How To Write Your Book Faster

hello everybody and welcome back to Heart breathing's today we are going to talk about something that has been much requested every time I do writing Sprint's or I go on a writing retreat a lot of people email me and ask about this so I thought I would cover it today which is how to write faster so today I'm going to be giving you eight tips on how to improve your writing speed but before we get into it just one thing that I feel like needs to be said right now especially in the indie market there's a lot of talk about how you have to write super fast that everything is about like rapid releases and writing twelve books a year or you know just getting these books out as fast as possible and there's a very little discussion about writing quality books and I don't want to get into a huge discussion about it because it's really up to you in the end how you best want to run your career what quality means to you and all that sort of thing so I'm not going to make really comments on what is quality or not quality but I just want to make sure that I make it clear that I'm not saying write faster because it's the only way you're gonna have any kind of career and you should give up quality to write as fast as you can because that is not at all what I believe and I also believe that it can be very dangerous to compare yourself to other writers this is something I've talked about on the channel before because it's something that I personally have struggled with pretty much you know the entire time that I've been publishing that it becomes very difficult for me to watch other people writing ten books a year and to not be able to replicate that for myself because I just physically cannot write ten books a year and have them be at the quality that my readers expect or that I expect of myself that's not a judgment that someone else can't do that because I have a lot of friends who are writing that many books and they're great books but it's just not for me I can't do it at least right now with my current skill set so in the end you have to let go of comparing yourself to other people so don't feel that you have to write faster just because someone says every sprint I write a thousand words you know four per sprint that doesn't mean that you should be writing a thousand words person or that you're not good some people only write 200 words per sprint some people can only write a thousand words a day and that's the best they can do but those are great words and they're making progress some people can consistently write 10,000 words a day and that's just their process when you get caught up in comparing yourself to other people and thinking that you're not good enough just because you're a slower writer or because it takes you longer to produce the quality that you want to produce you really start to get into a toxic relationship with yourself and with other authors so before I go into the tips on how to write faster I just wanted to make it clear that I'm not saying I think you should be writing faster but I think that everybody who's an author is constantly working to get better at something so if your words are coming more slowly than you wish they were coming and you want to be able to type those words out a little bit faster I'm talking about these tips so that you can do this for you not so that you can do this to compare yourself to someone else or to catch up with someone else and as you go on your journey toward writing faster the only person you should be comparing yourself to is yourself right now in this moment when I first started writing I struggled to even write 500 words a day I would sit down for hours the words wouldn't come very quickly I would be kind of pecking through like just choosing every single word and I would spend a couple of hours and end up with 500 words and that's where I started and that was okay now I do have days where I can write a lot more words than that and I can write a lot faster so I'm gonna give you some of the tips that helped me to get to this point but again I just wanted to make that clear that I'm not saying you should be writing faster you should always be writing at the level that makes you comfortable that makes you feel that you're producing quality work but we're going to talk a little bit about that when it comes to the rough drafts rough draft process as we go so here are my eight tips oh and I also wanted to just say that I apologize for the boxes here in the back but you guys are gonna be seeing that a lot because I'm about a month away from my big move to a new house here in Charleston and as you know I'm also six months pregnant so I am just going to be putting boxes kind of wherever and they'll get moved when they get moved so hopefully you guys don't mind a few boxes in the shop because that's kind of just the best I can do right now so tip number one is to plan what you're writing in advance or visualize your scenes in advance so whether you're a plotter or a pantser which a plotter is somebody who plots out a lot of their work beforehand a pantser is someone who flies by the seat of their pants they just sit down and write whatever comes to mind but whether you're one of those or somewhere in between it's very important when you sit down to actually write those words that you have a pretty good idea or a visualization of what scenes you're going to write today I find that when I sit down with no really good clue as to what is happening in the next scene like I know what I wrote yesterday but I don't really know where the story is going words come very slowly because I'm having to actually kind of figure out the plot and the scenes and what's happening and what's the purpose behind this scene as I'm writing so it's naturally going to come a little bit slower but if I show up to my writing sprint sessions which will talk about Sprint's in a minute with a note card that has just a few little things about what's happening