Full Free Book! Write Better, Faster by USA Today Bestselling Author Monica Leonelle

Chapter 1: Introduction. I first wrote this book about increasing your writing speed based on my own experience of taking my writing productivity from about 700 to 900 words per hour all the way to 3,500+ words per hour. I accomplished this through a variety of techniques that took me from writing sporadically and hitting few of my writing goals all the way to writing consistently and regularly and producing on average 8 to 10 books a year across several pen names and brands. That was back in 2015, when few authors were using these techniques to write faster. At the time, it seemed that many writers actually believed that writing faster could be detrimental to their creativity and the quality of their work. Now, in 2020, as I write this, writing fast is considered a must-have skill to become a full-time Earning Independent Author. Many of the techniques I share in the book have become popularized through the independent author community, in part thanks to this book and a few others that came out around the same time. This book alone sold 20,000+ copies and has helped thousands of authors improve their writing speeds and go full-time. This means it's well-tested and can likely help you improve your writing speed too. I am proud of the independent author community for embracing the Writing Faster framework and many of the techniques that I put forth in this book. At the same time, I've seen a growing trend of authors who do write fast but either burn out after 2 to 3 years, develop serious health problems after 2 to 3 years, or both. I myself have experienced health problems and burnout during my career., and I don't recommend either. I feel it needs to be said that this book is about how to write fast without burning out, and how to write fast without harming your body. In fact, many of the techniques I discovered and recommended throughout this book were the ones that helped me avoid writing injury and burnout. I've also seen authors get very competitive and feel like they have to keep up with the author next to them, in order to have a full-time writing career. I personally believe that anyone can have a full-time writing career, no matter how fast you write. There are so many amazing opportunities to make money as a writer in general, and that extends to writing fiction for a living. I have seen authors who write one book a year make a living at this simply by playing to their other strengths—marketing, relationship building, or story craft. Your success is not bound by your production rate. This book is not meant to make you feel like you are on a hamster wheel or like you are in The Hunger Games. On the contrary, this book is about how you can double, triple, or quadruple your writing speed. No comparisons to others are needed. I encourage you to only compete against your past self, as that's where you'll find the most joy around this topic. The Writing Faster framework has changed a bit over the years. I've incorporated the feedback from speaking to dozens of readers of Write Better Faster, as well as students of my Write Better Faster course. Write Better Faster is no longer about what worked well for me, but also about what works well for the average aspiring independent author. Writing faster is a skill set that only takes a month or two to master. There's no reason that you can't write faster soon. This book gives you the step-by-step of how to significantly increase your writing speed, according to what works well for most people. Write better, faster, and the Writing Faster Framework includes 6 critical factors that will help you significantly increase your writing speed. Chapter 4: Tracking Your Words. What you measure is what you are able to change. I teach you exactly what to track to quickly increase your writing speed. Chapter 5: Knowledge About Your Writing. Why you must know what you are writing before you start and how to get there quickly. Chapter 6: Writing in Sprints. Why the power of sprints is critical to doubling your writing speed immediately. Chapter 7: Your Writing Process. Your writing speed is a part of your writing process. And as your speed increases, your writing process will naturally change to accommodate your new abilities. Chapter 8: Dictation and Transcription. The basics of using voice recognition software to increase your writing speed even further. Chapter 9: Building Energy for Writing. Your energy is the most important part of how fast you can write over both the short-term and the long-term. It's an honor to share what I know about each of these topics with you in this book. Where this book originated and what's changed in this edition. This book was originally published in 2015 as part of the Growth Hacking for Storytellers series. Much of the text in this edition is pulled and rewritten from the original book, so if you already own it, this book will serve as a refresher of what you've already read. If you don't own the previous version already, you are in the perfect place to learn a ton about improving your writing habits and increasing your writing speed, as the content in this book has now been tested by thousands of novelists just like you. While writing better, faster, smarter, more and more consistently has always been in demand for novelists, a lot has changed since I wrote the original book. I've updated my story to include where I'm at today. I've streamlined the Writing Faster framework to include feedback from dozens of authors who have shared their process with me. This framework is now broader and works for more people. I've rearranged the sections to match the Writing Faster framework topics. And although many people loved this feature of the book, I've also removed the long diary entry appendix as it is from 2013 and has too many outdated references to tools and my ever-evolving process. Finally, I've changed the format of this book and others in the Productive Novelist series to better reflect the need to pause and digest information. This is done through journaling prompts. Feel free to grab a notebook and jot down your answers to the journaling prompts to aid in your understanding of the information and desire to take action on it. How to Use This Book. This book is best read straight through as each section builds on the last. That said, each chapter can also be read as a standalone essay, so if you have a specific chapter you'd like to dig into first, feel free to jump to that spot. Each chapter also contains journaling prompts, so you can use the Writing Productivity Companion Workbook alongside, to aid in implementation. This companion workbook covers all 3 of my writing productivity books: The 8-Minute Writing Habit, Write Better Faster, and Dictate Your Book. I highly recommend using the journaling prompts, as they will help you process and implement the information you just read. Who are you? My name is Monica Leonelle, and I have been publishing fiction since 2011. I write young adult fantasy, science fiction, and romance under Solo Storm and a few other pen names. Between my pen names, I have about 20 books. My urban fantasy novella The Last Daughter hit the USA Today bestseller list in 2017 as part of a boxed set. I've also written over 10 nonfiction books about writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and business. You can learn more about my work at theworldneedsyourbook.com. That's not much of an introduction, I know, but I also know that many of you are here to start a writing habit, not to hear my life story. I've shared my story around learning how to write regularly, and how to absolutely love doing it, in the next section, but feel free to skip past it if you want to get to the meat of the content right away. Ready? Chapter 2: Why I Wrote Write Better, Faster. I didn't start my author journey as a fast writer. Even after years of blogging, I hit about 900-1,200 words per hour for nonfiction, and around 700 words per hour for fiction. That's why my first novel, which was a little over 120,000 words, took me nearly 2 years to complete. That was all fine and good when I had the security of a 6-figure career as a marketing executive for Inc. 100 technology startups back in 2011. But a year later, when I was divorced, broke, recovering from relationship abuse (him) and alcohol abuse (me), trying to make a living as a freelance writer, and living in an apartment building I could no longer afford, I didn't have the luxury of writing slowly anymore. I had endless time to work, and we were at the beginning of self-published ebooks taking off thanks to Smashwords and Kindle Direct Publishing opening their doors to individuals. I watched as other writers who seemed smarter, more prolific, less procrastinating, and more disciplined than me took advantage of the marketplace and saw their careers take off. And yet, I could barely get a single novella out the door and onto platforms, where it could actually make me money. Because of my deteriorating financial situation, writing faster wasn't truly a choice for me. I had quit my career to follow my passion and my dreams, but I wasn't doing the thing I intended to do. I remember telling myself, if you can't prove to me that you really want to do this, you have to go get a real job. The way I would prove it to myself was to hit National Novel Writing Month numbers. 50,000 words in a month, so I could write and publish my books faster and string together a new career for myself. I read a few articles on the topic, though I didn't— honestly didn't find much. In 2012 and 2013, there was still a strong belief within the writing community that you needed to struggle and torture yourself to get a few sentences down in a day. Writers believed that quality came from spending a lot of time on something, and thus writers took a long time to write books. But I wanted to write full-time and make a reasonable living of about $4,000 a month doing so. At the time, due to lack of competition on Amazon, it only took about 5 books in one series to make that kind of money. I already had one book, and if I could write faster, I knew I could connect the dots for myself. But I still had a number of personal hang-ups that were holding me back. I believed that I was lazy, slow, and a perpetual procrastinator. No one is truly a procrastinator. I don't even believe in the concept anymore. Procrastination is a symptom, not a cause. Write Better Faster addresses the causes of why you are procrastinating which once addressed, will get rid of the laziness and procrastination for good. Writing faster wasn't possible. I believed my writing ability was fixed, but writing faster is a skill set, not a talent. You can systematically double, triple, or quadruple your writing speed just as I did using the techniques shared in this book. I was going to have to give up my comfort to be successful. I believed that writing was hard work, and thus I was going to be miserable with all the disciplining I'd have to do on myself. In truth, I was experiencing deep fear and paralyzation around writing. This was actually uncomfortable, and my anxiety was through the roof from not writing or pursuing my goals. The techniques in this book helped me calm my anxiety, by removing the fears that were holding me back from writing. I liked having written, but not writing. After I increased my writing speed, I genuinely liked the actual act of writing. As humans, we tend to like things that we are good at, and I had become very good at writing. It became easy, which made it pleasurable. Becoming a full-time author was a pipe dream and not based on reality. I didn't believe that I could achieve my dreams, but writing faster and sharing that process with the world helped me connect with thousands of other writers all over the world. I became a part of a community of people who were pursuing their dreams too. It was this community and you, my readers and students, who helped me believe in myself and my dreams. And I'd love to pass that feeling on to anyone who doesn't believe their dreams are possible. They are. This book can help you get there. I embarked on an experiment that took me through 2 months of writing 50,000 words each month. During this experiment, I suffered both hand injuries and an eye injury that had me wondering if I was going blind. I also moved into dictation efforts outside, where one walk-and-talk on the south half of Lakeshore Drive had 2 near-miss incidents. A gang almost mugged me but decided last minute not to, for reasons I still don't understand. And a drunk driver flew off the highway and cruised at about 20 miles per hour onto the sidewalk I had been walking along only 60 to 90 seconds earlier. I documented the entire crazy 2 months and tested every trick or tip that I could. By the end of the 2 months, I had 100,000 new words of fiction. —a lot of fun and slightly concerning stories—and massive burnout that kept me from writing for the next several months that followed. Thankfully, these days writing fast is far less dramatic. While my experiment ended up creating a bit of chaos in my life, followed by a period of no words, I did eventually start writing again. This time, I wrote with the knowledge that I could do it, and decided to do so with less emotional drama and self-sabotage for this round. I started publishing work under a new pen name and was able to publish 8 books and 1 short story in 2014, the year that followed. This was also the first year that I made $1,000 per month from my fiction for several months in a row. My newfound confidence in my writing abilities, along with the financial reward I received, helped me go all in on my writing. And by mid-2015, I was making a low-end full-time living from my writing. I was able to quit all of my freelance efforts for good and focus just on writing. I've been doing so ever since, and while my income has gone up and down over the years, especially just before and during my pregnancy, I'm really proud that I can honestly and genuinely say that I'm following my dreams and doing my true life's purpose every single day. I would never be where I'm at without those 2 months where I proved to myself that I could do the writing I wanted at a professional pace and level of quality. This one experiment and commitment to myself was the key to getting my writing career off the ground. Writing faster changed my life and gave me everything I have today. I am so grateful to have taken the journey for myself, and I wrote this book so that you can experience the same transformation as me. —if you choose to, of course. Sometimes people talk about life-changing amounts of money. But I talk about life-changing amounts of words. This is what you receive when you try the techniques shared in the book. I truly believe this book can hand you your writing dreams on a silver platter. I hope you'll take the chance on yourself. How to Get the Most Out of This Book. Write Better, Faster is a great book on its own, and you can completely transform your writing speed and your author career with this quick read. I've also put together some companion resources in case they are helpful to you. The Writing Productivity Companion Workbook and Companion Deck. The Writing Productivity Companion Workbook is a collection of workbook pages that follow the journaling prompts in my books, The 8-Minute Writing Habit Write better, faster, and dictate your book. It's 100+ pages of bullet journal style layouts in 8.5" x 11" letter sizing. It's ideal for writers who love visual data organization or love getting creative with colors and art supplies. The book also doubles as a coloring book of sorts, with lots of line art that you can color in, allowing you to meditate as you percolate on your outline. The Writing Productivity Companion Deck is a square card deck with tips and inspiration to keep you writing. You can do a daily card reading when you need to get motivated for your writing session, pull one card and reflect on it if you like to skip around in the material, or use the cards like flashcards to remind yourself of important concepts after reading. You can also stick these to a board or wall in your house or in your favorite notebook to create your own visual layout. If you do this, send pictures, please. The card deck can also be used with the other decks for other books in the Productive Novelist series. You can learn more about how to grab your own copies of these two resources at https://theworldneedsyourbook.com/shop. The Write