2k to 10k: writing faster, writing better, and writing more of what you love pdf

When I started writing The Spirit War (Eli novel #iv), I had a bit of a problem. I had a brand new babe and my life (like every new mother'south life) was constantly on the verge of butchery. I paid for a sitter four times a calendar week so I could get some writing time, and I guarded these hours like a mama carry guards her cubs - with ferocity and hiker-mauling violence. To proceed my schedule and make my deadlines, I needed to write 4000 words during each of these carefully arranged sessions. I thought this would be elementary. Afterward all, before I quit my job to write total time I'd been writing 2k a solar day in the three hours before work. Surely with half dozen hours of infant free writing time, 4k a solar day would be nothing....

Merely (of course), things didn't work out like that. Every day I'd sit downwards to add 4000 words to my new manuscript. I was determined, I was experienced, I knew my world. There was no reason I couldn't get 4k down. But every night when I hauled myself abroad, my word count had only increased past 2k, the aforementioned number of words I'd been getting before I quit my day job.

Needless to say, I felt like a failure. Here I was, a professional writer with three books about to come out, and I couldn't fifty-fifty beat the writing I'd done earlier I went pro. At first I made excuses, this novel was the most complicated of all the Eli books I'd written, I was tired because my son thinks 4am is an awesome time to play, etc. etc. But the truth was there was no alibi. I had to find a fashion to boost my word count, and with months of 2k a day dragging me downward, I had to do it fast. So I got scientific. I gathered data and tried experiments, and ultimately concluded upwards boosting my give-and-take count to heights far beyond what I'd thought was possible, and I did it while making my writing meliorate than ever before.

When I told people at ConCarolinas that I'd gone from writing 2k to 10k per day, I got a huge response. Everyone wanted to know how I'd washed information technology, and I finally got so sick of telling the same story over and again that I decided to write it downwardly here.

So, once and for all, hither's the story of how I went from writing 500 words an hr to over 1500, and (hopefully) how you tin too:

A quick note: There are many fine, successful writers out there who equate writing quickly with being a hack. I firmly disagree. My methods remove the dross, the fourth dimension spent tooling around lost in your daily writing, non the fourth dimension spent making plot decisions or word choices. This is not a choice between ruminating on art or churning out the novels for gross commercialism (though I happen to similar commercial novels), information technology's most non wasting your time for whatsoever sort of novels yous desire to write.

Drastically increasing your words per day is actually pretty piece of cake, all it takes is a shift in perspective and the power to be honest with yourself (which is the hardest part). Because I'm a giant nerd, I ended upward creating a metric, a triangle with three core requirements: Knowledge, Time, and Enthusiasm. Whatsoever i of these can noticeably boost your daily output, only all iii together can turn you into a word machine. I never get-go writing these days unless I tin hit all three.

Update! The talented Vicky Teinaki made a graphic of this metric and let me employ information technology! She is awesome!

Side 1: Knowledge, or Know What You're Writing Earlier Yous Write It

The beginning big boost to my daily wordcount happened almost by accident. Used to be I would just pop open the laptop and outset writing. Now, I wasn't a full make-it-up-as-yous-go writer. I had a general plot outline, simply my scene notes were things like "Miranda and Banage fence" or "Eli steals the rex." Non very useful, merely I knew generally what direction I was writing in, and I liked to let the characters decide how the scene would go. Unfortunately, this meant I wasted a lot of time rewriting and backtracking when the scene veered off grade.

This was how I had ever written, it felt natural to me. But and then one 24-hour interval I got mired in a real mess. I had spent three days knee deep in the same horrible scene. I was drastically behind on my wordcount, and I was facing the existent possibility of missing my deadline... again. Information technology was the perfect storm of all my insecurities, the thought of letting people down mixed with the fear that I really didn't know what I was doing, that I wasn't a real writer at all, just an apprentice pretending to exist one. Simply as I got angrier and angrier with myself, I looked downwardly at my novel and suddenly realized that I was being an absolute idiot. Here I was, desperate for time, floundering in a scene, and yet I was doing the hardest work of writing (figuring out exactly what needs to happen to movement the scene forrard in the almost dramatic and exciting way) in the near time consuming way possible (ie, in the eye of the writing itself).

As presently equally I realized this, I stopped. I airtight my laptop and got out my pad of paper. And then, instead of trying to write the scene in the novel every bit I had been, I started scribbling a very brusque hand, truncated version the scene on the newspaper. I didn't depict anything, I didn't exercise transitions. I wasn't writing, I was only noting down what I would write when the time came. It took me about five minutes and three pages of notebook paper to untangle my seemingly unfixable scene, the one that had just eaten 3 days of my life before I tried this new arroyo. Ameliorate yet, later I'd worked everything out in shorthand I was able to swoop dorsum into the scene and cease it in record time. The words flew onto the screen, and at the finish of that session I'd written 3000 words rather than 2000, most of them in that last hour and a half.