in the scene okay these two characters are gonna argue or she's gonna see him for the first time and this is how she's going to react just whatever and I actually have taken a moment to not only write those note cards down but to actually close my eyes and see if I can visualize those two characters in a room together and how things are going to go I find that the words will often flow so much faster so one thing that I do in order to get to that point is that when I'm writing you know say I finished a writing session this morning instead of just closing up everything and moving on to whatever's next I will take a couple of minutes and visualize what just happened in the scene and then what's the next logical step because as we all know writing scenes is a lot about action and then reaction so if I've just had a big scene where two characters had a big argument one stormed out the door maybe I'm gonna sit down and visualise okay what's gonna happen when she walks out that door what's her reaction and I'll just think about what types of feelings she might be feeling who she might go to she might call up a friend and tell them exactly what happened in this argument or if she just found out some interesting information she might act on and go now to check out to see if it's true but whatever it works for your story whatever type of genre you're writing you can usually visualize what just happened on the page or the screen if you want to call it that because I sort of visualize my things like a movie in my head and you can take that to the next level and say okay then what happens next so just take a second to think about what happens next in your story and visualize it and then jot down a few little notes about what you see happening tomorrow then when you come back the next day to start your writing see if that doesn't help you write a little bit faster I'm telling you that just five minutes of sitting down to visualize and making those notes on what happens tomorrow can make a huge difference in how quickly the writing comes tomorrow because when you sit down with a clear idea of what's happening it doesn't mean you have to have every single little detail and all the dialogue figured out but just to have that general picture in your mind of what's happening and how it feels and what it looks like to your characters it can go a long way to helping you write faster so step two is to let go of perfectionism so this is something I talked about in my self-doubt video just a week ago or so where I said you know it's okay to just allow the words to suck especially if you're writing a rough draft if you want the words to come quickly you can't be just pouring over every single word choices that the write you know description am I getting the exact word that needs to be here you know did they have this conversation exactly the right words am i pulling across like the perfect emotion between them of course it depends on what kind of writer you are some people love to have everything perfect so they do very little edits but if you're looking at writing quickly and writing faster one of the things you might try is just totally letting go of those bitty little word choices or those picky little word choices and feeling like it has to be perfect because a lot of people who write more slowly it's because they're really like agonizing over every single word twice when really you just need to get that story out you just need to figure out what's happening and then you can go back in the edits and you can pour and agonize over those little tiny word choices as much as you want but if you want to write faster and getting the story out then stop worrying about like is that the right adjective did they have the is that exactly what I want her to say and let me go back and change this 15 times just have her say what she says and move on and let go of that feeling that it needs to be perfect another way of saying this is to embrace the flow just let the words pour out don't worry so much about every single word choice but embrace that feeling of flow that it's just flowing out of you and once you can get past that point of like doubting every single word that comes across and just saying okay it's not perfect but it needs to just keep going sometimes I will even put in a little note to myself inside my manuscript that says I know this is not the right word this sucks but I'm going to keep going it's kind of like a little cheerleading section inside my rough draft where I tell myself just keep going that's all that matters and once you embrace that flow of not letting your fingers stop moving you begin to write faster and more confidently you can go back and fix that when you get to edits so number three which I'm not going to talk about super long because I've talked about this a lot before is use word sprints a lot of times this is also called the Pomodoro Technique which is where you basically set a timer anywhere from you know 10 minutes to 45 minutes whatever you decide as your best like sweet spot for me most of the time my Sprint's are about 25 minutes and then I take a five-minute break afterward and then I do another 25 minute and what this does is it kind of tricks your brain to saying okay I don't have to write for two hours and like pour over everything because I find that once I've been writing for 40 minutes I start to have diminishing returns I start to get tired I can no longer clearly visualize my scenes I start to get very easily distractible when a note comes by like somebody's texted me I tend to pay attention to it because I'm kind of getting tired of writing for this long stretch of time so 25 minutes works perfectly for me because I can sit down and I can say okay I only have to focus for 25 minutes this will play into the next tip as well but you know I won't have any distractions I won't allow any anyone to talk to me or interrupt me I have 25 minutes of focused writing time I find that it's easier