Better, Faster Course. The Write Better Faster course is 8 video lessons that help you drastically improve your writing speed, writing habits, and writing processes. It is the perfect addition to the content in this book, plus my 2 other books on writing productivity, The 8-Minute Writing Habit and Dictate Your Book. Learn more at https://theworldneedsyourbook.com/shop. The Productive Novelist Series. The Productive Novelist Series has 14 books spanning many independent publishing topics, including outlining, writing, editing, publishing, marketing, selling, business strategy, and mindset. You can read the books in order, or skip around based on where you're at in your writing and publishing journey. Learn more about the Productive Novelist Series here. Https://theworldneedsyourbook.com/books. Chapter 3: The Writing Faster Framework. I published the first version of this book in March 2015, after writing it at the end of 2014. So how am I doing 6 years later? Do I still write fast, use dictation, and publish 8 to 10 books a year? I definitely still write fast, at a natural and comfortable pace of 2,500+ words per hour. If I'm really flowing, I can hit 3,000+, but I usually need to get out my dictation software and microphone to go any higher than that, as my hands and wrists swell with pain when I go for the big 8-12k word days. I still use almost all of the techniques and step-by-step that I first described in the original book. But over time, and through talking to so many of my students and readers, I clarified and broadened that process to make it more general and accommodate more personality types. I share the broadened framework later in this chapter. I also still publish several books a year, though I've definitely experienced burnout and taken some years off. In 2018, I dealt with a ton of personal issues that held me back from publishing much, and in January 2019, I got pregnant after my husband and I experienced years of unexplained infertility. I'm writing this at the end of 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic and my child's first year of life, where I expect to publish about 6 books before the clock officially ticks into 2021. I would definitely love to get back to 8 to 10 books a year, though I'm less attached compared to past me. Having a back catalog has given me comfort over the years, and I don't feel the deep hunger to prove myself that I felt when I first published Write Better, Faster. The Writing Faster Framework. I've broken the Writing Faster Framework into 3 sections. Foundation: When you are first increasing your writing speed, you need to master 3 aspects: tracking your words, knowing what you are going to write, and writing in sprints. These 3 basics helped me roughly 2x to 3x my writing speed in a matter of days. In these chapters, you'll find the most popular methods that professional authors use to drastically increase their writing speeds and write more consistently. Many write upwards of 50,000 to 150,000 words per month on a regular basis. Next level: If you want to really take your speeds to the next level, You can look at your writing process and dictation transcription. Your writing process will evolve naturally as you write faster, but these chapters help you improve your mindset around the process and thus accelerate it. The dictation and transcription chapter is enough to help you decide if you want to incorporate it into your process. It's not for everyone, but if you feel it could be for you, you'll want to try it out for yourself and, if needed, grab additional books that focus specifically on the challenges of dictation. High Performance. Your energy is going to either accelerate or handicap your ultimate writing speed. What I've found is that people generally have enough baseline energy, but so much about life tends to drain that energy away. The biggest drain on your energy is your mindset. The next biggest is your physical health. Finally, your empty creative well and lack of systems around rest and play will also drag your word counts down. Shifting your energy is not an easy feat, and while I share some of my experiences in this chapter, I truly believe that many energy problems are about lifestyle, not writing faster, and thus the detailed solutions are beyond the scope of this book. Journal It: Choose Your Level. Are you trying to establish your writing foundation through creating consistent writing habits, increasing your writing speed, and improving your writing process? Are you trying to take a writing process that's already working for you to the next level through increased writing speed? Are you trying to go deeper into the lifestyle factors that help you perform at the highest level in your writing career? All are welcome, and it's fine to focus on one level at a time. When I wrote 50,000 words the first time, I did it without my full dictation setup. In the second month, I focused on optimization. The Writing Faster Framework is a process that you can work several times to continue to optimize your writing speed until you are writing at the level you want comfortably. Chapter 4: Tracking Your Words. If you're serious about creating a writing habit and boosting your word count per hour, there is one thing you must do. You must track your progress while you are attempting to make and master changes. You absolutely, 100% cannot skip this part. You will not succeed if you don't do this. I would not recommend even attempting this if you aren't going to bother with setting up and maintaining a tracking system. Here's why: To incite any real change, you must know what you're currently doing, what you want to do, and what the gap is. As Rachel Aaron pointed out in her brilliant book 2K to 10K, which I highly recommend, few writers have any clue how they write books to begin with. Is it any surprise that they can't figure out how to write faster, better, or more consistently? Just like you would at any job, you need to give yourself a performance review. Benchmark your current metrics for at least a week or two. This will give you a starting point for improving your metrics. Journaling prompt: Do you know your current writing benchmarks? Why or why not? If you are writing your first book, how can you benchmark your current metrics to see how you can improve over the course of writing the book? You're self-sabotaging in ways you can't begin to see right now. As humans, we're quite bad at remembering what we actually do on any given day. That's why people wake up 10 years later with 40 extra pounds, why employees are blindsided when they're fired, Why people see a picture of themselves and are shocked by how much they've aged. Our brains are incredibly good at hiding the truth from us. It's a survival mechanism, plain and simple. And if you're struggling with writing faster or more consistently, it's likely because this survival mechanism has kicked in. But your records will tell you the truth. You can use this information to catch yourself in the middle of your work and adjust course to improve your writing habits and speed over time. Journaling prompt: How have you self-sabotaged your writing in the past? What would having better records do to help you improve your writing habits and speed? We don't spot patterns without hard data. You may have a vague gut feeling that you write better in the morning, but you won't actually know anything until you track your progress at different times. I have been completely wrong about my patterns in the past, thinking I couldn't write in the mornings. It's 10:37 AM right now, and I've already typed about 1,500 words, and I'm just at the beginning of my writing block. If you're so sure of your natural inclinations, prove it to yourself with actual performance metrics. You won't be sorry you confirmed what you already knew, and you might be surprised by how much you didn't know about yourself. Journaling prompt: What are some things you know about yourself and your writing abilities? How can you set up an experiment to test whether that is (still) true or not? You have to approach your writing habits and speed like a scientist would. You can try to implement just the content and tips in this book, but you won't achieve optimal results. That's because self-knowledge is the actual holy grail of productivity, not anything else I share in this book. A lot of the information in this book is what I tried and what worked for me. I've also tested these tips and received feedback from thousands of authors that much of what I share works for them too. But you need to figure out what you should try and test it to see what is going to work for you. The whole entire project is an experiment you're going to do on yourself. My role in all of this is only to act as your mentor, to guide you in your thinking about what to try. You still have to do the work. And you will be completely lost if you don't set up your tracking system from the beginning. Journaling Prompt: How can you approach your writing habits and speed like a scientist, coming up with experiments to try and testing theories to optimize your writing efforts? Challenges with Tracking Your Progress. If you've ever tried to track anything—from your calorie intake, to your workouts, to your steps per day, to your weight, to your sales numbers or your traffic—you know that there's a lot holding you back from writing down and analyzing those numbers on a consistent basis. Here are the harsh truths of tracking: It's going to get old after a while. If you love data, you will love seeing your numbers go up as you progress through this transformation, but eventually, you'll hit a point where keeping the numbers is a chore. I have already hit this point and don't bother keeping track of my numbers anymore. I have a good handle on what works for me, and I've internalized a lot of it, so most of my writing time is spent in a moderate to optimal state. It's going to take time to maintain your spreadsheets. You don't want to count this time as part of your writing time, because eventually you'll stop tracking it. I would plan to maintain this for 1 to 3 months max, the higher end only if you're doing this extremely part-time. You may be tempted to fudge the data. Resist this urge to lie to yourself. Obvious, but worth stating explicitly. You'll need to mix things up during the experiment. If you write every morning for an hour, you're probably going to need to try writing at other times in the day. If you always type in the same spot, you might need to try a coffee shop or a dictation mic. If you use a jolt of coffee to get you going, you may need to switch to caffeine-free a few times. An experiment is just that, so don't be afraid to get out of your comfort zone. You will learn a lot less about yourself if you don't. What Gets Measured Gets Managed. I don't talk much about key performance indicators (KPIs) in this book, but the bottom line is that if you focus heavily on fresh word count for a while, that is what you're going to get in your results. Keep in mind that fresh word count is a key driver in books published, but it's not the only key driver. I ran into this personally when I was writing 50,000 words per month but had no process in place to also edit and self-publish 50,000 words per month. Don't forget about this and set your expectations accordingly. I talk about this a lot more later in the book, but I want to point out from the outset that word count does not equal published books. That equation is a bit more complicated. Tracking is going to make you work harder than you normally would. This is a known phenomenon called the Hawthorne effect. What it means is that when you are being watched, even by yourself, you are more likely to follow through on your intentions. That means that your results are going to be better when you're tracking than they are when you're not tracking. Keep this in mind for when you go off of tracking. I would say that although I could write 4,000 words per hour, and have on numerous occasions, I rarely do, now that I'm not tracking, because I'm not making changes to my writing habits any longer. Could is still a valuable outcome. But it's not like I can crank out a 40,000-word novel in 10 hours on a daily basis. You are a human, not a machine. Right now, I'm probably writing closer to 2,200 to 2,500 words per hour. It's 11:21 AM, and I've added about 1,500 new words since I last told you my time, 10:37 AM. I'm jumping around, as I usually do with nonfiction. I write more linearly with fiction, which accounts for the 4,000 WPH, but I can't recall ever achieving this with nonfiction. I'm sipping tea, listening in on conversations around me, and watching people walk by out the windows as I type. It's a relaxed environment. I'm not using my microphone, which accounts for a huge boost in my word count. Right now, I'm trying to enjoy myself, not write as fast as I possibly can. The point is that you're going to have bad days, and you're going to eventually want to optimize for something else. Like pleasure or enjoyability, where I'm at now. So don't take the numbers too literally. That last sentence will drive some of you absolutely insane and give others of you a huge sense of relief. Explore with an open mind. You really don't know what you're going to find. You may find that 4,000 words per hour is way, way out of your comfort zone. You may find that you need to write with music. You may find that you've been doing all the wrong things, and your writing routine needs a complete overhaul. You may find that everything is already optimized. Approach this process with no expectations, and you'll be surprised. Approach it with the goal of publishing 20 books next year, and you will only set yourself up for disappointment. Don't compare yourself to others. This is the road to anger, bitterness, resentment, jealousy, disappointment, and self-loathing. Eyes on your own paper. All progress is progress. If you get stuck, and you will, don't feel bad about stepping away for a moment. You'll see in My Life of a Writer Diary, in the appendix, that I got really stuck during the second month. I took some time off from the experiment and got clear on what I needed and wanted. Forgiving myself and my shortcomings was key to that. Transformations are wonderful, but they can also be all-consuming. As you're going through this transformation, try to ground it in realism and daily life. You can't drop everything and drive your word count up forever. That's just a recipe for burnout. Keep this experiment as close to real life as possible, and you'll get more realistic results you can live with in the process. Journaling prompt: Which challenges do you think you'll face with tracking your writing progress? How will you handle and overcome them, so you don't get derailed in your goals to improve your writing habits and speed? How to Track Your Progress. There are two most important metrics (MIMs) that you need to track: How many words per hour you're hitting, on average. How many hours per day you're writing, on average. The goal for your entire journey will be to increase these numbers in a way that works for you. You can adjust this goal to your preference, of course, but this is the basic driver of the experiment. To track your MIMs, you need to record what you're doing throughout the experiment. You can do this in multiple ways and formats: By keeping spreadsheets of what you do—I recommend Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets. By keeping a daily diary of what happened, at what times, and how you felt as you were trying to make it happen—I recommend Evernote, SimpleNote, or Google Docs. By allowing an automated program, like RescueTime, record your productivity for you. By sharing your progress with others publicly through a blog or within a group, I recommend Facebook or WordPress. Put as much of this as you can in place so you have more data. You'll be surprised by how much it helps you later. If this seems daunting, remember that tracking is temporary. Eventually, you won't need to track what you're doing because you'll have enough data to draw conclusions about what you should do, and then you can just integrate those conclusions into your habits and actions. Here's my list of what I tracked quantitatively (numbers): Start time. End time. Date. Total time spent. First Pomodoro, second Pomodoro, etc. First set of Pomodoros, second set of Pomodoros, etc. Where I was at, what inputs I used—my keyboard—whether I was primarily writing or editing, the title of the