
How to be a faster writer - maalyex
http://www.slate.com/id/2301243/
======
alanfalcon
This is the perfect place to mention one of my favorite websites:
<http://750words.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.

~~~
bdr
Do you find that you're writing a structured piece, or moving aimlessly from
topic to topic?

~~~
alanfalcon
It really depends on the day. I like to try to think of topics during the day,
often new game ideas. Then when I sit down to write (I usually write towards
the end of the day) I'll record the ideas that I like and usually I'll come up
with new related ideas while writing, so I'll write those too. These are
probably my favorite days.

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.

~~~
bdr
FWIW if you come home after midnight again some day, just change your time
zone to Hawaii (and then back).

------
jonnathanson
I hesitate to prescribe speed-writing to everyone. Similarly, I am leery of
such a teleological view of the evolution of a writer's "10,000 hours," i.e.,
the claim that _all_ writers mature into speed writers after a certain amount
of practice. Some certainly do. Others seem not to, and I do not think less of
them for it.

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.

~~~
Swizec
As a bit of a speed writer myself (it takes me ~12 minutes to produce 800
words of thought-flow and about 30 minutes to produce a proper 500-600 word
blogpost) the main advantage of speed writing I see is just vomiting out
content onto the page. It produces a sort of flow that people find easy to
read and I don't get stuck in the details too quickly.

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.

~~~
jonnathanson
I'm in the same camp, more or less. I can speed write well. Sometimes even
_very_ well. At the same time, I'm under no illusion that I'm churning out
Shakespeare when I speed write. And I think it's important to keep that in
mind, so that I later go back and place almost as much emphasis on the editing
as I did on the initial "burst."

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).

~~~
Swizec
I still have pages of fiction at home that have more red than black on them (I
really like editing by hand when I want something to read really well).
Unfortunately the red is very discouraging and that novel will likely never
make it past the first two chapters.

~~~
jonnathanson
When I was in high school, I spent a summer interning for a TV writer. It was
laborious and menial work. Essentially, I would take his heavily redlined and
annotated scripts, type up the revised versions, then drive them back to his
house. Then I'd repeat this exercise the next day. At the time, I remember
thinking what a chore it was, and wondering -- sometimes aloud -- why he
didn't just save different versions in a folder on his computer, skipping the
intermediate step -- me -- entirely.

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.

------
zwischenzug
I worked with Matthew Parris briefly when he was the parliamentary sketch
writer for The Times in 1995 on a student placement.

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".

------
wisty
The best tip (which I hadn't heard before) - do your planning, then throw it
away (or hide it from view). If you look at the plan _while_ you are writing,
you will try to correct the plan, and the context switching will slow you
down.

If the plan is _really_ high level, or embedded (i.e. topic intros), maybe
that's different.

~~~
battlebee
While I see the value of that advice (longer flow periods), for academic or
technical writing it is often impossible. It might work for fiction or
punditry, but detailed analysis requires frequently looking to citations and
notes.

------
ctdonath
My "how to" summary: prolific blogging.

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.

~~~
ellyagg
Yep. It's the story of the teacher who divided his class into two groups: One
would be graded on how many pots they crafted and the other on the quality of
a single pot over the course. The students from the first group also had the
finest pots.

------
bilalhusain
For those who missed Dave Winer's _API designers should be writers_ [1]; a
helpful tip for individuals not in the writing field - say it directly; and
edit later.

[1]
[http://scripting.com/stories/2011/06/21/apiDesignersShouldBe...](http://scripting.com/stories/2011/06/21/apiDesignersShouldBeWriter.html)

------
clintjhill
_burst-pause-evaluate_

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".

~~~
voidfiles
Yea, to bad there isn't an compiler for english that could break on syntax
errors.

~~~
mdaniel
For me, it's not the syntax errors that get me, it's the semantic ones. Oddly
enough, I find that to be true when writing Java, also.

------
voidfiles
Doing more of what you want to be good at has never been a bad idea. My wife,
who trained as an actor, has always coveted the idea of being on a soap opera.
Not that they are high quality gigs, but the actors are the work horses of the
acting industry. You can spend hours a day acting, more then any other job in
the industry.

------
iuguy
As someone who writes endless reports about the flaws of other peoples'
security systems I find it quite easy to write in certain styles, but quite
hard in others. I have standard terms that just drop out of my head onto the
page for common vulnerabilities as I often find it quicker to do a mental
paste rather than open a document, copy and paste to another one. Do any of
the programmers or designers on HN do this?

------
spobin
My latest project - freeblogging.me - forces you to free write for 15 minutes.
I find it genuinely helps my productivity if I free write non-stop for 15
minutes at the start of each day.

------
DrHankPym
This is my process for writing anything:

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.

------
lani
tldr : apply {10,000 hrs , ???, superhuman skill} -> to writing // am I right
?