for me to just have that limited amount of time that I have to severely focus like acutely focus on my work and then I get a break okay now I can't take that break to sort of visualize what just happened what's happening next and it sort of builds up this momentum without me getting tired or fatigued now for me ten or fifteen minutes is not enough time because I've just started getting into the flow when I'm interrupting it so I find that it's best to go past the point of flow and then once it you feel like you're starting to get tired that's usually your sweet spot now if you want to figure out what your best writing sprint number is like how much time then you could just try a bunch of different ones and experiment so we'll talk about this later as well with a different tip but just try them so start with ten minutes do three or four of those today tomorrow try 15 minutes and do three or four of those and track how many words you get per sprint how it feels and that sort of thing and then the next day go up to 2025 and so on I know I have friends that like to go for an hour at a time and some friends that like to go only ten minutes so it's going to be a very personal thing but what I found is that I can write just as many words in 25 minutes as I can in 35 minutes which just sounds kind of weird just like 10 extra minutes right but I just start to slow down so much if I have all that extra time so just give yourself a little bit of like a week to experiment with different times to see what your sweet spot is but my sweet spot tends to be about 25 minutes so the fourth tip goes hand in hand with the sprints remember and that's to eliminate distractions so if you have a lot of little little things dinging on your phone and you've got like a bunch of like notifications popping up in your messenger or whatever on your computer and you've got like somebody's you know bouncing on the couch or knocking on your door or whatever you're just not going to get as much done and you could sit down for two hours and end up mostly distracted the entire time so one of the best ways to write faster is to eliminate those distractions and I know it can be tough to like turn on airplane mode or Do Not Disturb on your phone sometimes you know not everybody has a nice office that's all to themselves so sometimes you're writing on the couch and your kids are there and they're jumping around and you've got those describe distractions anyway but see if you can find and carve out time in your day where you can be completely distraction free Facebook can wait text messages can wait phone calls can wait your kids can wait whatever it is that you've got going on that's a distraction see if you can carve out even you know 50 minutes or an hour of time for yourself even 30 minutes for yourself that is completely distraction free turn your phone off turn it on just do not disturb so that you can't hear any little like dings that are going on and just tell yourself you're gonna focus this is why it goes hand-in-hand with word sprints because if you set that timer and you say I'm not gonna allow any distractions during this timer you tend to get more done because you've got just a limited time without your brain saying oh my gosh I have to go three hours without like interacting with anyone else which can start to seem or feel a little bit lonely so give yourself that 25 minute word sprint then give yourself five minutes to check your messages to check your email if you want to or to go talk to somebody like your roommate or whatever real quick and then come back and start all over again so removing those distractions can be very helpful in helping you to write faster so remember how it's just telling you to experiment with different times like 10 minutes 15 20 minute with your Sprint's tip number five is to experiment with different times of day and different locations when it comes to your writing so you know you may be stuck kind of in a routine where it's like okay I'm a night owl so I write every night from 9:00 to 10:00 p.m. or 9:00 to you know 11 p.m. and I'm always sitting on my couch where you know my husband's over here playing video games and you know whatever whatever so you've got this kind of routine of how you're writing but you're consistently writing slower than you want to write well one of the things you might want to try is to experiment with different times a day and different locations now some of us of course have full time jobs or we have other responsibilities where it's like we can't necessarily be a morning writer or we can't write in the middle of the afternoon but some of us also have you know writing is our full-time job or we have a lot more flexible schedule so it's just going to depend on you but you could always get up a little bit earlier as painful as that might be for some of us to try morning writing or you could try writing write when you get home from work or right after lunch or on your lunch break but just sit down with a notebook what you guys know I love notebooks and ways to use them sit down with a notebook and jot out all the times maybe for this upcoming week that you could try writing when you don't normally write and use it as a great experiment treat it like a game and say okay I'm gonna try writing over my lunch break for this hour and I'm gonna eat my lunch at my desk or I'm gonna eat my lunch in the car and I'm gonna write in the car whatever it is I'm gonna go down to Starbucks for lunch and I'm gonna try writing at that point see for a few days if you do that how much writing you get done during that one hour at Starbucks or Panera Bread versus what you used to get done in the evenings from 9:00 to 11:00 you might surprise yourself that oh my gosh I love writing during my lunch hour and I get twice as much done in a smaller period of time you also might normally be a night owl and try getting up an hour earlier in writing in the morning you might find that because your