book, the title of the series, a notes column where I could write down mood. Here's my list of what I tracked qualitatively—rich textual data: times, how I felt, What I was struggling with. My original intentions. What got in the way of those intentions. Where I was, where I wanted to be. New experiments I wanted to try. Real-time evaluation of my progress. Real-time adjustment of my goals and expectations. I did not use rescue time personally, but it may be helpful to corroborate your data at the end of the month. Especially if you think you'll be tempted to lie to yourself. Of course, you can lie to yourself just as easily via rescue time—every system can be gamed. Journaling Prompt: What do you want to track qualitatively and quantitatively? What are some things you hope to discover as a result? You may be wondering what you would ever do with all this data, or whether you need to collect it to begin with. My thought is collect all the data you can at first, and adjust down as you go. If you find yourself not having any use for something, stop collecting it. But start at a place of abundance, just in case. Evaluate your data and progress and make adjustments. After collecting all this data for several weeks, I evaluated myself from session to session. And then in detail on a monthly basis when I did this experiment. That's what I'd recommend to you as well. My monthly detailed analysis was fascinating for me and gave me even richer insight than I was getting from the day-to-day. As you evaluate, here are some things you can do: See what you are doing now and do more of what's working. Abandon what's not working. Hypothesize some new theories about what would work for you, and set up the experiment. Compare your data from this month to last month, and congratulate yourself on any improvement. Add another goal and push yourself. Journaling prompt: How will you evaluate yourself as you go along? How can you use evaluation to tweak and adjust your goals and experiments along the way? Journal It: Setting Up Your Tracking Systems. What can you gain from getting a tracking system into place? If you're trying to write every day, increase your writing speed, create a more joyful writing schedule, complete your first book in a timely manner, and more, I can't tell you how important tracking is to your success. I'll reiterate, if there's one takeaway you glean from this book, it should be to start tracking your data around writing. As we continue through this book, much of the information will be optional and dependent on your goals and what works for you. Tracking is not optional, though. I strongly recommend you implement a tracking system before continuing with the book. Chapter 5: Knowledge About Your Writing. One of the things that doubled my writing speed with not much additional effort was knowing what I want to write about before I write it. Many authors either scrimp on an outline or skip completely—big mistake. I understand the compulsion to skip pre-production and just sit down and write. Because I used to do the exact same thing. I can tell you with confidence where that road led to for me: a bloated novel that didn't make much sense or sell well. My system for gaining knowledge about my novel. It's only through years of refining that I've been able to come up with a solid process to create an amazing draft that works for me. This particular system leaves very little room for writer's block. Your mileage may vary, but I think this is a worthy framework to start from. You'll of course have to customize it to your own style and preferences. Here's how it works. Step 1: Outline. Pretty much everything I learned about outlining, I learned from reading only a few books, despite buying and reading over 50, so save yourself time and take my recommendations. I have done two things for you that will help you skip a ton of the research I had to do on outlines. The first is that I wrote three of my own books on storycraft: Novel Writing Prep, a 30-day planner that prepares you to write 50,000 words in one month; The Productive Novelist #1, which helps you complete your outline in 30 days by focusing on one small part of your book at a time; Story Symmetry: Tune your story into harmony and alignment to create a better reading experience. The Productive Novelist #5, which combines what I learned from dozens of books on storycraft and helps you understand modern story structure at a deep level so you can craft your own outline style that works for you. Editing for Marketability: Rewrite your story to find 10,000 true fans and sell more books. The Productive Novelist #6, which uses marketing techniques to help you take your current manuscript or completed ones like a first in series to a new level of amazing, useful especially if you are struggling to write fiction that sells easily. The second thing I've done to aid you in outlining is that I've given you my favorite storycraft books throughout this chapter so you can pick them up and read for yourself. I've sprinkled these among this list of the types of information you want to trace in your outlines. Number 1: The plot arc. You definitely want to know your plot, and it's easy enough to follow the 4-part story structure that is commonly taught for commercial work. Story Engineering by Larry Brooks is the best book on this topic. I can't recommend his book enough. He goes over inciting incidents, cliffhangers, plot points, pinch points, and more. Most aspiring (and some actual) authors stop at the plot outline, when there are still a few other pieces of your book that you want to know more about before moving on to beats. 2. The Character Arcs. You also want to outline major character arcs, which gets sticky if you have multiple characters or multiple viewpoints. Still, there's no getting around doing character arc outlines for every major character, including the antagonist, because a character that people care about will change throughout the story and you've got to be able to show that. I also usually give myself 3 or 4 backstory/flashback/dream sequence sections per novel, though that's by no means a hard and fast rule. I just try not to overwhelm my readers with too much information about any one character. As it was explained to me, when you define your characters too sharply at their introduction, it sometimes leaves little room for them to grow. This works well for most tertiary characters, but not for protagonists, antagonists, and secondary characters, who need much more gray area in their personalities. My favorite books on this topic are by Victoria Lynn Schmidt, starting with 45 Master Characters, and continuing with her other book, A Writer's Guide to Characterization. Though if you only read one, read 45 Master Characters. I also subscribe to the television model of character arcs when I'm writing a series. The television model is something you'll probably recognize once you hear it. It's the idea that every secondary character gets an episode dedicated to them per season. One amazing show that follows this model exactly just came out in 2014, called "How to Get Away with Murder." Every storyteller should watch this show to get a better understanding of how to build character arcs. The show starts with a general pilot that sets up the concept of the entire series, focusing on the main character, the one who's on all the posters, Annalise Keating. She's a criminal defense attorney who puts together this crack team of first-year law students to work at her firm. In the second episode, we watch one of Annalise Keating's cases. Like many new television shows, this one has a freak of the week for the first 6 to 7 episodes so that new viewers can jump right in without a ton of context. But we also learn more about one of the first years on this crack team while keeping the others in the background. The next episode focuses on another of the first years, and then another; by the 6th or 7th episode, all the characters have had their moment in the sun, the larger arc has developed rapidly, and the show has kept its pattern of one trial case solved per episode. It's really quite a feat to watch, and one that I haven't seen many other shows pull off so well. Once you've created both your plot arc and your character arcs, you of course need to overlay them and start matching things up. This can be a bit challenging, or it can feel serendipitous—I've felt both for the same book. I'm not going to go into detail on this because it depends a lot on how you outline. What I will say is that this part is a bit like piecing together a puzzle. All of the little pieces you've gathered with eventually form the full picture, but you've got to figure out the connections to make it happen. If you are confused about how to meld your plot and character arcs, I highly recommend my two books mentioned earlier: Novel Writing Prep and Story Symmetry. Sometimes people think I'm being self-promotional in my books, but I'm mentioning these two books again because they have the exact answers you're looking for. To me, it's a gift not to wade through a bunch of junk to get to the specific solution I need. I wrote the Productive Novelist series based almost entirely off of the most common problems and questions that independent authors have about every step of the writing, publishing, and marketing processes. This series is a clear step-by-step map to success, so please read the other books when you get stuck, as the answer is likely front and center. Whatever path you take to melding your plot and character arcs, If you can get this right, you'll be way ahead of at least 90% of writers who simply don't think about how much time they could save down the road by getting plot and character arcs right up front. Number 3: Worldbuilding Arcs. If you want to go a step further, it may also be helpful to do a worldbuilding outline, especially if you write anything other than contemporary fiction. Few historical, fantasy, and science fiction authors think about this, which results in pockets of information dumps throughout their novel. I experienced this with an urban fantasy one was working on, where I threw like everything anyone ever needed to know about the world into a single book. When I went back through and rewrote the book, it was my first one, so it needed to be rewritten for a plethora of reasons. I took entire plot lines and just moved them to later books in the series; they were merely open threads that slowed down the first book. When it comes to creating a world-building outline, there aren't any real templates or books out there to recommend. What I do is limit myself to the least someone needs to know to understand the novel, and move pieces around accordingly. Less always seems to be more in these cases. A great example of someone who can build a world slowly is J.K. Rowling. Spoiler alert: Not that anyone who hasn't made time to read the Harry Potter series yet needs one, I'm now going to talk about the full plot of all 7 books. Skip the next several pages or so if you haven't read the series and plan to. Imagine, for example, if she tried to cram in all the information about the Horcruxes in Book 2. Where the first one showed up? It would have been a confusing mess. Deciding where to reveal this information was an interesting choice on her part, and in a way revitalized the entire series in the 6th and 7th books, when we finally got the whole backstory on Voldemort. Another amazing example of world-building is in this British television show called "Black Mirror." It's a bit like The Twilight Zone, and explores the way our digital lives impact us in dark ways. The second episode of the first season is called "15 Million Merits," and is what I would consider a masterclass on world-building. The script itself is sparse of dialogue, but the setting and the visuals give you all the information you need to immerse yourself. I love how every little piece, from the Wraiths' babes at the beginning, to the scenes with the apples tell so much more about the world than words could. I don't think outlining the world-building progression needs to be a big effort, especially not compared to the plot and character arcs. I tend to just make notes about when I'm going to dig in to each piece of information and try to keep those pieces spread out. If you are a color-coding type, you can easily visualize this by labeling the world-building sections of your outline in green. One last thing I want to say about outlines, that they don't need to be this huge production. An outline is just a few sentences about each chapter plus a list of things you want to touch on within the scene. Journaling prompt: How can you gain more knowledge about your novel through outlining? What outlining system makes sense to you? Step 2: Beats. After the outline is done, I then continue to build out the story, writing down the highlights for each chapter scene. Mine are basically the same, though sometimes a chapter is a couple scenes strung together with transitions. What are beats? My short definition is: you can do beats however you want. Similar to an outline, beats are very personal. The way I do mine is I attempt to tell a mythical someone what my story is about. Later, I'll convert tell to show, the preferred method of reading a story, but for now, I just want to get down what exactly the story is. This part immediately makes the gaps in my story painfully obvious. Have you ever thought you had a great story, and then when you tried to tell someone, you realized it's actually terrible? This happened to me a lot in my youth. I had an amazing night out with my friends, and I'd be talking about it at lunch the next day, and then I'd realize that the story basically amounted to "we got drunk and partied." Your beats will tell you if you actually have a story that someone else cares about, and will also help you nail down the details in a way that outlining doesn't force you to. For example, if you're outlining, you can write stuff like "Harry Potter goes up against Professor Quirrell and wins." Unfortunately, that sentence is almost useless when you get to the actual writing part. There are way too many details that you still need to figure out, and if you go straight to the draft, you will spin your wheels and waste your potential for flow trying to decide on the most basic of plot points. In the book Willpower, the author points out that decision-making is one of the largest taxes on your willpower throughout the day. That's why people like President Obama don't spend time on pointless decisions, like what to wear in the morning. His entire wardrobe is coordinated to gray and blue suits. If you buy into the research, you can probably see why it's so hard to keep writing when you have no clue what your story is about. Writing, at the end of the day, is a series of decisions, and you'll make thousands of them throughout your novel without even realizing it. You're eating up all your willpower making these decisions, which makes it hard to then apply that same willpower to the act of putting fingers to keyboard. Beating is a way to make a ton of decisions about your novel, without the added pressure of making it "sound good." Going back to the original sentence, "Harry Potter goes up against Professor Quirrell and wins," let's dig into those decisions now. If you were telling someone this story, you wouldn't be able to get away with that single sentence. You would need to expand. The other person might ask questions like: How does Harry win? Where do they battle? What is the weapon? What happens to Professor Quirrell afterward? Does Harry actually kill him, or just stun him? How does a child take down an adult wizard, inhabited by the darkest lord of all time? Your beats are where you can work out all the answers to these questions. Just start by asking yourself one question you have about a sentence in your outline. With every question, you'll find an answer and another few questions. Keep on prodding yourself until you've developed a nice narrative that you could share with someone else to explain your scene. You'll end up beating out several chapters' worth of content and answer all the basic questions someone might have about your story. Following this simple process alone is going to be insanely more helpful than your outline. It also takes a lot less time than you think. I can usually beat out my entire book in a day or two, and this saves me hundreds of hours during both the writing and editing processes because I don't waste time going down