Looking dorsum, it was and then simple I feel stupid for non thinking of it sooner. If you want to write faster, the get-go pace is to know what you're writing before you write it. I'thousand not even talking near macro plot stuff, I mean working out the dorsum and forth exchanges of an argument betwixt characters, blocking out fights, writing up fast descriptions. Writing this stuff out in words yous really desire other people to read, especially if you're making everything up as y'all keep, takes FOREVER. It'southward horribly inefficient and when you lot get yourself in a expressionless end, you cease up trashing hundreds, sometimes thousands of words to get out. Only jotting it down on a pad? Takes no fourth dimension at all. If the scene you're sketching out starts to go the incorrect way, you encounter information technology immedeatly, and all you have to do is cross out the parts that went sour and kickoff again at the beginning. That's it. No words lost, no time wasted. It was god damn beautiful.

Every writing session later this realization, I dedicated 5 minutes (sometimes more than, never less) and wrote out a quick description of what I was going to write. Sometimes it wasn't even a paragraph, simply a listing of this happens and so this then this. This unproblematic modify, these v stupid minutes, boosted my wordcount enormously. I went from writing 2k a day to writing 5k a day within a week without increasing my 5 hour writing block. Some days I even finished early.

Of the iii sides of the triangle, I consider knowledge to be the most important. This step alone more doubled my give-and-take count. If you lot merely want to try 1 modify at a time, this is the 1 I recommend the near.

Side 2: Fourth dimension

At present that I'd had such a huge boost from i minor change, I started to wonder what else I could practice to jack my numbers up even higher. But as I looked for other things I could tweak, I speedily realized that I knew embarrassingly little about how I really wrote my novels. I'd kept no records of my progress, I couldn't even tell you how long information technology took me to write whatever of my last three novels beyond broad guesstimations, celebratory blog posts, and vague memories of past discussion counts. Information technology was like I started every book by throwing myself at the keyboard and praying for a novel to shoot out of my fingers earlier the deadline. And go along in heed this is my concern. Tin can you imagine a bakery or a freelance designer working this way? Never tracking hours or keeping a tape of how long it took me to really produce the matter I was selling? Yeah, pretty stupid way to work.

If I was going to boost my output (or know how long it took me to actually write a freaking novel), I had to know what I was outputting in the start identify. So, I started keeping records. Every day I had a writing session I would notation the time I started, the time I stopped, how many words I wrote, and where I was writing on a spreadsheet. I did this for two months, and so I looked for patterns.

Several things were immediately clear. First, my productivity was at its highest when I was in a place other than my home. That is to say, a place without internet. The afternoons I wrote at the coffee shop with no wireless were twice as productive equally the mornings I wrote at abode. I also saw that, while butt in chair fourth dimension is the root of all writing, non all butt in chair time is equal. For example, those days where I but got i hour to write I never managed more than than five hundred words in that hour. By dissimilarity, those days I got five hours of solid writing I was clearing shut to 1500 words an hour. The numbers were articulate: the longer I wrote, the faster I wrote (and I believe the better I wrote, certainly the writing got easier the longer I went). This corresponding rising of wordcount and writing hours just worked up to a point, though. There was a definite words per hour drib off around hour 7 when I was simply too brain fried to continue.

But these numbers are very personal, the betoken I'm trying to make is that past recording my progress every day I had the information I needed to start optimizing my daily writing. One time I had my information in hand, I rearranged my schedule to make sure my writing time was always in the afternoon (my most prolific time according to my sheet, which was a real discovery. I would have bet coin I was better in the morning.), always at my coffee shop with no internet, and always at least four hours long. Once I set my time, I guarded it viciously, and depression and behold my words per 24-hour interval shot upwards again. This time to an average of 6k-7k per writing day, and all without adding whatsoever extra hours. All I had to exercise was find what made good writing time for me and then make sure the adept writing time was the time I fought hardest to become.

Even if you don't take the luxury of 4 uninterrupted hours at your prime number fourth dimension of twenty-four hour period, I highly suggest measuring your writing in the times yous practice accept to write. Even if y'all simply have ane complimentary 60 minutes a twenty-four hours, trying that hour in the morning some days and the evening on others and tracking the results can make certain you lot aren't wasting your precious writing fourth dimension on avoidable inefficiencies. Fourth dimension actually does thing.

Side three: Enthusiasm

I was flight high on my new discoveries. Over the grade of two months I'd jacked my daily writing from 2k per twenty-four hour period to 7k with just a few elementary changes and was now actually running ahead of schedule for the commencement time  in my writing career. Merely I wasn't done yet. I was absolutely determined I was going to interruption the 10k a day barrier.