brain is fresh you do get a lot more done in the morning I used to always be a night owl but after I had my son seven years ago I realized I'm just too exhausted in my brain my brain is too fried a lot of the times at night so I became more of a morning writer and it was so shocking to me because I had never been and never have considered myself a morning person and I know that with this new baby coming to you know I'm gonna have to experiment all over again with what times of day work best for me so I encourage you as the next tip to try different times of day and different locations try going out to a coffee shop try going to Panera or something try going to your library where things are super quiet try writing with music try writing without music try writing at home try writing in a different area of your home like in your bedroom or whatever and see like if you track it and you see it in a notebook like I tried this today and this is how many words I got done then you can take all that data and you can say okay consistently when I go out to Starbucks I get twice as much done and then you can start doing that more often so just experiment with times a day locations and types of atmosphere and see what starts to help you to write faster number six is an easy one as well and that's to improve your typing skills it may sound very simple and it is but if you're like one of these people that uses two fingers to peck out your typing you're going to be a lot slower than someone who knows how to type and has taken a typing course and knows exactly where their fingers go and they can use all of their fingers to be typing if you just you know use two or four fingers to type everything out then probably one of the best things you can do to improve your writing speed is to learn how to type better I got super lucky that I took a keyboarding or typing class back in high school and that really helped me a lot but I also have a friend that introduced me to this game called the typing of the Dead and I am a huge like zombie fan like love zombie movies and all tombi games and stuff like that and she introduced me to this very cheesy kind of like 70s style game called the typing of the day that I could buy for like five dollars or something on Steam so I went and bought that and it's basically a zombie will pop out and I'll have a word over their head and you type really fast and if you can type the word correctly it kills the zombie very cheesy kind of thing but I go through and I play that once a week to keep up with my typing skills and guys it really helps so if you look for different like typing games online or ways to improve your typing or if like I said you really don't even have a good sense of where your fingers are supposed to go and you've been kind of pecking things out improve your typing skills that's gonna help you write so much faster because your brain is always going to be going faster than your fingers so if you can bring your fingers up to speed with how fast your brain is thinking then you're going to immediately write faster if anybody knows of some good typing courses or other typing games that are really fun go ahead and pop those in the comments below so talking about bringing your fingers up to speed with the speed of your brain and your thoughts the next tip is to try dictation now I will admit that this is something I really have not been able to get in to super well but I also admittedly have not spent a lot of time trying to make it work but this is probably the number one thing I hear my fellow authors say improved their writing speed like exponentially is dictating and what dictating is is instead of typing out your story you read your story you you just dictate it you talk it out so instead of typing each word and only moving as fast as your fingers can go you can go as fast as your voice and your mouth can go so you would just open a program like Dragon Dictation I believe like word and Google Docs also have some form of dictation but they're not going to be as like beefy of programs as something like Dragon Dictation or Dragon NaturallySpeaking but I have heard that some people can get as many as three four thousand and more words per hour just speaking their text instead of typing it out now there is a learning curve involved in this because it you know we're so used to writing our stories by typing of thinking it and we type it so when you actually have to say it you have to learn how to add punctuation and you have to train the software to work with your voice and there's going to be typos and things that it misunderstood and you're going to have to learn how to say comma in quotes and all these little like commands that have to go with this so it may be slow going at first as you're learning it or as you're training yourself and you're training your program to recognize your voice but in the long run it is one of the ways to increase your speed what scares me about it and what I haven't really tried it in earnest is because I'm not sure that it will sound right to me to be like Harper said this or whatever I feel like I need that kind of delay for my typing fingers because I don't know if I could speak it out but it also just be my fear of actually speaking my words out loud and feeling a little bit awkward and having somebody else you know being able to hear me and what I'm saying with my story I don't know but it's just something I haven't personally tried but I had to mention it here because I do know that in terms of increasing your speed exponentially it's probably the biggest tool out there which would be using dictation so I know that the biggest program that people tend to use is Dragon NaturallySpeaking or the Dragon Dictation and it does cost money but there are other free programs out there as well that you could try like inside Google Docs they do have some dictation if you just wanted to practice it but then you're going to need some equipment too like a