paths that don't lead to a successful story. Let me expand on that. As Larry Brooks says in Story Engineering, my absolute favorite book on plotting, too many writers waste words on trying to find their plot and end up having to cut huge sections and entire chapters from their final draft. This is not only painful and time-consuming but also 100% avoidable. He subscribes to the idea that finding your story in pre-production, before you do all that drafting, is vastly more efficient, and I have to agree based on my personal experience. I rarely need to cut sections from my drafts anymore because the story is clean and whole from the beats. I'm able to spot and address issues before I even start drafting because they become apparent when reading through the beats. This results in significantly less writing, significantly less rewriting, and significantly less editing. It sets me up for success all the way through the rest of my process. In my beats, I also like to add in other little notes to myself. For example, I like to add in a beat that reminds me to describe the setting, especially if it hasn't been done before in the book. Same goes for characters. You usually need to give them at least a sentence, especially if they are tertiary and fairly one-note. Like the Dursleys in Harry Potter. You'll also want to experiment with your length of outline to length of beats ratio, and length of beats to length of draft ratio. For me, one sentence in my outline usually equates to 1 to 3 paragraphs in my beats. And one paragraph in my beats usually equates to 300 to 500 words of draft. Why is this useful? Because once you figure out what those amounts are for you, you'll be able to predict how much time you need to complete a draft. A big part of drafting is knowing when something is done. Another way this has helped me is I can push myself a little more. I can say stuff to myself like, "Oh, I'll just do one more beat, it will only take 10 minutes." A great productivity tip that so many gurus will tell you is when you are overwhelmed with a task, it's often because you need to break it up into manageable chunks. That's what knowing these ratios helps you do, and most writers can manage 300 to 500 words per day, no matter how busy they are. Finally, knowing this information takes a lot of the mystery out of how to go from outline to draft. Mystery equals fear. Fear equals resistance. Resistance equals procrastination. Remove your procrastination at the source, and you won't have to push yourself to write ever again. You must weigh the value and knowledge you'll get from pre-production, a lot, against the value and knowledge you'll get from drafting, a lot more. Your goal at the outline and beats level should be to learn enough about your characters, setting, world, and plot to get started with actually writing. You need to do enough in pre-production to hit your personal goals while not spending too much time in pre-production to the point that you never start writing. As important as I believe pre-production is, I've also seen writers who stay in pre-production for years. It is painful and piteous to watch a writer stay stuck in this mode. You will always, always learn a lot more about each of these areas as you write. Eventually, you must just start. Journaling prompt: How do you write beats? How can beats help you get rid of writer's block? How can beats help you write faster and take advantage of in-between times to get more writing in? Step 3: Sketch or skeleton. Note: I use sketch and skeleton interchangeably throughout this book. What exactly is the sketch? I think of it the same way an artist might think of it. It's a rough draft of what you are eventually going to draw. Isn't that just the draft? Maybe, but for some writers, it's better if it's an entirely separate step. You may or may not need this step, based on whether or not you are an underwriter, or an overwriter. Overwriters will definitely not need it, and it will probably drive them crazy. For me, as an underwriter, I like it because my mind works out some parts of my story in more detail than others, and I can get stuck on those others and not make nearly as much progress as I want. I basically use the sketch step to turn the beats (the tell) into a draft (the show) and then to make notes about anything that's not yet fully formed in my mind, but that I know will eventually need to be in the draft, i.e., transitions. As inspiration hits, I start detailing the sketch, drawing in the lines of the sketch, if you will. This allows me to skip around and work on whatever I feel like while still making progress overall. It ensures that if I'm doing writing sprints, I'm spending them productively, because I'm gravitating toward whatever inspires me at that moment. This helps keep me motivated and in flow. I find myself skipping around when I'm feeling excited about one section but not another, or when I feel like writing dialogue and not description. If I'm sketching, I almost always skip transitions between beats because they bore me to tears. Even as I write this book, I keep skipping between the steps in this section, leaving a few unfinished sentences and a few sections blank to fill in later. This helps me stay inspired about what I'm writing. Whatever works for you. I tend to have author ADD and hop around a lot. If you don't have this problem, then you probably don't need a sketch step. The last thing I'll say about the sketch is that it can bring a sense of playfulness to your work. Allowing you a somewhat carefree way of drafting without all the pressure of writing, the one with the capital W. If you struggle with the prospect of writing, but you have no trouble jotting down some parts of your draft in full while making notes on the rest to come back to later, then you may appreciate sketching for the freedom it provides. All of that said, I frequently don't use the sketch and instead skip straight to a full draft. This is true especially when I do a walk and talk, explained in a later chapter, to get a draft going quickly. But if I'm in a moseying mood, or if I'm short on time, or if I'm phoning it in— yes, I still do that, it's going to happen if you write thousands of words every day— or if I don't have my microphone with me, then I'll just open my laptop and write a little section of a scene this way. Making all the decisions is the hardest part of writing. A lot of writers try to do it all at once while also trying to get the character and setting right. And the writing itself goes very, very slowly as a result. Write sketches/skeletons instead. Journaling prompt: Do you like the idea of writing a skeleton or sketch to make decisions faster in a draft? Step 4: Draft. It's finally time for that dreaded draft. Only, you've done so much work already with the beats and the sketching that it likely doesn't seem that hard anymore. In fact, you can see the framework of your scene coming together already in bits and pieces, and all you need to do is start stringing those pieces together. I learned most of what I understand about drafting novels from my background in computer science and software programming. The way I write is to go from the high-level, big-picture view of my novel, and then work my way down to the details. If you can get all the chunks into their correct places, then you can fiddle with the inner workings of the chunks and tweak as much as you want. During the drafting stage, I first rearrange my chunks how I want them. They are usually already in the correct order, because I already arranged them in order in the beats. Next, I add any transitions necessary, which are usually in the form of narrative summary. For example, your characters are having a conversation in the dining room with the wrench. Then, they are having a conversation in the garage with the scissors. You need to narrate, in just a few sentences usually, the physical distance between those two chunks, so your reader follows the characters along as they move. Finally, I clean up the chunks themselves, which for the first draft usually just means that I finish them off so I don't have any missing sentences or sections. I also tend to add color here, descriptions, funny looks, jokes, but you can also do this during editing. My goal of the draft round is to get my scene or chapter into a compile. In software programming, Compile means that your code can at least run. It doesn't mean your code is good, elegant, or even does what it's intended to do; it just means that it runs. For both fiction and nonfiction, compile means that you complete your sentences and thoughts without completely losing the reader. It doesn't mean that your draft is good, elegant, or even does what it's intended to do; it just means that the reader can comprehend it. If you've followed these steps, you've done so much of the work by this point, which should make the draft smooth sailing. Journaling prompt: What about the draft stresses you out and how can you make the first draft easy and joyful? What is your system? I believe I've given you more than enough about my process to help you formulate your own process for gaining more knowledge about what you're writing. And for getting the draft done quickly and efficiently. The main takeaways I hope you gain from this section are: Going from outline straight to draft is a great way to get stuck. I can't say enough about the Beats step. It will easily help you double your word count per hour and also make writing much more fun for you. Breaking down your work into small, doable 15-minute tasks is a winning strategy. Our minds simply can't process huge projects. Beats help you compartmentalize sections of your work. The best combatant for procrastination is to always know exactly what you need to do next. This is even more important for parents of little ones and full-time employees who will need to write in the in-betweens of the day. Having a solid outline is going to save you lots of mistakes, rewrites, and wasted energy throughout your entire writing process. Your outlining process will be specific and personal. I've seen, however, that simply having an outlining process can double a novelist's productivity. Journaling prompt: Where do you see your largest sticking points when writing a first draft? How will you use some of the concepts in this chapter to tweak your writing process and make the whole experience easier and more joyful? Before I move on to the next section, I wanted to give you just a few more ways you can spot a need for adjustment and refinement of your process. A low word count per hour means you need more planning. Whenever I drop below about 1,500 words per hour, I know that I need to step back and do some more planning on the scene. Note: Your metric will be different depending on how fast you write,, but a good benchmark is a number at about 50-60% of your average writing speed. Some writers mistake slow writing for a need to push themselves harder or focus more. If they see that their writing is poking along at all, again most writers have no clue. What it actually means is that you have no clue where your story is going. You either haven't visualized your scene well enough, haven't made enough decisions about your scene, or, for nonfiction, haven't collected enough data or done enough research. This is where your tracking spreadsheets are essential. A lot of writers don't think of their word count speed as a monitoring metric, but it makes so much sense. If you were running significantly slower than you could, wouldn't you wonder if you were sick or had an injury? If you were at work and were only producing at half your usual pace, Wouldn't your boss sit you down and start asking about your home life, your health, your mental state? You don't have a boss, so you need to spot this pattern on your own. If you're going slow on a scene, you have a lot of options. Set it aside and come back to it later. Your subconscious hasn't done enough of the work yet, but it will. Go back to your outline to see if you made a wrong turn. Ask yourself more questions about your story. What is the first thing someone would ask if you tried to describe this story to them? Now answer that question. Go back through your diary and look for patterns. There might be some insight there that is only obvious in hindsight, but that would make a huge difference in your process. Ask a friend or critique partner for feedback. Others can see your mistakes more easily than you can. All of this is relative, of course, so your low word count may be a completely different number. What's important is to know your numbers and see warning bells when your numbers are off. Likewise, to feel giddiness when your numbers skyrocket, as I expect them to once you implement even just a few sections in this book. Journaling prompt: What is your fallback plan when your writing is moving slowly? How can you salvage a slow drafting point to better hit a deadline? What do you want to test out in this area? An urge to procrastinate means you've taken a wrong turn in the story itself. If you are listening to this book, you are not a lazy person. That means you are motivated, smart, and proactive, and you can figure out anything life throws at you. Furthermore, this 4-step process actively combats a lot of the fears writers face when they start. It's already working for you to break through the barriers that are holding you back from hitting your writing goals. So if you have done all these steps, and you love writing, and you want to write your story, and you're still procrastinating, it's probably because something about your story is wrong and you aren't facing it. You see, your gut knows you've taken a wrong turn in your story long before your mind does. There are many times when I'm procrastinating and have no idea where I've gone wrong. In those situations, I can't identify any one part of the story that's wrong. The only thing I know is that something is wrong. Again, you have a lot of options. Take a break from the book. You probably have other projects you can work on in the meantime, and pushing back a release date is understandable and commonplace, as long as it's communicated well. Toss a compiled version of what you have so far on your Kindle, and experience it like a reader would. How does it make you feel? Try to block out all your urges to rewrite, and instead get lost in the characters and story. This has helped me more than once get out of my own head and into my readers' heads. Use one of the tactics under the low word count section. They will all work in this case too. Journaling prompt: What is your strategy for beating procrastination when it happens? How will you get unstuck? Difficulty with any of these steps means you need a different step. For some writers, this entire 4-step process will be complete overkill. For others, it won't be nearly enough. I touched on this earlier, but you truly need to use self-knowledge to adapt this process to what you're trying to do. How do you do this? There are several options. Find more writers' processes to emulate. Many, many writers write about how they get things done and post it online for free. There are also a ton of comprehensive paid resources that dive crazy deep into the authors' processes. My two favorite ones that are so relevant to writing faster are 2K to 10K by Rachel Aaron and Fiction Unboxed by Shawn Platt and Johnny B. Truant. Study your own past successes. You don't have to steal from others, as you can steal from yourself and all the other areas of your life where you've already succeeded. Chances are, something in that area will help you in this area. Great examples of areas with corollary goals and tactics to writing faster and more are weight loss, training for any sport—marathons especially are superbly metaphorical—hacking any sort of system, like a corporation, a college or university, or a particular industry, or learning a language. Trace back over your steps in any of these areas, and you'll probably spot some strategies and tactics that worked for you then that will also work for your writing goals. Launch a new experiment on yourself. Just try something different. Don't worry about whether it's better; just do something else. Record your results and adjust from there. Journaling prompt: Who do you want to emulate for your own process? How can you get access to the right mentors to see how they write books? What systems do you want to test to see if they work for you? Journal it. More knowledge. The goal of this chapter is