My top 10 strategies for finding your focus and smashing out stories.
Whether you’re writing features, preparing a report, or drafting a book, it’s worth learning how to write faster. Whatever the merits of the slow writing movement, there are valid mercenary reasons for wanting to write faster. Faster writing, for instance, means that you can write more pitches, sell more stories, and make more money – in less time.
But an interesting side benefit is that fast writing often flows better. It’s loose, playful, energised, relaxed. By contrast, when a story has been squeezed out, word by painful word, that energy somehow transfers to the text. There’s a constricted, heavy, overwrought quality to it.
David Fryxell, author of How to Write Fast (While Writing Well) suggests that “when the words spill out effortlessly onto the page”, it’s because you’ve entered a flow state. First described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the deliriously pleasurable state of flow emerges when we’re stretched to our limits to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.
All of which means that fast writing doesn’t mean easy writing – even if, from the outside, it might look that way. Fast writing is first about attending to processes like prewriting and outlining that need to happen before you even sit down to write. And then it’s about getting the words down, quick smart, before you sabotage yourself by turning a simple assignment into a time-consuming torture.
I’m always on the lookout for tips on how to speed up my writing. Here are some of the most useful techniques I’ve found along the way. Best of all, none of them involve resorting to AI!
Write on the road
For a long time, I baulked at starting a travel story until I returned home. Sure, I’d scribble notes, take photographs, record interviews, and collect press releases, but I’d leave the wordsmithing until the moment I was back at my desk. I wanted to process the trip in its totality, I argued, and I couldn’t do that until it was all over, and I knew what it all meant.
But when press trips start coming thick and fast, with very little turnaround time, there wasn’t space to ‘process’ anything. Self-indulgent procrastination gave way to writing on the road. Sometimes that writing would be a few rough paragraphs eked out on my laptop at the end of a long day. Other times, it would be penning a long caption to accompany a social media post. (Today, I often refer to images and details I’ve captured in social media posts as a springboard to a longer story.)
Still other times, my writing would be a scribbled note about something I’d seen or heard, an interaction I’d witnessed, or something else which could easily be forgotten amid the hurly burly of the following day’s adventure. For example, I had no devices with me when I went trekking with donkeys in Far North Queensland, but I did carry a battered Moleskine notebook and pen.
The trek leader was one of the toughest and most capable men I’ve ever met – he ran the Australian Army’s survival school for three years. However, his tenderness towards animals struck me. I noted different instances down, not knowing if I’d even use them. But some sentences I’d scrawled in my tent, late at night, by the light of my head torch, made it into the final copy with very few changes.
Sift and sort your raw material
I’m a bowerbird. Tickets, postcards, business cards, boarding passes, menus, coasters, brochures, fallen leaves, newspaper clippings, fragrance sachets, menus, snapshots of willing subjects at train stations – you never know what will spark inspiration when the time comes to sit down and write.
Yet few things are as frustrating as having to break your writing flow by searching through a 60-minute interview for the exact wording of a quote from an interviewee, to dig through a report to find that perfect statistic you read somewhere, or to mine a credit card statement for the exact cost of entry to Qatar Airways’ business class lounge.
So, before you even think about applying fingers to the keyboard, it’s important to sift and sort all that raw material. That’s because, once you’re writing, you’ll want it within easy reach. Transcribe interviews with the help of something like Otter, highlight your most revealing notes from the field, summarise any relevant texts, and note relevant statistics (and their sources). You might still need to make a few phone calls to check last minute details, but the bulk of the grunt work is done.
Organising your raw material like this takes a bit of extra time upfront, but it will get the cogs turning. And you’ll reap the greatest rewards in the writing stage. Jack Hart, author of Wordcraft, warns that failure to organise opens you up to missed deadlines, formulaic writing, a slow and unproductive process, and an overly long manuscript. Failure to organise, he adds, “may be the most dangerous failure you risk”.
Prewrite
Unless your deadline falls within the next 15 minutes, you probably have enough time to engage in some prewriting activities. Strategies such as listing, mind mapping, freewriting, looping, brainstorming, creating a word cloud, or answering the six traditional journalists’ questions (Who?, What?, Where?, When?, Why?, and How?) can help you organise your ideas and create a roadmap for the tasks ahead.
Hart also suggests writing a simple theme statement which “cuts through the detail and exposes the heart of what you want to say”. Developing a theme statement forces you to focus on where you’re going, without applying any pressure to simultaneously come up with the perfect lede (or lead). When the theme statement has served its purpose, you can simply delete it. Hart suggests building your theme statement in the form of: subject – transitive verb – object. Such as: The Big Horn Mountains (subject) preserve (transitive verb) the character of early fly-fishing in the West.
Again, this might all sound like yet more effort upfront, but the time you spend prewriting pays dividends when it comes to the actual writing.
Outline
Many successful writers start a draft without a clear direction in mind – they’re called pantsers (as in, they prefer ‘to fly by the seat of their pants’). I wish I could do this, but I can’t. If you can, more power to you! Feel free to disregard the next section.
