I once wrote a novel draft in about fourteen days. It’s a very long story, one I may have told on the internet before, but that’s not important right now. I’m telling you this not because I’m proud of it — it was nearly 15 years ago and there was a lot going on –but because it’s probably one of the worst “challenges” I ever put myself through as a writer.
While writing something quickly may sound impressive, it isn’t always the admirable feat you might want to believe it is. Sometimes stories just pour out of you, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But many aspiring writers want to know how to write faster for various reasons. And I’m here to tell you that if this is your end goal … you might be focusing on the wrong things.
Speed Writing Can Become a Bad Habit
I’m a recovering NaNoWriMo veteran (more on that in a future post). I also spent time as a news writer for an online media outlet. When you train in certain tasks to write drafts as quickly as possible, you learn some valuable things about writing — such as how to quickly decide what’s important to include in a piece and what can be left out. But you pick up some bad habits as a writer when you’re not careful, too.
Writing fast usually means you’re choosing quantity over quality, rushing through sentences to get to the next one, and often not always taking the time to think about the big picture of a piece. When it comes to things like books and more in-depth pieces, speed should never be the goal. It’s tempting to want to race through something just to get it done — I’ve been very guilty of this in the past. But you’re going to gain a lot less from it — and probably do yourself a lot more harm than good — than you might expect.
Writing Consistently Matters More Than Writing Quickly
I’m pretty close to finishing the first draft of a novel as I write this. From start to finish, it will likely have taken me slightly less than five months from the day I put down that first word to the moment I’ll type the last (for now). Five months does not seem like a lot of time, which is why I’m anticipating so many questions about how I wrote over 80,000 words of a book in such a short amount of time.
But writing “fast” actually had nothing to do with it. My goal was never to finish writing the book in a certain amount of time, and each individual writing session varied in length depending on a number of different factors. What got the book written was consistency, not speed.
At the start, probably for the first few weeks or maybe closer to a month, I committed to writing only 500 words a day minimum. Sometimes more, if I really got into what I was writing and had time to dedicate that day. But never less than the minimum. What made that add up to 80,000+ in five months was the fact that, with some exceptions, I did this every day, five days a week, for the majority of that time frame. I only skipped one or two days here and there because of other, more pressing deadlines and didn’t write over Thanksgiving break. Otherwise, I showed up every single day. Even when I wrote slowly, I still sat down and wrote.
Faster Writing (Sometimes) Comes with Practice
Sometimes, you can eventually start writing more quickly the more you practice writing. But the consistency factor does come into play here; consistent practice — sticking to a set schedule, not necessarily every day — is what yields results. When you become familiar with a particular format or style of writing, such as a blog post, you generally do often become more efficient and a little faster the longer you do it.
The reality, though, is that some people are just slow writers. They can work on speeding up a little, but if you’re not built for speed naturally, then speed might just not be your end goal. There is nothing wrong with that. Learning to meet deadlines and that sort of thing is much more about structure and planning than it is about actually getting the words down on paper quickly. I know plenty of people who are just slower writers, but they’re brilliant at what they do. It’s not a contest to see how fast you can write something — unless you want to make it one.
Go at your own pace, and focus on getting the words out, rather than doing so as fast as you can. At the end of the day, no one is really going to care how fast you wrote it as long as it’s worth the long-term effort.
Meg Dowell Writes 