to get knowledge about what you are writing into whatever format that helps you so you can tweak from there. Find ways to get through the Knowledge step faster, more efficiently, with more overall savings on your entire process. To reiterate, Knowledge alone basically doubled my word count per hour. It also helped me completely banish writer's block and made sitting down to write a much easier habit to adapt. Can it do the same for you? Chapter 6: Writing in Sprints. We've all experienced it at least once: complete and total immersion in a project, book, or goal. When we were in that place of total immersion, we were making inhuman progress, losing track of time, coming up with way better than our usual ideas, and soaring free mentally and emotionally. We were in flow, and damn did it feel effortless. Flow is the state of complete immersion in the activity at hand, no matter what that activity is. When you're in flow, your body moves without your mind's conscious intervention—you don't have to think, you just do. This hyperfocused state allows you to move incredibly quickly through your tasks, your project, or whatever else you're working on. Every writer longs for the state of flow while he or she is writing. It helps you write better, faster, and more. It appeases both writers who love to write and writers who love to have written. And it means that our stories are being told and spreading value to others. But how do you achieve a state of flow? It's a question I asked myself several times before, that took me many years to come up with answers to. What helped me most was falling into a state of flow accidentally and then observing the steps I took leading up to it. Through trial and error, I've come up with a list of writing-specific techniques that I believe can get any writer closer to a state of flow. We've already talked about a number of tips that will help you achieve a state of flow. For example, we talked about having a larger "why" for what you're doing in the Mindset chapter, and we talked about how knowledge of what you're about to write can eliminate mystery about what to do next as you're writing. A few other traits of flow: losing track of time, concentration and focus, engaging and re-engaging in the task at hand. Eliminating distractions. Eliminating negative thoughts. Taking ownership of your results. Knowing the next small step to take. Achieving the state of flow seems like a very personal process to me, in all the years I've studied it. As such, I'm going to share some of the rituals that have helped me achieve flow with writing, with the caveat that you may want to brainstorm on the traits I've shared above to figure out what works for you. Even if some of the following tips are not for you, I hope they will inspire you to come up with your own techniques and tricks for getting into flow. Word of warning: many of these tips would work for the workplace as well, but I encourage you to use them just for writing when possible, especially since you are chasing the specific goal of writing better and faster. Mixing the two might put you in a state of mind for your day job when you're supposed to be writing, or vice versa. Use writing sprints. One of the best ways to win at distraction whack-a-mole—if winning is even possible—is to time-box your distractions and essentially limit your exposure. Time-boxing is a technique where you spend a small, concentrated amount of time on something, then quit when the time is up. If you've ever used a calendar, then you have some experience with time-boxing. My time boxing method of choice is the Pomodoro method because it is 25 minutes on with 5-minute breaks. I use the Pomodoro method only for writing, which feels important to me. I feel like if I tried to use it for something else, like clearing my inbox, I would be in the headspace of my email during my set writing times. I never tested it though, so see for yourself. The 5-minute breaks were essential to my progress, especially at first. They allowed me to record my numbers on the spreadsheet, get up and walk around for a minute, go to the bathroom, or get a quick snack or look at my phone without feeling crazy. I also loved the Pomodoro method because it normalized all my writing sessions. I originally tracked my writing sessions by just starting when I felt like it, and ending when I felt like it. This meant that sometimes my sessions were 7 minutes long, while others were 77 minutes long. It was really hard to see patterns at a glance this way. The 25-minute sessions helped me compare and contrast sessions easily. People sometimes ask me, "Are the time boxes set or can you adjust them?" I searched online and never found a good answer as to whether 25 minutes was an optimal length of focus. So I tried it myself. I found that for me, somewhere closer to 40 minutes was more optimal, only because when I got started with a scene or section, I would be roaring along and the buzzer would go off, pulling me out of flow. I liked 40 minutes because I could usually finish a draft 2,500-word scene, my average scene length, and I could still do a 5-minute break for around 45 minutes of time total. In 3 hours, I could do 4 Pomodoros, which is equal to 1 set. Your mileage may vary. For example, if you only have an hour to write every day, doing 2 Pomodoros at 25 minutes each is probably more effective. If you're not sure, I recommend starting with 25 on, 5 off, and adjusting from there. I will say that when I first started, 25 minutes was painfully long for me. This was because I was addicted to distractions. Practice cured my addictions. If you are feeling like 25 minutes is far too long for you, or if your schedule doesn't allow for you to sit down for a long stretch, you can also try 8 minutes on and 2 minutes off. This is the basis for the 8-Minute Writing Habit that is the title of the previous book in this series. You can slowly increase your Pomodoros in 5-minute increments as well, which will improve your writing stamina, or the total amount of time you spend writing per day. One thing I don't do is check email or Facebook. Those apps are designed to suck you in, so they aren't ideal for 5-minute breaks. I've also heard of people who do 50 push-ups, or whatever. Awesome idea if 50 push-ups is easy or refreshing for you, but if not, don't pick this up. Don't do anything that's going to drain your energy on your break. That's a recipe for burnout. While the rest of this chapter will share other ways to get into flow, I've found that writing sprints is a key factor in getting more writing done, faster. Journaling Prompt: How can you test writing sprints to improve your writing habits and speed? What length of time sounds good to you? What length of break sounds good to you? How can you realistically fit writing sprints into your schedule to get into better flow? Have a system for emptying thoughts. Have you ever noticed that a lot of productivity hacks basically amount to deleting? Well, if the flow step had a theme, it would be delete. Here are ways we delete to be more productive and efficient. Eat less or cut out specific foods to lose weight, gain focus, develop muscle. Get rid of stuff in your closet to organize it. Clear meetings on your calendar to do more creative work. Archive, filter, and delete most of your emails to clean your inbox. Unsubscribe from, log out of, and quit social media to get a life again. Since deletion is a key step in any productivity improvement, my next rule of achieving flow is to empty your mind, the place where all your creative work comes from, in any way that you can. You can do this in a hundred different ways. Many, many uber-productive people turn to meditation, yoga, or both. As an ENTP and an idea person, I tend to get sidetracked by my own ideas. For me, journaling has been the best source of release and easiest way to empty my mind. I have stacks of black 5.5" x 8.5" Moleskines that are full of ideas and insights I'll likely never get to in my lifetime. But having them down on paper somehow allows my mind to release them and close the open loop. Journaling has been one of the most important writing practices I've ever encountered. Writing truly takes all of your energy, attention, and being while you're doing it, so you can't have other threads spinning in the background. Journaling helped me hit delete on those threads. I journal the way most people exercise— daily, first thing, plus whenever my mind feels mushy or I find myself not making writing progress on my projects. Journaling Prompt: How do you empty your thoughts so you can sink into flow faster? What journaling practices can you put into place to make it easier to get into flow on a regular basis? How can you hit delete on things that are taking up valuable real estate in your mind, such as clutter (digital and physical) and interruptions? Cross unnecessary decisions and tasks off your list. A big part of writing is making space for writing. I asked my husband Patrick one day, "Do you think I need to work somewhere with no access to the internet?" He said, "You don't need more motivation to write. You love writing. You just need to set aside blocks of time to do it." I realized immediately the truth in this. A writing career doesn't require a ton of productivity aerobatics to make things work. It actually requires a lot of space—in your mind, in your surroundings, and yes, even in your schedule. There is literally only one way to make space for more writing, and that is to start crossing off your to-dos rather than checking them off. For a long time, I thought I could do it all, but nope. The first thing to go in a busy schedule is your creative work. It's just too taxing, too ambivalent, too difficult to check off. Creative projects are endless in how much they require from you. Right now, if you are not writing as much, it's largely because you're busy during the day. While logically you probably have a few hours to spare, mentally you're spent. The harsh truth about writing more is that you need to figure out what you're going to give up, and let go of in order to get more time to get it done. So you have to turn off the internet for a few hours, give up your B and C list television shows, and stop playing video games. None of this will kill you, and a lot of it will probably make you happier. You may be tempted to cling to these little comforts, but here are some easy ways to make that space. Log out of Facebook. Do you have any idea how many times you check that thing? Just logging out will make you realize how addicted you are. And hitting the login page of Facebook is a nice slap on the wrist without making you feel like you are never going to speak to your 843 friends again. Unplug the internet or go to a coffee shop. I love coffee shops. Tea is a fun pairing with writing and always gets me in the mood. And crappy shared internet is close enough to no internet. Because when a site takes nearly a minute to load, you will get bored and give up. Delete shows from your DVR. This is easily one of my favorite productivity strategies ever. If I need more time, I just start deleting things, leaving groups, unsubscribing from newsletters, turning off notifications, quitting habits. If I feel bummed after a few days of quitting, I simply add it back. But that doesn't happen 90% of the time. Typically, without the constant reminder that something is there, I pretty much forget it completely. We live in an on-demand world, so you can always come back to it later. New Girl, for example, is a funny television show, but I can watch it on Netflix someday. In the meantime, my books are getting done. Set times for eating. I eat between 12 PM and 8 PM every day, unless there are extenuating circumstances. Usually I eat a salad or leftovers for lunch, and then whatever Patrick wants for dinner. Very few snacks in between, since we don't keep a lot of them around the house. Is all of this weird? Well, I like to call it quirky. But basically, it prevents a ton of thinking regarding food. Wear a uniform to work. I live in St. Louis, So my uniform is basically thick tights, sweater boots, and a comfortable hoodie. This cuts down on the time I spend to get ready and is also public-ready, which means I can actually wear it outside without looking like I just rolled out of bed. Save alcohol and smoking for the weekends or cut them out completely. They just make you miserable anyway, and when your body is off its addictions for even a short amount of time, it's easier to not go back to them. Maybe it's because I recently hit my 30s, but as of late, I've been limiting myself to 2 drinks max in one sitting. Anything more ruins my next day of writing. Mostly, you need to identify your soft addictions and give them up, at least during this process. Easier said than done, of course. Journaling Prompt: What are your soft addictions and how can you quit them? How much time and energy would this help you free up for writing time? Create systems that combat distractions. Concentration is key to achieving flow, and you can't concentrate if you are distracted. Again, there are hundreds of ways to distract yourself, and more pop up every day. It's really, really not your fault. As one of my favorite bloggers, Rebecca Healey, writes, companies are now spending millions and billions of dollars perfecting the addictive crunch of a chip until the whole bag is gone, the autoplay of the next episode until you've watched the entire season, the notification alert until all of your time is spent. The world is working against you, trying to push their own agendas. Productivity has become synonymous with navigating this veritable field of landmines. Timelines, so that your own agenda doesn't blow up in your face every single day. A lot of your daily grind is going to be one large game of distraction whack-a-mole. Here are some of the obvious and easy things you can do: Turn off the damn internet. I've never met a writer who can get into flow while simultaneously having easy internet access. Put all your devices on airplane mode and let yourself spend a few hours notification-free. It's not going to kill you, and in fact, it will probably be the huge relief you need to finally relax and get some writing done. Put up passive barriers everywhere. A passive barrier is something that is small but annoying to remove in order to do something that you might do. For example, a passive barrier to going to the gym might be having to de-ice your car. While I was doing my daily writing habit challenge, I maintained a separate account on my computer that was essentially on lockdown, so I couldn't get on the internet. It was so annoying to close out all my programs and switch over that I could do many distraction-free hours of writing in the mornings. This unfortunately worked the other way as well. If I was on my internet account, it was that much more difficult to get back to writing. My prerogative quickly became to put up as many passive barriers as possible for things I didn't want to do, and to remove those passive barriers for things I did want to do. This meant doing stuff like not switching over to the internet account until the evening, and then switching back before I went to bed. I don't need this barrier anymore because I've gotten used to spending long periods of time writing, but when I first started, I was like a crack addict with the internet. Close the door. You will not understand the power of a door against your loved ones until you don't have one. In my 1-bedroom plus den apartment that I share with Patrick and my little West Highland Terrier, Mia, I basically work in a walk-in closet that's been gutted and repurposed as an office. There is no door. Which means that if I want any peace or interruption-free time, I have to leave or work in our bedroom or bathroom, the only two rooms in our entire apartment that have doors. Yay, open floor plan! If you are lucky enough to have a door, establish the rules with your family. You need your loved ones on your team, rooting for you, honoring your boundaries. They must respect your work time and treat it as sacred as you treat it, or you won't see much success with this. There is a lot of detail to these 3 items that I'm leaving out, but that's basically the premise. Don't get overwhelmed; remember, this is a game of whack-a-mole. You don't try to hit them all at once; you wait for the moles to poke their ugly heads above ground, then bam! Journaling Prompt: What systems can you put in place to eliminate or manage distractions