For me, making a playful, unplanned start and seeing where it takes me belongs to the prewriting stage. Otherwise, the process feels like chasing rabbits down burrows, getting stuck, backtracking, and finally bursting back into the sunlight, blinking, and wondering, ‘How the hell did I get here?’
An outline can smooth the path towards speedier writing. Some people estimate that the time you spend outlining makes the writing process ten times faster. An outline can be as brief as a rough list of points you’d like to cover, in the order you’d like to cover them. Some writers add transitions from one paragraph to the next. Others include some of the detail (quotes, statistics, description, and so on) that they’d like to include.
Contrary to popular opinion, an outline doesn’t constrain you. It functions like a security blanket. An outline gives you something comfortable and snuggly to start with as you ease into the work. If you want to change it, or you don’t need it anymore, just cast it off.
Fryxell urges writers not to skip outlining to save time. “It is precisely the process of outlining, however crudely,” he writes, “that will save you that precious time.”
Start somewhere
When it’s finally time to sit down and write, knowing where to start is key. Newsroom folklore suggests that nailing the perfect lede will summon forces to propel you effortlessly through the rest of the story. Sometimes this happens. More often that not, endlessly writing and rewriting the first sentence does nothing but fritter away precious time, energy, and sanity.
I’ve previously written about the benefits of not starting at the beginning. It’s more important that you start wherever you can. Writing the easiest paragraph first, and then the next easiest, and so on, has the added benefit of firing up the girls (or guys) in the basement, so you brain is already chewing over the possibilities for the lede or the conclusion or the next point without your conscious awareness.
Make friends with placeholders
Journalists often write TK (short for ‘to come’) when they don’t want to interrupt their flow by going back to their notes to find out exactly what an interviewee said, or where an obscure town is located, or when an historic event occurred. Short for ‘to come’, the logic is that TK rarely appears naturally in the English language, so you’re unlikely to miss it during a final read-through.
Of course, you don’t have to use TK. While drafting of this blog post, I used the following placeholders to hold space while I kept on merrily writing:
- intro goes here (I wasn’t ready to write this paragraph)
- blah blah blah (I needed to do some more research)
- Dan software guy (I couldn’t remember his surname)
Try a sprint
Set your timer for 5 (or 30 or 60) minutes and then write as much as you can in that time. Go! Writing sprints encourage you to write as much as you can in a limited time and are a staple of events like NaNoWriMo. With their emphasis on quantity rather than quality, sprints can help you break free of perfectionism, procrastination, and writer’s block. Sometimes, the sheer speed at which you work also generates novel insights and associations.
Eliminate distractions
Turn off notifications, place your mobile phone in another room, and use a browser blocker. All these strategies have merit, but the most pernicious distraction, at least for me, is the thoughts which bubble to the surface when I’m meant to be focussing on something else. Like a siren song, they urge me to fact check a different story than the one I’m working on, google to find the answer to a thought that’s just popped into my head, or check whether the latest issue of Whatever Publication (in which I expect to have an article) is out.
Instead of switching tasks, which reduces efficiency, it’s important to dump these random thoughts somewhere they can be dealt with later. Physically capturing these thoughts reassures the brain that they will, in fact, be dealt with at the appropriate time, and so no further reminders are required, thanks very much.
For example, while writing this post, I filled a Post-it Note with the following list:
- Interlaken (to remind me to RSVP for a media lunch invitation)
- Proof CD (to remind me to review proofs in Company Director magazine)
Self-soothing v grounding (a question that popped into my head)
Ventilate your prose
I love this idea from software developer Dan Allen (who is the Dan software guy from the placeholder above). He suggests that each new sentence (just like a piece of code) should start on a new line. He calls it ventilating your prose, which means giving it space to breathe.
“Don’t let writing wrap,” he says. Starting each sentence on a new line means you’re more likely to write content that’s easier to read. It’s also easier to edit. “You can easily move lines around,” Allen says. “You can leave comments (and) notes between the lines.”
This is vastly different to the traditional approach, where you write in paragraphs – a series of sentences linked by topic which hang together meaningfully. In the early stages of getting a draft down, writing in paragraphs makes it harder to disentangle one sentence from another when new associations are forged, and sentences need to shift. It’s easy enough to consolidate individual sentences into paragraphs further down the line.
Pretend you’re just having a conversation
The idea of ‘writing’ can cause many of us to freeze, even if it’s something we’re supposed to do for a living. When the words won’t flow, pretend you’re having a conversation with a friend about the thing you’re writing about. What is the first thing you’re itching to tell them (that’s often a worthy lede)? What comes next? What questions do they ask? How do you answer them? Do they have questions that you can’t answer? How would you go about getting those answers?
Having a conversation is a lot less scary than ‘writing’, which is why hosting your own Q&A can be a great way to get those first few words on paper. Eventually you’ll build up a head of steam, ‘sticky’ content will attract more content, and you’ll be off to the races with your work in progress.
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