How I Trick Myself Into Writing More, Faster, Every Single Time
Use this trick to change your writing life forever.
No one starts out writing well, and no one is naturally a fast writer. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.
Writing — both in quality and craft — takes years of hard, often unpaid and unrewarded work to master. That’s why great writers are made, not born — and why the only person who can make you a better writer … is you.
One of many struggles people have with writing is the time it takes them to go from a blank page to a publishable document. There is nothing wrong with being a slower writer — I’m married to one, and he’s one of the greatest writers I have the pleasure of knowing. You don’t have to write faster to be successful.
But if you do want to get more writing done in less time, I might have a temporary hack for getting yourself into a flow state so you can write what you need to without it taking all day.
It’s simple, really: I pre-write. But not in a traditional way.
Why You May Need to Master the Art of Writing Quickly
That’s “learn to write with speed,” not “quickly learn to write.” In many contexts, how quickly you write matters less than the quality of your writing. But training yourself to write faster — or tricking your brain into doing it — will benefit you much more than it will hurt you.
In online publishing specifically, writers who produce more work in a shorter amount of time tend to be the favorable ones. This isn’t fair to naturally slower writers, but this is typically how the industry works. Those who can do more are expected to generate more profit for the companies they’re writing for, so they’re given more assignments and sometimes even trusted with more “risky” assignments (like reviews or interviews that involve working with PR).
Even if you’re writing in a slightly different context, being able to meet deadlines and consistently produce good work on time will only lead to more opportunities and, ideally, more financial gain.
Teaching yourself to write faster over time can be a long process, and it will take many hours of practice and refining. I was not a fast writer when I first started — I became one the more I wrote.
You should try not to sacrifice quality for quantity when you can. But depending on the career path you’re on, knowing how to write as much as possible in as little time as possible — and well — is going to make a huge difference in the long run.
Fast writing doesn’t mean you don’t plan or don’t submit or publish a near-perfect piece of writing every time. It does, however, mean that when you do sit down to write something, you’re not going to spend the first hour trying to figure out what to write about or attempting to extract motivation from something that’s only going to distract and further delay you.
The Biggest Mistake Writers Make? Waiting For Motivation to Strike
“I don’t feel motivated to write” is what I call a brain block. Creatively, when you sit around and wait for motivation to seek you out — or you do things you think might motivate you but won’t (watching TikToks about writing could maybe motivate you to write, but not as a pre-writing exercise) — you’re only slowing yourself down and holding yourself back.
Motivation comes from doing the thing you want or need to do — once you start doing the thing, you then often feel inspired to continue. The best way to motivate yourself to write … is to start writing.
In the same way the first pancake never turns out quite right, the first few sentences you write may prove a bit unwieldy. That’s why pre-writing is a common method for working through those first rough sentences or ideas so you can write good-quality words (make yummy-tasting pancakes).
But even that may not always help you get to those good sentences faster. Here’s where my trick finally comes in.
Pre-writing often refers to jotting down thoughts and ideas related to the topic you’re going to write about before you actually start writing. I actually approach it in a much different way: Writing about something completely different from what I need to write before I write the essential thing.
Write What You Want Before You Write What You Have To
This may seem counter-productive, but it only hurts you if you’re doing it unintentionally. If you’re subconsciously putting off writing what you have to by writing what you want to write instead, you’re not going to have an easier time writing the “have to” thing once you’re done with the “want to” thing.
The solution? Still do this, but on purpose.
I’m on deadline right now. I’m supposed to be writing 1400 words for someone else. So what am I doing here? I’m very quickly writing something that’s on my mind to force my brain into “write mode” so I can tab over to the thing I actually need to get done today … and do it.
It’s not procrastinating. It’s backward productivity, and while it won’t work for everyone, it has completely changed my writing life.
Don’t make the mistake of waiting for inspiration and motivation to find you. Force it out of hiding. It’s like giving your dog a little treat before you give them their medicine (followed by another little treat afterward). What’s coming might not be the most fun, but look — this is the kind of fun you can have again when the less-fun writing is over!
The most effective part is that once I’ve written the fun thing, I’m not only ready to write the other thing — I’ll do it faster and with more focus. That’s how I get more writing done in far less time.
And now that I’ve written this, I’m in a flow state and ready to go write something that I’ll get paid for. Good luck to us all.
