Write Like You Mean It

How to Maximize Your Minutes

Barbara O’Neal

I am a prolific writer. Over my twenty-plus-year career, I’ve written nearly sixty novels, many novellas, and hundreds of blog posts, articles, and short pieces. I continue to write at least one novel per year, sometimes more. The longest it takes me to draft a novel is six months, and I’ve done it in six weeks.

Some of you might be thinking, Ah, you churn ’em out, don’t you?

Do you wonder where that thinking comes from? Before I share my tips on how to write faster, let’s get a couple of things out of the way.

BEAT BACK THE BELIEF IN THE “WRITER AS TORTURED ARTIST”

Regarding fast writing, two mythologies are in play here.

The first is that good writing must take years and years of suffering, despair, and all manner of angst and struggle to produce something worth reading. As George Orwell put it, “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

The second is that writing fast is “churning it out,” without regard for quality, as if writers can work only at one speed—slowly.

If writing is as torturous as Orwell claimed, why in the world would you do it? Find something that suits you better. Yes, writing is demanding. It requires intense focus. It is challenging. It is also heady. Exciting. Rewarding—maybe one of the most rewarding undertakings any of us will engage in.

If I don’t buy into the “tortured soul” mythology, I’m free to love writing with the passion such an artistic pursuit deserves. I’m free to follow the words where they lead. I can write as fast as the wind.

The idea of the long-suffering artist is part of our cultural heritage. We hold a vision in our minds of the writer or painter or composer engaged in the process late at night, hands in hair, sweating (and probably drinking) to give birth to some Great Work of Art.

While some writers take years to craft a novel, that’s hardly true of all of them. One of the most literary living American writers, Joyce Carol Oates, has written more than fifty novels and a vast number of essays and short stories during her career. One of my favorite writers, the celebrated M.F.K. Fisher, wrote hundreds of thousands of words over her lifetime. She was often desperate for money and wrote to get it. This does not appear to have ruined her voice, as she is one of the most revered food writers of all time.

Professional writers write. Some write faster than others, but the pace of the writing does not determine quality.

How can you learn to write faster or build on whatever speed you now have to produce more work? Time, preparation, practice, and record keeping provide the cornerstones of writing more quickly.

CARVE OUT TIME

If you wanted to train for a marathon, you would not just run whenever you were struck by the mood to do so. You would set up a training schedule and stick to it religiously. You would arrange your life to support that training.

The first step toward writing faster is to find the time for it. That may sound like an obvious idea, but you’d be surprised how often writers fail to plan their writing hours. Just as a runner must have regular hours on the trail, a writer needs regular time at the keyboard. Where will you find your time?

The best time is, of course, during your freshest hours. If you can commit even a half hour a day during your most creative period, you’ll reap ample rewards. Often, however, those hours are claimed by a day job or family demands. In that case, find whatever hour you can and commit to it. If you are going to write, you’re going to have to, well, write. Claim the hour after dinner before you have a beer or your lunch hour twice a week, or plan to get up an hour earlier to write undisturbed. You might have to give up something, at which point you will have to decide what is most important.

Once you make the time commitment, make it consistent. Nothing piles up pages faster than sitting down at regular times.

PREPARE BEFORE YOU WRITE

Luckily I learned to write before anyone told me it should take a long time or that I should suffer for it. From the age of twelve, I gleefully wrote novels in spiral notebooks whenever I could, lying in the sun or scribbling covertly during class. It was a joy. Why wouldn’t I spend all my time on it?

But when I went to college, the anxiety of knowing my work would be read in the campus newspaper gave me pause. For several months, I wrote like that tortured artist, tearing out my hair, locked in fear. Thankfully I was a journalism student who was forced by deadlines and finals to sometimes write a big story in as little as a half hour. Or in the middle of the night. Or as we were preparing to send the paper to the printer.

Quite to my astonishment, I learned that if I had my facts—the interviews, the information—a story I wrote in twenty minutes at 3:00 A.M. carried almost exactly the same cadence and voice as something I carefully crafted over several days. It was a mind-blowing revelation, but after four years, I learned to trust it.

Planning and plotting are the plain, unsexy sisters of the writing process, the prim-mouthed women who clean up after the drunken artist. But these two sisters make the actual process of writing pages much easier and faster.

Virtually all writing requires some research. To write fast, get your research done ahead of time and keep your materials at hand as you work.

The next step is plotting. Writers who fly by the seat of their pants—pantsers—and writers who like to plan ahead—plotters—have long been at odds about the best way to write (as you’ve seen from the duo of essays from Ray Rhamey and Anne Greenwood Brown). Pantsers claim their process is wrecked if they have to tell the story before they write it, and I will address that problem in a moment. For now, let’s assume everyone is a plotter.

