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    Writing Faster For the Win
    Writing Faster For the Win
    Writing Faster For the Win
    Ebook104 pages2 hours

    Writing Faster For the Win

    By L.A. Witt

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    About this ebook

    Frustrated with your writing output? Looking for ways to get the words moving?

     

    L.A. Witt has written and published nearly 200 romance novels and novellas since 2008, and in Writing Faster For The Win, she shares some techniques for getting the words out of your head and onto the screen faster than before.

     

    Whether it's shaking off insecurities and self-doubt, streamlining the research process, or writing out of sequence, you may just find the advice you've been looking for.

     

    Second edition - lightly revised.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGallagherWitt
    Release dateJun 26, 2023
    ISBN9781642302035
    Writing Faster For the Win
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    Author

    L.A. Witt

    L.A. Witt is the author of Back Piece. She is a M/M romance writer who has finally been released from the purgatorial corn maze of Omaha, Nebraska, and now spends her time on the southwestern coast of Spain. In between wondering how she didn’t lose her mind in Omaha, she explores the country with her husband, several clairvoyant hamsters, and an ever-growing herd of rabid plot bunnies.

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      Book preview

      Writing Faster For the Win - L.A. Witt

      Introduction

      What this book is, and what this book isn’t.

      If you’ve picked up this book, chances are you’re trying to find ways to increase your writing output. And since I’m the one writing this book, just who in the world do I think I am?

      Basically, I’m a writer who writes fast. I’ve been writing full-time since the end of 2008. Every writer has their strengths and weaknesses, and if there’s one aspect of this craft that I know, it’s how to get words out of my skull and onto my screen at a steady clip. I started writing at speed during NaNoWriMo 2008, and pretty much haven't stopped. Since then, I’ve written or co-written close to 150 novels, around 45 novellas and 20 short stories.

      My output is roughly 80,000 words a month, give or take 20-30K depending on what else is going on in my life, and I write between 750,000 and 1,000,000 words per year (not counting my co-writers’ contributions to our joint works – I only count what I’ve written).

      As such, I get a lot of questions about it, mostly How?

      So, I decided to write a short book with some tips for writing faster. There's also some general commentary on not driving yourself up a wall (and stalling out) with your story because in a lot of situations, the key to writing fast is knocking over some mental obstacles in your writing technique. i.e., spending less time banging your head against the keyboard and more time tapping your fingers on it.

      For some, upping your speed is a matter of technique. For others, it’s a mindset—getting past insecurities and shaking off bad (if well-intentioned) advice. So, sections of this book will deal with both angles. Feel free to skip what doesn’t apply to you. Also, any time you run into advice, tips, or techniques that don’t work for you, feel free to skip those too.

      I also want to preface this book by saying that writing fast does not equate to writing better. I can't write slow because I get frustrated and impatient. Other writers are solid and consistent at a few hundred words a day, and that's a comfortable pace for them. I say this because writers seem to fall into two camps—those who write fast, and those who write slow. There are always people who have something negative to say about one camp or the other. The slow writers are lazy. The fast writers don’t care about quality. The slow writers are pretentious. The fast writers just churn out garbage.

      All of which, I believe, is nonsense. I’ve read garbage written by both fast and slow writers, and gold written by both fast and slow writers. Laziness certainly has no speed limit. Fast writers can burn out, but so can slow ones. Slow writers can produce very little, but fast writers can certainly be non-productive too. For that matter, a slow writer who produces 500 words a day will still write more than the fast writer who writes a novel in two weeks, but burns out and stops writing for a year.

      The bottom line is that every writer has their comfortable pace, and there is no shame in writing fast or slow. This book is not a judgment of slow writers, nor is it praise of fast writers—it is simply a tool for those who would like to increase their productivity for whatever reason, based on things I’ve done and learned in my own career.

      If you’re reading this book because you’ve been led to believe that writing slow makes you a bad writer, you’ve been led wrong. Slow is absolutely okay. Is there anything wrong with trying to up your productivity? Certainly not. Will increasing your speed hurt your quality? That’s up to you—personally, I believe that when you write your 5,000 th word of the day, you still know how to write just as well as you did when you wrote your hundredth word of the day. But if you find that writing fast wears you down, and fatigue hinders your quality, then there is no shame in reining your quota back until you find the amount you can produce, with consistent quality, every time you sit down to write.

      Side note: When we’re talking about word counts and quotas, it goes without saying that you’re still writing good words. Sure, it’s a first draft, and it’ll need editing. They all do. That’s okay. But don’t throw garbage on the page to fill your quota. More on that later.

      Also, I’d like to make it clear before we get started that when I talk about my numbers (my quotas, hours spent writing each day, etc.), I’m using examples from my work to illustrate how I do things, but I don’t want you to get discouraged by those numbers if yours are different. Please keep in mind that I am a full-time writer. Early in my career, my writing sessions were eight hours or more, sometimes twelve or even sixteen. These days, it’s closer to five or six hours a day. That’s just writing—no admin, marketing, editing, etc., all of which take up their own blocks of time. Another writer’s sessions might be an hour or two. That’s going to have an impact on how many words happen during that time. We all have twenty-four hours in our day, but some of those hours are chewed up by other things, so each writer has to determine how much of the remaining time is available for writing. I don’t come home from a day job and spend an hour writing before I have to help kids with homework. So take my numbers for what they are—examples from my experience—and apply the principles to your own numbers.

      With all of that in mind, let’s talk about what this book is not.

      It will not magically turn you into a writing machine who can effortlessly knock out tens of thousands of words in a day. There are no incantations that will render you immune to burnout ¹. There will be no formulas for producing cookie-cutter books that need only a few details altered from one version to the next.

      In this book, I will not be getting into artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT and other such apps, as I have not used them myself and have no intention of doing so.

      As far as software goes, I tend to use Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel (I’ll get into how and why I use Excel later), but my methods do not require you to do the same. I know a lot of writers who use Scrivener, various open source programs, AlphaSmart devices, and

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