while you are writing? Let motivation take over. Confession time: I don't use the Pomodoro method as often anymore, unless I'm on a deadline or trying to tackle a section that I'm particularly frustrated and/or bored by. I also don't always turn off my internet—I think it's on right now, actually, in case I need to look up a quote. What I've found is that you don't need a lot of these tips to get into flow once you have the motivation. When you feel motivated, it's much easier to slide into flow. These tips are great when you're starting out, or if you don't have a lot of practice with writing tons of words every day. But like tracking your progress, like self-editing, like plotting and story structure, really, like a lot of aspects of writing, once you practice enough you begin to internalize what you've learned. This has happened to me, in two other areas of my life. First, when I was studying jiu-jitsu, and I began reacting from muscle memory during my sparring matches rather than from any thoughtful or logical process on my part. I had been over the moves so many times, perfected the positioning of my hands, arms, legs, and posture, and calculated the right amount of force to use so many times that the instinctual part of me finally took over. This took several years, lots of training, and constant vigilance, but even today, over 10 years after my last jiu-jitsu class, I still have a lot of the self-defense skills I learned there, which was of course the point. When someone is attacking, you don't want to hesitate over what to do next. The second time it happened to me was with singing. I sang for most of my school-age years, always participating in the choir until I got to college. When I knew a song, I didn't have to think about the words, the notes, anything. I could just go up there and add my energy and perform. Writing is a bit like this too, though so many writers, even professional ones, never get to the point where they can perform at a high level even without the proper routines and preparation. Learning to write faster and putting in more hours has gotten me to this level. I've been working on this book for the last 6 or so hours, with lots of breaks, including a lunch one, and added 11,000 or so brand new words, nearly all of which will make it into the final draft. I don't feel fatigued. I've taken natural breaks for food and more tea. I'm working at a coffee shop as I type this, and I'm still people watching through the windows outside. It's only in the last hour that I've felt a little more distracted with checking my phone for messages. Which means I've only got another section or two in me. But thus far, everything has flowed naturally, with no need for passive barriers, Pomodoros, word count tracking, or any of the other tips I'm sharing in this section. Motivation plus preparation and training has given me the ability to hit my flow easily and efficiently. It's real, tangible, and available to you too. I tell you this because it can be challenging to implement all these changes to your routine, but the light at the end of the tunnel is that you probably won't need them forever. Once you go through the transformation, it's quite easy to maintain your progress simply by writing on a regular basis. This is not just true of writing, but of many, many habits we are able to install in our lives. For example, when you first start a cooking routine, it's painful and almost all-consuming. But once you've been doing it for several months, you can whip up dinner in 30 minutes fairly easily. You've internalized a number of recipes, you know just what to buy on your weekly grocery run, and you have a great system for processing dirty dishes after your meal is finished. The same is true for people who are able to maintain their weight after losing 100 pounds. Or people who learn their way around a new city, or people who become new parents overnight. You just get used to doing something and you adapt. We humans are so moldable. If only we harness our abilities and put that energy towards something good that makes our lives better. Now, don't get me wrong, I still have to put in the hours to see the results. Increasing your writing speed is like riding a bike, though. You don't forget how to do it. Achieving flow through sprinting was another huge, huge boost in word count for me, allowing me to break through the 2,000 words per hour barrier, which is a dream for most writers. I obviously didn't stop there, but I'm quite happy with that result on most days. Any day where I can hit over 5,000 new words despite everything life throws at me is a productive day in my book. Journaling prompt: Where in the past have you used techniques like these ones to drastically and quickly improve a skill or habit? What else did you use? How can you take your successes in other areas and translate them to writing? If you're struggling with finding flow through sprinting or any other method, see if anything below helps get you unstuck. Forcing yourself means you need to step back. Writers are a crazy group of people in general, but one of the craziest things I see them do is push themselves in any way. Here's the thing: writing is damn enjoyable. It's fun. You are creating something, using your talents, putting your thoughts on a screen. If you aren't having fun doing this, If you have to push yourself in any way, then something is wrong. Some writers will disagree with me, and my guess is that those writers should not really be writers. The best writers I know are the ones who do it compulsively, even if it's just for themselves, even if they have to write it all out by hand, even if they don't have the right tools, even when they don't have the time, even when they should be working on other things. None of this sounds like forcing or pushing to me. There are a few occasions when I've felt like I had to push myself. When the scene or the content was all wrong, and as a result not very good. When I hadn't done the legwork needed, like beating out my content or getting my research done. When I didn't want to create the specific content, I wasn't interested in the topic or the upside. When I was exhausted and not respecting my physical, mental, and emotional restraints, usually due to not taking care of myself. It's hard enough to do things you do want to do. Setting goals for things you don't want to do is just going to waste a lot of time and energy stressing out about things that just aren't going to happen, no matter how hard you push yourself. Journaling prompt: If you are not enjoying writing, why do you think that is? Where are you forcing yourself rather than letting your writing flow? How can you shift your energy around writing to make it easier and more pleasant? Not following whims means you need more space in your schedule. The creative life is, by its nature, inconsistent. When you're struck with a new idea that has you giddy inside, Sometimes you need to drop everything and explore it. If you leave enough space in your schedule, this can be quite a productive use of your time. I try to put at least 5 hours of brainstorming per week on my calendar because it gives me the freedom to do just this. Whenever an idea strikes, I can explore it right away. I just move whatever I had planned to the brainstorming section on my calendar. Anyone who has been a creator long enough knows that inspiration is fleeting. Capture it when it strikes. Journaling prompt: How can you incorporate creative blank space into your writing routine while still getting a lot done? Missing your rhythms means you're taking the wrong advice. I used to read a lot of advice. I would read, "Write in the morning before anyone gets up," or "write in the middle of the night because it's quiet." The truth is that you should write according to your natural rhythms and ignore most other advice about it. Through a lot of experimentation, I learned that my natural rhythm for writing is to start around 10 AM and continue until about 3 PM, taking breaks for food, water, and so on. 3 PM is basically my nap time, I'm so sleepy, and since I work from home, I'm often cuddling with my dog at this point. Once I wake up, I start doing chores and cooking for the family and don't circle back around to writing again until later in the evening when I seem to catch my second wind for several hours before bedtime. For a while, I was trying to write in the middle of the day, and it just did not work for me, no matter what the research showed. When I started coordinating my writing schedule around this natural ebb and flow of my energy, I got much better results. The point of all this is too many writers both give and take advice to do something very specific, but I've found that the instructions are way too detailed to be universal. You've got to figure out what your natural flow is and just work within that framework. Yes, this probably means you have to accept your nature, but once you do that, you can almost always make your natural strengths and preferences work in your favor. For me, I had to accept that my body likes a nap around 3 PM. It's likely biological; my mom has, since before I can remember, been a 3 PM napper as well. During the holidays, you can usually find us napping on matching couches in their living room, with the dog curled up next to one of us. Journaling prompt: How can you tweak everything you read in this book to what will work for you? Where will you commit to experimenting? What are you excited about? Journal it. Sprinting for Flow. Are you ready to try writing sprints? Do you see how it will more easily get you into a flow state and why that's important. Have you taken note of some ways to protect your writing sprint time and combat the distractions and procrastination that is holding you back from achieving your goals? The goal of finding flow through writing sprints is to move you away from the distractions of your life and toward a creative lifestyle. For most of us, this means developing better boundaries that create space for us to actually do the work we want and need to do in our writing careers. Once you implement sprints and learn how to get into your flow regularly, your writing will come out much easier and faster. Chapter 7: Your Writing Process. Throughout this book, we've talked a lot about how to increase your writing speed, but I wanted to spend a chapter spelling out the exact process for going from fewer words to a lot more words. I originally wrote about 700-900 words per hour for fiction. Now, I write between 2,500-4,000 words per hour for fiction. There were a few key factors that helped me triple my writing speed in just a few short months: Tracking: While tracking itself didn't significantly change my writing speed, it made me more aware of things I needed to tweak, and led me on the path to discovering the things that would help me increase my writing speed. This is why I see tracking as a requirement, at least when you are first trying to boost your word counts. We talked about tracking in Chapter 4, Tracking Your Words. Knowledge. Creating a stronger outline ahead of time doubled my writing speed to about 1,600 words per hour. I use my 4-step outlining process to gain more knowledge about my book, and use my Story Symmetry framework to outline a book that is deeply aligned to theme. We talked about knowledge in Chapter 6, Knowledge About Your Writing, and I write about the Story Symmetry framework in Novel Writing Prep and Story Symmetry, both of which are books in the Productive Novelist series. Sprints. Sprinting doubled my writing speed again to about 2,500 to 3,200 words per hour. Doing longer sprints between 25 to 45 minutes worked best for me, though your mileage may vary. For writers starting out, I highly recommend starting with 8-minute sprints and working your way up. We talked about sprints in Chapter 7: Writing in Sprints. Dictation. Dictation boosted my writing speed to over 3,500 words per hour consistently. While there is a lot to learn to use dictation software, and while it will mean tweaking for your writing process, it's highly worthwhile to learn for reasons we'll discuss more in Chapter 8: Dictation and Transcription. Walk and Talks. The final step for me that took me to upwards of 4,000+ words per hour consistently is my walk and talks, where I would walk and dictate my book from an outline. We talk about this more in Chapter 9, Building energy for writing. Walk and talks was a specific way that I built up my energy, but in truth you can do so many other things, and many authors do. I've expanded my own ability to build my energy for writing and share in the coming chapter on it. Journaling prompt: Which of these strategies sounds like it could work for you? What would be the benefits of writing the same quality of words at double or triple your current writing speed? How much faster could you hit your writing goals? In my experience, most writers can double or triple their writing speed by applying just a few of these strategies above. I truly believe they work well for any personality type and any writing process. What it really comes down to is desire and willingness to change. As you work through these chapters, you may have noticed that your writing process is already changing. This chapter addresses challenges that may come up as a result of writing faster. How Writing Faster Changed My Writing Process. Throughout this book, I share a lot about what worked for me. Here, I want to address how these changes affected my writing process. This is critical, as you may already have a writing process that you like or feel attached to, and your resistance to changing your writing process may hold you back from implementing changes that help you write faster. Here is how my pre-production, post-production, and publishing processes have changed since I started writing faster. Before using my framework: Outline: I plotted lightly and used basic storytelling structure with 4 sections. Sometimes condensed to 3. First draft: I wrote down as much as I could think of for the scene, usually starting with dialogue. I was very much an underwriter and would often come up with chapters that were 1,000 words or so. I wasn't good at filling in details or adding transitions. Second draft: I went back and simply wrote more. I tried to add at least 50% more words to each section. I also rewrote a lot of what I already had, changing lines of dialogue, rearranging sections, and more. Third draft: I went back through each section and ticked off items on a list—descriptions of people, descriptions of setting, transitions, etc. When the list was checked, I considered the draft revised. Editing: Once all the chapters' scenes were in the state of revised, I then started looking at them on a higher level, how they all work together. I started at the beginning of the book and just chugged through it, changing whatever I wanted as I went. I also rearranged chapters and cut chapters and made notes about chapters that I might want to add. It was quite chaotic. Second editing. After the first editing, I tried to put all the chapters in the correct order and wrote the extra chapters I thought I needed. I threw away chapters I didn't need, often amounting to tens of thousands of words. And then I started over, basically doing the same thing as the first editing. Third editing. This process of editing could repeat several times until I was sick of it. Then I would hand it to an editor to see what he thought. But he would hand it back with tons of comments and questions, and my approach would basically be to go through the editing process again., with my editor's suggested changes. Proofing and Publishing. Once I had spent a sufficient number of months on editing, I would proof the book to get it ready for publishing. There were several issues that made this process incredibly inefficient. I wrote way more content than I ended up using, which amounted to hours and hours of wasted time. I realized that if I could avoid writing that content to begin with, I could drastically reduce the book's time spent in draft. I couldn't predict how long my draft was going to be. This was terrible because it made it impossible to predict when it would be done, a release date, which is an impossible way to run a business. I couldn't predict how long it would take me to edit something because I didn't know what I needed to add, cut, or rewrite beforehand. I also didn't really have an endpoint to editing, and stopped when I couldn't stand to do it anymore. This didn't