microphone and that sort of thing and there's a learning curve but it could be pretty huge and increasing your productivity when it comes to writing speed and the final tip that I have for you today tip number eight is to be consistent so if you work on your story a little bit this weekend and then two weeks from now you pick it up again and you say okay what what happened you're gonna have to like go back read through what you wrote last time try to get back into the like mood and the vibe of that story you have to try remember exactly where your thought process was and you're just constantly like having to go through that process of like re familiarizing yourself with your story but if you're consistent especially when you're drafting your story and you're writing that first rough draft and you try to at least spend time every single day working on that story you're going to naturally write faster because you don't have that process of having to like read back through and think what's going on in the scene I can't remember what was going on with this character or where she was or what she was thinking I can't remember what I was thinking about this character you would just be able to say oh I know where I was yesterday and now I'm going to continue on with that today being consistent is also something that it's going to help you write faster because like I said your brain is already in that space if you follow my tip number one you've already kind of visualized what's happening in what you're writing today you don't have to sort of reinvent the wheel but when you are not touching your story consistently and what I mean by touching your story is at least reading through working through the plot thinking about your characters if you're even if you're not getting new words you need to be touching that story on a daily basis okay so maybe you take Sundays off or something and that's no big deal that you took one day off but it's when you start to take four and five six days off in between writing you always have on that seventh day to pick back up where you are and get yourself familiar all over again with the story with the characters with what was happening and you also tend to lose ideas so you might have this great visualization and this great idea of what's supposed to happen in this next scene and now you've forgotten it because you don't really understand your notes anymore or it's been a week since you even looked at it or even a month since you last looked at it so if you're a slower writer but you also notice that you haven't been like consistently daily working on your story or working on it four or five times a week or whatever that number is for you then that would be another good place to start to improve your writing speed is to be consistent and touch that story every single day alright guys so those are my eight tips for how to start writing faster and remember only only write faster comparing yourself to your current skill level to your current speed don't compare yourself to anyone else because compare yourself to other people and allowing that to distract you or to make you feel worse about yourself there's just really no room in that in writing for that so eliminate those kinds of thoughts and don't try to write faster just because someone else is writing faster write faster for yourself and of course we all want to go back and edit our books to the best of our ability and focus on quality books but when you're writing your rough draft it's okay sometimes to skip the feeling of every word needing to be perfect and just let the flow of words come out of you and don't worry so much about the details of every single word then when you go back to your edits it's gonna be a lot better that you've got the story down as quickly as possible you can fix anything in any word choice that's on the page speaking of editing I do have an entire series on editing if you haven't seen my series on plotting yet you might want to check that out I will link it down below for you but I'm working currently on filming an entire series on how to edit your novel as well and that'll be coming up later in the month of May actually just in about a week or so those videos are going to start coming out so I hope that if you are not subscribed and you enjoyed this video that you will subscribe to heart breathings channel also make sure that you hit that notification bell to be notified whenever a new video comes up for me I am six months pregnant so it's been harder to stick to an exact schedule I try to get new videos up on Thursdays but here we are on Friday just getting it out so sometimes they've come a little bit late so it's important that you hit that notification bell so that you will get a notification when a new video comes up from me I also have a newsletter list linked down below where you can get the how to plot your novel workbook that goes along with that plotting series I'm gonna have some stuff for you too when it comes to the editing series so stay tuned for that as well if you like this video please hit that like button down below so other people know that this was a good video on how to write faster and be sure to leave a comment so I know you enjoyed this video thank you so much for your time and hopefully this will help you get to writing faster I will see you guys in my next video bye

Channel: Heart Breathings

Views: 14,528

Rating: 4.9910111 out of 5

Keywords: how to write a book, writing a book, write a book, how to write a book for beginners, writing tips, book writing, how to write a book fast, how to write, writing a book for the first time, writing a novel, how to write a novel, book writing tips, how to write a book faster, writing books, nanowrimo tips, writing a book tips, writing tips for writers, writing, heart breathings, how to write a kindle book fast, write books faster, sarra cannon writing tips

Id: MbDtVvxtT6E

Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2019