I'd really cleaved it before. Using Knowledge and Fourth dimension, I'd already managed a few 10k+ days, including 1 where I wrote 12,689 words, or 2 chapters, in 7 hours. To be fair, I had been writing exterior of my usual writing window in improver to my normal writing on those days, so it wasn't a total words-per-60 minutes efficiency jump. Only that's the bang-up thing almost going this fast, the novel starts to eat you and you detect yourself writing any time y'all can just for the pure joy of information technology. Even improve, on the days where I bankrupt 10k, I was also pulling fantastic words-per-hour numbers, 1600 - 2000 words per hr as opposed to my usual 1500. It was articulate these days were special, but I didn't know how. I did know that I wanted those days to get the norm rather than the exception, so I went back to my records (which I now kept meticulously) to notice out what fabricated the 10k days unlike.

The answer was head-slappingly obvious. Those days I bankrupt 10k were the days I was writing scenes I'd been dying to write since I planned the book. They were the candy bar scenes, the scenes I wrote all that other stuff to get to. By contrast, my slow days (days where I was struggling to pause 5k) corresponded to the scenes I wasn't that crazy about.

This was a duh moment for me, simply information technology besides brought up a troubling new problem. If I had scenes that were boring enough that I didn't want to write them, then at that place was no mode in hell anyone would desire to read them. This was my novel, afterward all. If I didn't love it, no one would.

Fortunately, the solution turned out to be, however again, stupidly simple. Every 24-hour interval, while I was writing out my little description of what I was going to write for the knowledge component of the triangle, I would play the scene through in my heed and try to get excited virtually it. I'd look for all the cool little hooks, the parts that interested me most, and focus on those since they were evidently what made the scene absurd. If I couldn't observe anything to get excited over, and then I would change the scene, or get rid of it entirely. I decided then and at that place that, no matter how useful a scene might exist for my plot, boring scenes had no place in my novels.

This discovery turned out to be a fantastic one for my writing. I trashed and rewrote several otherwise perfectly skilful scenes, and the issue on the novel was amazing. Plus, my daily wordcount numbers shot up again considering I was ever excited about my work. Double bonus!

Life On 10k A Day

With all three sides of my triangle now in place, I was routinely pulling ten-12k per day by the time I finished Spirits' End, the fifth Eli novel. I was most 2 months ahead of where I'd thought I'd be, and the novel had simply taken me iii months to write rather than the seven months I'd burned on the Spirit War (facts I knew at present that I was keeping records). I was alee of schedule with plenty of time to practice revisions before I needed to hand the novel in to my editor, and I was happier with my writing than ever before. In that location were several days toward the end when I'd close my laptop and stumble out of the coffee shop feeling almost drunk on writing. I felt like I was on top of the globe, utterly invincible and happier than I've ever been. Writing that much that speedily was like taking some kind of weird success opiate, and I was thoroughly addicted. Once yous've hit 10k a day for a week straight, annihilation less feels like your story is crawling.

Now, once more, 10k a twenty-four hour period is my high signal equally a professional author whose kid is now in daycare (PRICELESS). I write 6 - 7 hours a day, usually two in the morning and 4-5 in the afternoon, five days a calendar week. Honestly, I don't encounter how anyone other than a full time novelist could pull those kind of hours, but that doesn't mean you have to be a pro to drastically increase your daily discussion count.

So 10k might be the high cease of the spectrum, but of the people I've told about this (a lot) who've gotten back to me (not nearly equally many), most have doubled their word counts by striving to hit all three sides of the triangle every time they write. This means some have gone from 1k a day to 2k, or 2k to 4k. Some of my great success with increasing my wordcount is undoubtedly a product of experience, every bit I also hit my million discussion mark somewhere in the fifth Eli novel. Nonetheless, I believe most of the big leaps in efficiency came from changing the way I approached my writing. Just as changing your lifestyle can assist y'all lose a hundred pounds, changing they way you sit downwards to write can boost your words per hour in astonishing ways.

If you're looking to get more than out of your writing time, I really promise yous try my triangle. If you do, please write me (or comment below) and permit me know. Even if it doesn't piece of work (especially if it doesn't work) I'd love to hear nigh it. As well, if y'all observe another efficiency hack for writing, let me know about that too! In that location's no reason our triangle tin't be a square, and I'm always looking for a fashion to hit 15k a day :D.

Again, I actually hope this helps you hitting your goals. Good luck with your writing!

- Rachel Aaron

ETA: If you liked this post, you'll love the book it spawned! 2k to 10k: How to Write Better, Write Faster, and Write More of What Y'all Love combines several writing posts from my blog, cleaned up and expanded, with all new content, and all for under a buck. Cheque it out at Amazon.com!

And if you lot want to read more of my gratuitous writing posts, check these out:
12 Days of Celebrity (or how I wrote a novel in 12 days, complete with daily numbers!), How I Plot A Novel in 5 Steps, and Editing for People Who Hate Editing! I add new writing posts all the time, so feel complimentary to follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or on my RSS Feed (available on the sidebar to the left) for updates and information.

Thank you as always for reading and spreading the give-and-take!

- R

godfreyfreand.blogspot.com

Source: http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html

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