produce any specific result in the end, and I relied too much on editors to safeguard me from publishing something that was bad. It occurred to me, especially after reading Story Engineering, that I was searching for my outline through the process of drafting, rather than through the process of outlining. To Larry Brooks' point, this makes zero sense and is a huge time suck. The solution, which he provided, was simple: find problems in your plot in the pre-production phase, before you draft pages and pages of content that doesn't make it into the book. Getting a solid grasp on your story at this phase saves hours and hours down the line. After using my framework, My process now looks very different from how it was when I started. Outline. I still do an outline, but I'm quite a bit better at predicting word count from an outline. All of my chapters are one scene, and every scene runs about 2,500 words. I also have chapter structures that I can plug in my stories to. I have these models in place because it cuts out a lot of decision-making with the outlining process. And also it ties my word count prediction directly to the amount of money I can earn from each project. This lets me sort projects by value to my business as well. Beats. I always do beats these days, which you've already read about. At this point, I usually try to get feedback from someone on my idea, and I also poke at my idea for challenges with structure. This saves dozens of hours and rewrites down the line. Sketches. I'm still an underwriter, so while my sketches have gotten better, I don't usually need to double word count afterward. I still tend to skip over transitions and description and add them in at a later date. This is the part I do with dictation. It's really fast. Draft. The draft is done when it's ready to compile, as I said before. I now produce fairly clean drafts, in part because I do so much pre-production, and in part because I've written a lot more words and gotten better at my work in general. Edit/Revisions. I edit and revise as I go at every step, but I don't obsess over this the way I used to. After reading Story Engineering and doing my own tests in the marketplace, it became obvious to me that readers care much, much, much more about reading an amazing story than they care about reading perfectly stylized sentences. My area of genius is much more in the former area, which meant that I could outsource the latter to others who were stronger at it. I also use software to catch spelling errors and typos. Proofing: I format my own books using Adobe InDesign, so I'm able to continue making changes as needed after the final draft is done. After compiling, I typically read through my book several times on various devices. I usually do the proofing myself and manage to catch nearly all of the problems. I believe 100% in putting great work out there, but disagree that hiring an editor to do the proof makes a significant difference in quality or sales. Any more than a single typo in a blog post means no one will want to share it. That's my entire process before I publish, from beginning to end, and why I can fairly easily predict not only how long a project will take me, but how much I can potentially earn from it. Even if you don't care about writing faster, I still encourage you to find your word count per hour, because being able to tie production time to revenue has been a game changer for me in my career. Journaling prompt: What is your writing process now? How might your writing process change as you adapt some of these strategies? Will the changes be an improvement in terms of time and energy spent? Common Questions About Increasing Your Writing Speed: Answered. For the rest of this chapter, I want to address the most common questions and blocks that writers have to implementing what works. I've found that writers can be very hesitant to adapt these strategies, but there's really nothing to fear. Writing fast is safe, fun, and produces great work. Will my writing process change? Your writing process will most likely change, because writing faster will make you more efficient overall. Several of the techniques in this book, like outlining, have massive downstream effects on your writing process. If you add in dictation or transcription, that will also require you to make changes to your editing process. What I see most often is that as authors write faster, they also have to reorganize their editing process, usually for the better. Journaling prompt: How can you get excited about changes you plan to make to your writing process? What are some things you already know you want to change about your writing process? What if I like my writing process as it is? I'm not convinced that most people prefer their writing process when they write slower than their full potential. In general, people are afraid of change. It may not be that you like your writing process as it is, but rather that you are attached to your writing process as it is. Also, if you like your writing process right now, Then why learn to write faster to begin with? Although change can be scary, the great thing about writing faster, and the downstream effects it has on your writing process, is that all the changes are typically pretty good. You are becoming more efficient not just in your writing speed, but also in your ability to build a book faster. This includes the outlining and editing processes, in most cases. Here's another comforting thought: if your writing process changes and you hate it, you can always go back to what you were doing before. There's no harm in trying something new. It's just an experiment you are doing on yourself. Journaling Prompt: What is your biggest worry about changing your writing process? How can you keep the best parts of your writing process while also taking away what works for you from this book? How do you maintain quality while writing faster? Writing faster does not equal writing worse, as long as you aren't rushing, which is a completely different thing. In fact, for many, writing faster actually helps them write better, for a number of reasons. When you write faster, you write more. Practice improves your skill, and hitting higher word counts can, though doesn't necessarily, help you improve your storytelling or structuring skills. The more work you have, the more work you can publish in any form, not just in books, which means that you'll receive more feedback, which helps you improve. Writing more also gives you the opportunity to take on more projects, which means you can vary your work, try different styles in parallel, and in turn improve your skillset further. When you write faster, you disconnect from your editing side. Writing with Dragon Dictate helped me separate the writing from the editing, so I could produce drafts from the heart, rather than from the mind. These drafts were full of passion, voice, and energy—everything needed to produce a great story and everything that's hard, if not impossible, to attain through an editing lens. When you write faster, you're forced to plan your story beforehand. Writing slow allowed me to make up the story as I went, to ignore plot, ignore character, ignore structure, and more. Writing faster forces me to write outlines and beats—I can't write fast without a map—which are very, very important planning processes for creating a better book altogether. Getting the planning right for each book means that I do less writing, editing, and revising down the line, which means I can spend more time writing, which is more words and more practice and more feedback. Overall, writing faster has helped me vastly improve my craft, my processes, and my efficiency at publishing books. I've gotten on a schedule that allows me to publish about 8 to 10 books a year, which means that I'm happy, productive, and in flow. I'm making swift progress now, and I'm also earning money and readers for my efforts. Contrast this with where I was back in 2013, when I had 3 books total from 3 to 4 years of effort. The difference is astounding. Journaling prompt: How is writing faster going to help you become a better writer? How is writing faster going to help you build your author career? How is writing faster going to be an amazing skill to invest your time and attention into? What else will you be able to do with your fast writing skills? Journal it: Increasing your writing speed. Do you have a good idea of the process for increasing your writing speed after listening to this chapter? Is it something you want to do? I've seen in the past that some writers worry a great deal about changing the way they write. The truth is that even if your writing process changes significantly, it's most likely for the better. And if it's not, you could always go back to your old ways, so no harm done. What else do you need to know to write faster, and how will you get access to that resource so you can implement? Chapter 8: Dictation and Transcription. Why should you learn to dictate? It's a question that you may be wondering about, especially after seeing dictation mentioned several times already in this book. After all, you already have a multitude of ways of getting your words out. You can handwrite them in a notebook or journal, you can use a typewriter, or you can do what most of us do: use a keyboard and a word processor to draft our books. So why add yet another piece of technology that enables us to do the same exact thing that we're already doing? It's a fair question, so I'm going to share with you several of the reasons why I decided to learn to dictate. I'm also going to share with you how you can get started with dictation easily, and how to use it to increase your writing speed and boost your daily word count. And finally, I'll share with you a second option, transcription, if you just can't see yourself dictating on a regular basis. While I will share my experiences here, there is far too much to say about dictation and transcription to include it all in this book. When I first published Write Better, Faster, I got so many questions about dictation—from what tools I was using, to my setup, to troubleshooting problems and challenges people were having with dictation—that I ended up writing an entire other book to help people figure out their own dictation setup. That book is called Dictate Your Book: How to Write Your Book Faster, Better, and Smarter. The Productive Novelist #4. I recommend picking up that book if you want to dive deep into dictation or transcription and have specific questions that go beyond the scope of this book. Why Dictate Your Book? When I first started learning about dictation, I had a number of reasons I wanted to hop on the train. Writing faster: I saw that the average human could speak about 150 words per minute and type about 30 words per minute. I also found myself in a writing frenzy at times, exploding with words that I couldn't get into the computer fast enough. The math was obvious. I knew that dictation would help me write significantly faster. I am highly motivated by efficiency, a trait I imagine many of you listening share with me. Dictation is one obvious way to double or triple your writing speed quickly. Giving my hands a break. As I worked my way up to writing 50,000 words per month, I found my hands swelling with pain. I experienced a repetitive strain injury, RSI, and worried about arthritis as it runs in my family. As I was only in my late 20s at the time, I knew I needed to take care of my body if I intended to keep up my career. Getting out and about. I grew tired of sitting at a computer all day and even developed an eye injury from staring at a computer screen for too long. I needed to find ways to move while working, and walk and talk seemed like an obvious choice. I've also heard of people who need to write when they are driving, spending time with children, or doing chores around the home. If you need to go mobile, dictation and transcription will help you get there. As a backup, one of my greatest fears as a writer is that I'll someday not be able to write. Writing is truly my life's purpose, and the easiest way for me to communicate with others. I watched my uncle navigate life after becoming paralyzed from the neck down, and saw how quickly and easily you could lose the use of your typing fingers. In many ways, dictation technology saved his life. I genuinely wanted to find ways to protect my career, and dictation seemed like a perfect backup system in case anything happened to my physical body that left me unable to sit and type at a keyboard. For fun and variety, sometimes I like typing on my keyboard at my desk, sometimes I like taking my laptop to a coffee shop, sometimes I like swiping on my phone like I'm text messaging. Sometimes I like pounding out a few words on my tablet, and sometimes I like speaking my book out loud. I try to get words however I can because it really adds up over time. This has become more important to me as I became a mom. I use different techniques at different times to produce words, and it keeps me producing regularly and consistently. Journaling prompt: What are your reasons for learning dictation? Does this list of benefits convince you to give it a try? Will dictation work for you? The number one question that writers have is whether dictation will work for them. I even get feedback from authors who have tried dictation and decided that it will not, in fact, work for them. So will it work for you? My answer is a resounding yes, but only if you want it to. I believe that dictation can work for anybody; it just depends on that particular writer's dedication to learning a new skill set. Let me reframe the question. Imagine you're talking to a new author, who is just getting started with writing. Imagine that they come up to you and ask, "Will writing on a computer work for me?" You'd probably be wondering to yourself, "Why is this a concern to her?" It seems quite silly to imagine that writing on a computer, which is how almost every writer completes his or her book, would be a question mark in anybody's mind. Well, the same is true with dictation. Keep in mind that dictation is simply another technology for getting words out into the world. Dictation can work for you if you are willing to learn a new set of skills, the same way a washing machine can work for you if you are willing to do your laundry in a different way. So, in my opinion, it's ultimately up to you whether dictation is going to work for you. There are some people who say that dictation is only for authors with no accent, is only for extroverts, is only for authors with public speaking experience, and so on. I may have even said some of these myself in the past. I was wrong. Now you know the truth: dictation is for everyone. It's an extremely affordable technology that has made huge gains in the last 10 years. It uses your voice commands to input your words to a computer with a 95% accuracy rate. Just like all other technology that came before it, including telephones, computers, dishwashers, toasters, and more. The technology is available to anyone in a first-world country who is interested in taking advantage of it. In this chapter, I'll give you tons of information about how you can make dictation happen for you. I believe that once you buy into the mindset I've used to approach dictation, you'll have a much easier time getting it to work for you. Journaling prompt: What are your concerns regarding whether dictation will work for you? How can you find answers to those concerns? Test dictation for free first. The best way to learn whether dictation is going to work for you is to just try it. However, before you go out and get a bunch of equipment to do dictation long-term, you can actually test the concept for free., which I highly recommend as a first step. There are several ways you can do this: Voice Command Software: Most smartphones have some version of voice command built in. You may be familiar with Siri or the "OK Google" prompt. If you don't own a smartphone, check your car system, your Xbox, or your television. The next time you're using one of these devices, instead of texting or reaching for the remote, Give voice command a shot and see if you can get the technology to respond the way you want. Dictation apps. To test dictation specifically, you can download an app on your phone, tablet, or computer. The one I recommend, which is available on phones and tablets, is Dragon Anywhere, which has a trial version. There are dozens of other dictation apps you could try as