(Photo: Michael Josh Villanueva)
Want to know how to double, triple, or even quadruple your writing speed in 10 minutes? Let me tell you how I did it. A few mornings ago, I sat down to freewrite with the intent of boosting my creativity, and I wrote for 10 timed minutes, without looking at my monitor. I know… Sounds ridiculous, right?
Well, for perfectionists like myself, it’s a dream come true. Think about this it. You’re sitting there writing and in the flow, and then you misspell a word. As a perfectionist, you’re instantly inclined to go back and correct it. It’s only a small mistake and it took about a millionth of a second to correct, but what if you don’t like an entire sentence or paragraph that you just wrote? What if you don’t like the way your last sentence sounds and you stop to think of a way to reword it? You may not realize it, but going back like this while writing, especially when you do a it a lot, can severely hurt your writing productivity and damage your creativity. You know how I know? This is how I typically write (or wrote, rather).
Usually, I start writing and in a matter of seconds, I fall victim to my thoughts and peripheral vision. I find my eyes and brain wondering about the previous sentences. I become so worried about how the previous words sound that I forget what to write next, at least momentarily. Then, I manage to write a little more, and a little more, but my writing gradually slows and and over the course of an hour, I typically have about 400 words in my word processor. The really sad part is that if I don’t finish what I started in that time, I’m less likely to come back to it. Over time, I may be able to finish short pieces like blog posts or poems, but for projects that take longer, like reports and novels, it’s detrimental.
I actually pieced together this strategy from a little Google research on “writing productivity” and it cost me nothing. For starters, I downloaded ZenWriter. For those that don’t know, this is a free minimalist writing program that fills up your entire monitor, thereby blocking out other windows that serve as distractions. It’s pretty much just a blank screen with no formatting or editing buttons. Just plain text. Within the program, you can configure optional typing sounds and background noise as well as a lightly-transparent scenic backdrop to facilitate the ideal writing environment.
After ZenWriter was opened and I had some light background music playing, I started a 10 minute timer, courtesy of E.ggtimer.com. I wrote that entire time and decided to take a 5 minute break before writing for another 10 . The next thing I did in this process was absolutely key to sustaining my creativity and speed. I kept my eyes off the monitor. Yep, that’s right. I didn’t even look at the monitor – only the back wall, which is blank and white. Of course, I was still very tempted by the glow of the screen and my peripheral vision, so for the next 10 minutes, I just turned off the monitor and stared at a blank black screen as I wrote.
In this process, well at least for the first 10 minutes, I managed to write 431 words. For the second 10 minutes, I turned the monitor off, and guess how many words I was able to write then? 474! Combine this with my earlier 431 words and I had a total of 905 words of free-flow brain activity. That’s 900 words in only 20 minutes of writing. If you add two more 10 minute writing periods and 2 5-minute breaks to that, totaling one hour, you can easily achieve 1800 words in an hour. Just imagine what you can do in a day…
I’ve read about several authors already being able to do this, but I honestly can’t say I’ve been able to do it before. 400-500 WPH is probably my lifetime average in a single session. A little research, tweaking, and testing, though, allowed me to push past this little plateau and boost my creativity in the process .
Now, before you start pounding keys, there are a few steps you need to take for preparation. For one, eliminate any potential interruptions. Write early in the morning before anyone wakes up if you have to. Trust me. Your creativity will thank you for it.
The other preparation step you can take is to outline/summarize what you’re going to write before you even start, and make sure it’s about something that actually interests you. I took this advice from a blog post by Rachel Aaron, who used the Triangle of Writing Metrics to go from 2,000 words per day to over 10,000.
After you do this a few times, you may be tempted like I was, to finish your writing without a timer. If you have a creative flow going, this may be a great idea, but again, you have to make sure that you won’t be disrupted and try to avoid on-the-fly editing. Also, while ZenWriter is an amazing piece of writing software, you don’t necessarily have to use that. If you’re not looking at the screen, it doesn’t really matter what program you use.
Summary of Steps:
- Eliminate distractions
- Prepare (outline/summarize)
- Start timer
- Turn off monitor
- Write until 10-minute timer goes off
- Wait 5 minutes (do something other than write)
- Repeat steps 5 & 6 for an hour or until finished for the day
Anyway, that’s all I have for now. I hope you enjoy this post and let me know if it works for you. If you can, track your progress and tweak this strategy over time until you get your desired results. It may vary depending on your particular writing project, but the general concept should help significantly. I resisted this strategy, especially the monitor part, for about 2 solid weeks before finally trying it, and now it’s becoming a staple of my my first-draft writing strategy.
Happy writing!
Note: This post is about 1,000 words, written in 2 10-minute blocks, and with about 1 hour of editing afterward. What’s cool is that the editing part was fun because I already had the content laid out.