Take the time to plot your story before you begin to write. Many, many books have been written to help you find a plotting style. Sample them until you find one you like. Personally, I need to have four or five things in place: the characters, the situation and problem, about five to ten scenes that reveal something important (“Tallulah finds out her mother has been lying all her life”), a general idea of the book's ending, and a solid opening, even if I end up changing it.

Does such a spare style really count as plotting? Yes. While it may not reveal every plot point or every scene, it offers enough at the beginning of the drafting process. This is very like the pencil sketch an artist makes before starting to paint—it’s a guideline, a method to understand the space and balance in a piece.

An outline helps prevent time-consuming mistakes, like discovering your plot has no conflict or that your book is only a series of episodes, not a cohesive story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Don’t plan too much, however. I have learned that I can plan as much as I like, but the story happens when I am actually writing, when I’ve let go of all the mannerisms, plots, and tricks, and played the final round of solitaire and turned off the Internet to allow the story to emerge.

This method often allows me to spend less time revising after I have finished my rough draft. Employing an outline and then spending time each day to edit and rewrite the previous day's work stabilizes the structure and aligns the characters, allowing me to focus on smoothing clunky language and finding places to add beauty or underline metaphor. You may find the same to be true, but perhaps you will need to revise a lot. That’s fine. By creating a finished draft, you have something to work with. As the famous Nora Roberts is fond of saying, “I can’t fix a blank page.”

Pantsers, this is where the process will work for you. Write your first draft as if it is the outline, and then go through the revision process by imposing the structure on the material. Go for it, and be willing to rewrite and restructure as much as you like.

KEEP TRACK

If you don’t know when you write your best work, take a page from Rachel Aaron, a young science fiction writer who landed a contract for a series of books when she was pregnant. Facing deadlines and the responsibilities of caring for an infant made her a master of her own patterns. For months, she kept track of when she started writing, when she stopped, how many words she wrote during that time, and anything else that might have influenced her, such as writing at a coffee shop while a babysitter took care of her child.

A few years ago, I realized I’d grown lax. I wanted to see if I could speed up my writing, so I used Aaron’s method to record my writing times. I discovered that I was right about my best hours: They are first thing in the morning, before anyone else gets up. But I had also thought that writing was a loss after lunch. Not so, my friends. In fact, I’d often produce more words in the early afternoon than I did in the first session of the day.

Only you can know your patterns and make adjustments accordingly. Try keeping track over a couple of months, and see if you can improve anything. There are many apps for doing this, but you can also create a simple spreadsheet and monitor yourself that way. Be sure whatever method you use allows you to note times and patterns.

SET THE MOOD TO FIND YOUR WAY IN

Give yourself permission to find a way into the story each time you sit down. The beginnings are usually the slowest—I give myself several weeks to write at a pace that’s less than a quarter of the speed I’ll write at for the rest of the book, say, 500 words a day. As I discover the world I'm creating, I try to remember what Hemingway said: “Find one true sentence, and write that.”

Later, as the story gathers momentum, you still must reenter the story world each day. I start by reading the work from the day before, making tweaks and aligning ideas, finding better words—lightly editing, not diving into big changes. Usually by the time I finish the exercise, I’m aware of what I want to do that day.

Here is where another of Rachel Aaron’s suggestions comes into play: Before writing the new scenes, write down a few things you want to happen during this particular writing session. She writes down beats for the whole scene, whereas I simply scrawl a few ideas about where I want to end up. Do whatever works.

LEAVE THE WORLD OUTSIDE

During this drafting process, it’s absolutely crucial to make everyone and everything wait outside the office door (or wherever you write). Do not think about your teacher, your critique partners, your husband or family, your friends, or the desire to trounce everyone with your literary genius.

Your only goal is to open the window into the other world you’ve created and let yourself look through it, then step through and become a part of it. Allow your fingers to simply interpret what you see and hear. You want to create flow, that immersive, trancelike state where time passes quickly and you emerge at the other end with a sense of having been far away.

For that reason, once you begin drafting, do not use the Internet. Do not check e-mail. Do not search for a fact you think you need—just write “TK” (which stands for "to come"), and return to it later. Writers have argued with me over this—but the bottom line is, if you break, you end the trance. You hurtle back to the real world, the window slams shut, and the story world has to be entered, painstakingly, again.

Give your story respect by letting it enchant you. Leave this world alone. If, like me, you are weak about the Internet (as writers tend to be—was there ever a medium so thoroughly suited to our brains?), try using an app to lock yourself out. I use Freedom; there are many others.

EMBRACE YOUR OWN SPEED

Perhaps some of these ideas will help you write a little—or a lot—faster over time. In the long run, however, it isn’t speed that matters. It is the pace at which you can write your best work that counts.