them come together magnificently. They edit more and get a higher quality of output out regularly.
Janet went on to explain that she takes immense time carefully citing studies and carefully editing and re-ordering her pieces, and that approach pays large dividends for her, especially when covering a topic both as important and delicate as health.
So, some of the difference in time can be chalked up to style. If you spend immense time editing (which I don’t, and which sometimes shows) — well, it will take longer and your average quality will be higher.
This was an interesting discussion, but I wasn’t wholly satisfied. It used to take me a lot longer to write; now I can do it a lot faster. Even my long essays and analyses of history get written reasonably quickly, and writing used to take me a lot longer. Why is that?
And I think there’s three broad strategies you can use to write a lot faster —
1. Capture great thinking as it occurs: Two things are happening when you’re writing. There’s the thinking aspect of writing, the part where you can conceive of ideas and get content broadly together. Then there’s the mechanics of writing, which is word choices, pacing, tone, perspective, etc. I think the former is very much more important than the latter — great ideas, even written poorly or simplistically, will resonate.
That means — look for good ideas, and when you catch them happening verbally, immediately copy down notes or write it down verbatim. This gets you two-thirds of a piece of writing completed and the speed is limited only by how fast you can type.
2. Write in your mind before you sit down: I didn’t start doing this until a few years into writing regularly; I didn’t realize I did it until recently. At any given time, I’m working around a half-dozen to a dozen pieces in my mind. I have one I want to write about Julius Caesar’s attitudes and methods during highly leveraged moments. I’ve been thinking about the piece on-and-off for about eight months. I’m in no hurry. At some point, I know it’ll click and I’ll know exactly how I want to do it, and then I’ll be able to write it fast.
I try to do this during time I couldn’t do anything more productive. It’s slightly dangerous to daydream about the format of a piece when you could just be writing or doing work, and that does happen. But daydreaming and playing with the elements of a piece when you’re checking in at the airport and going through customs and security? It’s basically free; there’s not much else you could do there. This speeds up writing immensely if you can get in the habit of it.
3. Be opportunistic about grabbing writing time: I read an amazing article about Cory Doctrow talking about how he constantly writes a few sentences for his books, even when in the middle of many other things. The most fun part was when he was speaking at a panel in Germany, and when it wasn’t his turn to talk, he’d be writing his book! He was asked during Q&A what he was doing with all that typing. He answered, “I’m writing a book.” The audience laughed. “No, really.” Harder laughs, and some appreciation.
I don’t do this enough. I’m still working on it. But the idea that you have to “be in the right place mentally” to write, I think, suppresses a lot of writing. I try to dash off a bit of writing here or there when I can, and to analyze it later. Occasionally it is great, usually these days this dashed-off writing is up to my standards, and occasionally a short piece falls flat. Either way, every week or two I’ll analyze all the pieces I did and look for where they could have been better, and look to improve. 2-4 times per year I’ll do a study of writing and try to improve my technique broadly.
But you’ll see from that that I’m not putting a filter on and making a big deal of writing, which is something I did for a long time before just going. I’m still not on Doctrow’s level, but I aspire to be, seizing those idle moments and putting pen to paper, even if it’s unideal. After all, most of life is unideal for most things, is it not?
As a side note, Caesar would constantly be dictating letters and writing even in the middle of other things. While traveling through the city, he’d have a scribe with him, and he’d be hammering out his thoughts onto the page while coordinating his political maneuvers, finances, soldiers, policies, and allies. The timing is rarely perfect, but we can all do more if we seize those moments that come to us.