well. However, Nuance is the market leader in the space at the time of this writing. With this app, you can speak for about 4 or 5 continuous minutes into your phone, and then you can email yourself the results. Note-taking apps: Most apps like Evernote have a voice command option, so you could dictate directly into the Evernote app and it will capture your content. This works on both the mobile app and the desktop app. Many authors are already familiar with Evernote, and may even have the premium account, so this is a great way to get started without downloading any new software. Speech-to-text on your computer. Many computers have some sort of dictation software built in. My experience with these is that they aren't quite good enough to use on a daily basis, but they are good enough to get your feet wet and get comfortable with the idea of dictation. If you do short writing sessions, you may be able to get by with this technology alone. Browser apps. If you want to try this out but don't have the right software, you can test dictation right over the internet. The two browser apps I know of are TalkTyper (talktyper.com) and SpeechPad (speechpad.pw). Word of warning for all of these options: none of them are particularly suitable for long-term ongoing or daily use. I share them, not to recommend them as your dictation solution, but rather to give you options for testing dictation without purchasing any software or equipment. Many of these options have poorer accuracy than the professional software, or they have great accuracy but length or time limitations. TalkTyper, for example, limits you to a single sentence or thought before you have to start the dictation again. Use these options to test dictation, but if you decide to go for it, make sure you upgrade to the regular software. My recommendation is Dragon Natural Speaking for Windows, or Dragon Anywhere. Both are from the same company, Nuance. Unfortunately, Nuance ended support on Dragon Dictate for Mac, which was the software I first learned dictation on. I now use Dragon Anywhere for dictation, and I also keep my old version of Dragon Dictate for Mac on my computer. You can purchase and download professional dictation software immediately at all major online retailers, including Amazon. Journaling prompt: How can you test whether dictation is right for you without buying the software? What was your experience with the test? Ease into dictation slowly. One of the biggest mistakes I see authors make when attempting dictation is trying to incorporate it into their regular workflow immediately. They pull up whatever novel or nonfiction chapter they are working on right then and try to dictate it instead of using their keyboard. Huge mistake. This, to me, is the top reason that many authors give up on dictation too early. Before you try to drastically change your workflow, I highly recommend easing into dictation slowly. Here's my simple training plan. First, set your novel aside and don't even touch your regular writing routine at this point. Too many authors think, "I'm already good at writing, this is just another input method." Just because you're a great writer doesn't mean you'll be great at dictation. World champion tennis player Serena Williams wouldn't walk onto a professional basketball game and say, "I'm already good at sports; this is just a different ball and different play rules than I'm used to." Next, build dictation into your daily life and learn with a project where the stakes for success are much smaller. You can dictate email drafts, blog posts, or texts using dictation, for example. Finally, once you are able to dictate a text, a business email, and a blog post with minimal errors, you can start dictating for a portion of your normal writing session, maybe 15 minutes to start. If you use this simple training plan, when you are ready to switch over for the bulk of your writing sessions, you'll have already built the basic skill set you need and won't be distracted by the technology. You can focus on the writing, just as you do now while typing on your keyboard. Journaling prompt: How can you ease into dictation slowly without interrupting your current writing process or your current projects? What extra time will you dedicate to learning this new skill set? Work through frustrations. You are going to get frustrated, it's natural. Consider how a master pianist feels when she picks up a guitar for the first time. She has a lot of the knowledge needed to play that guitar, but there's still a lot to learn. She may be able to read music, and she may understand the concept of chords. However, she's going to need to learn where fingers should be positioned, and how to use the pick. She'll also need to get comfortable holding the guitar and learn how to tune and maintain it. Still, if she works through those beginning pains and initial frustrations, she will probably be fluent in guitar sooner than a student who's been playing for years already. As a writer, you are in the very best position among all other people in the world to do well with dictation. Because you have already built so many of the skill sets needed for it. You will probably pick up dictation skills quickly. Just keep in mind that there will be some parts of it that you need to work at before you're entirely comfortable. And if you feel frustrated at any point in your training, remember that at some point in your life you had to learn to type. There's nothing about typing that comes naturally or intuitively., and you probably had to rewire your brain a bit to memorize the odd positioning of the keys and how to type without looking down at your fingers. Learning to type probably wasn't that easy, but eventually you learned. Similarly, you are rewiring your brain for a new dictation skill set. It will take a bit of time. Work through those frustrations rather than giving up. Journaling prompt: How will you handle the inevitable frustrations that come up from working with dictation when you are first starting out? Hang on to your keyboard. This is the funniest thing. When authors first start thinking about switching to dictation, they feel like they are losing their keyboard. The truth is that there's no real switching involved. Don't worry about having to give up or trade in something that's already working for you. Instead, think of it more like adding capacity. You're just adding another opportunity and skill set to produce more words. As you're learning dictation, don't put pressure on yourself to use it at all times. I don't dictate all the time, not even close. I still spend many of my writing hours in front of the computer doing outlining, editing, or even drafting. I also write on my smartphone, and I use my iPad and connecting keyboard to write in bed. So continue to utilize your other workflows, and you'll find dictation simpler and more fun to learn, because there will be no pressure to make it work until you're ready. Journaling Prompt. How can you use dictation as an additional input rather than a replacement input? How can you take the pressure off while learning dictation, while still making consistent progress on building this skill set? Get started with dictation quickly. So you've now tried dictation, and you can see yourself using this option on a regular basis. Great! Once you've decided that yes, you are going to commit to dictation, you'll probably need to do a little bit of work to get yourself set up. Unfortunately, the tools that you used to test the concept of dictation are not going to be the same tools you want to use every single day in your regular workflow. These tools are simply too inconvenient, and if you're taking this writing thing seriously, you probably want to do dictation properly. This chapter is going to help you get set up with dictation and integrate it into your current workflow so that you can transition between typing and dictation fluidly. Remember, our goal for dictation is simply to add more capacity. We're not trying to trade anything in or out. That means that your workflow still needs to incorporate opportunity for typing, so that when typing makes more sense for your project, you can switch back and forth seamlessly. Transcription. The difference between dictation and transcription is fairly minimal in practice, but choosing one or the other can make a huge difference in your writing process. Dictation is usually live input, similar to a keyboard, and requires using speak-out-loud commands for punctuation and formatting. Transcription, on the other hand, is creating a recording of you speaking out loud, and getting it turned into typed words at a later time. Dictation efforts do not create an audio recording, as the input happens in real-time, same as if the strokes on your keyboard would. For transcription, you would run your recorded audio through a transcription service to get text output, which you could then edit into a manuscript. Transcription is nice because it doesn't require you to learn any dictation commands. You can create a transcription from your audio for free, up to 600 minutes a month at the time of this writing, through otter.ai. Depending on your audio, this can produce a fairly usable first draft, though just as with dictation, you'll want to practice. You can also use a transcription company, if you are willing to pay. I have used Rev.com in the past, and it has worked well for me, helping me create a first draft of a book from audio recordings. I have created books in the Productive Novelist series using all 3 methods: typing everything out, dictating, and transcribing. Those books are now published. You tell me which ones are which. In my opinion, having more tools and technology at your disposal is always a good thing. These different ways of writing have all helped me produce content faster, So I'm grateful to be living and writing in times like these. Journal it: Using dictation or transcription to write your book. Don't forget the reason behind training your dragon, which is to get your ideas onto the screen faster than you could with a keyboard. I truly believe that when writers focus on the work, it makes it so much easier and more satisfying to work with dictation. Wishing you huge success and productivity as you adventure with Dragon and dictation. Good luck! Chapter 9: Building Energy for Writing. More recently, I learned about energy in a new way as I became a mom for the first time. Suddenly, my breezy 16+ hour days that allowed me to work as much as I wanted had turned into just a few spare hours every few days when I could get a babysitter for my child. At first, I was accomplishing about 25% of what I could have accomplished pre-children. Then, as my child neared 7 to 8 months, I noticed that I was at about 75% of my former productivity levels. As my child passed a year old, I realized that I had come all the way back to my previous productivity levels and had even gone beyond, with the capacity to accomplish more than I had pre-children. I've joked to my close friends, having a child is easier than building a business, and having a child is the most productive thing I've ever done in my life. Of course, this is just my experience. I've been deeply blessed with a healthy child, financial security, and a lot of help. What I noticed more than ever during this time period in my life was that work expanded to fill the time I allotted to it. I really didn't have time for my own emotional drama, nor my author blocks. Suddenly, books were coming together easily and faster than they ever had before, and I found plenty of time to start a new pen name, record 80+ podcast episodes, run a 30-day challenge on YouTube, and so much more. This experience taught me that time is not the foundation of productivity, Energy is. If you can conserve or increase your energy, it really doesn't matter how much time you have. I work only about 25 hours a week, yet I'm accomplishing as much or more as I did when I had endless time. The secret is energy. Journaling prompt: Have you ever experienced your capacity increasing due to a personal transformation? I believe that your energy for your writing comes down to 3 categories: your mindset, your physical health, your creative well. Number 1: Clearing Your Mindset for Increased Energy. One of the greatest time sucks that will prevent you from writing at the levels you want is your mindset. Luckily, that's an area of your life that you can work on. In truth, I don't think having a child is the reason my productivity has increased over the years. My child has helped me prioritize and truly let go of the small stuff, which has helped. Additionally, he has forced me to truly time-box my work, which has helped as well. But the greatest way my child has helped me is something that anyone can commit to, regardless of whether they have children. That is improving my mindset and healing my blocks in the process. I believe everyone needs a way to handle their daily triggers and stresses in life. I have learned to do this personally through my spirituality, but a lot of it translates easily to mindset work. Mindset work is truly just rooting out false beliefs and self-sabotaging thoughts, then replacing that programming with something that serves you better. One of the best practices that I have continued to do through the years is to spend a few minutes every morning listing the following things: forgiveness, little things that others did to me or that I am spinning on that I realize I need or want resolution and peace on. I give that forgiveness to the person or to myself to get it off my plate and out of my mind. Gratitude: things I'm grateful for. Gratitude is truly the water that fills your energy well across all areas of your life. Goals: what I hope to accomplish that day, that week, or even in the next 5 years. For example, for years I had the goal of becoming a New York Times bestseller. It was extremely motivating. Sometime in 2017, I became a USA Today bestseller and this particular goal stopped being part of my why. Of course, I still want to be a New York Times bestseller, but it's not in my top 5 motivators anymore. This small practice has helped me slowly, over time, realign my mindset to abundance rather than scarcity, love of the work rather than fear of it, and peace rather than chaos. If mindset has become a drain on your energy, and you want to shift your mindset more dramatically and systematically, you may like my book, Author Mindset Deep Dive. Uncover and permanently release the subconscious false beliefs and self-sabotages that are holding back your author career. The Productive Novelist, number 13. I know it's another book recommendation for my own series, but I truly believe it's the best book on mindset for authors. I wouldn't recommend it otherwise. Journaling prompt: Do you find yourself spinning on stressful thoughts or replaying past mistakes? Do you wish you could calm your mind? Do you feel good about your mindset, or do you desire to improve and shift it? Number 2: Increasing your physical health for increased energy. One of the first things to go for most authors as they ramp up their writing speed is their health health and exercise routines. Of course, this is if they had them to begin with. For me personally, I remember the days when health and fitness were a huge priority for me. I walked everywhere in Chicago, no matter the weather. I was careful about my nutrition, and I even committed to big health goals like training for a marathon. As I moved from a secure corporate job into the stress of entrepreneurship, I found myself gaining weight, about 5 pounds a year. Over a decade later, and after a pregnancy, I have about 50 pounds to lose and have struggled to find the motivation to change my diet or movement habits consistently. I recently listened to a recording of Lorna Jane Clarkson, who is the founder of Australian activewear line Lorna Jane, a company worth over half a billion dollars. When asked how she did it, she said that her number one secret was that she exercises consistently every single morning first thing and has impeccable nutrition that helps fuel her for her day. Something in me clicked and made me realize that I was viewing my health and wellness as a competing goal to my writing goals. Instead, my health and wellness goals are meant to be incredibly supportive of my writing goals. I find myself with a greater desire to implement my efforts to feel really good in my body, and I share this to pass it along if it resonates with you too. Journaling prompt: Do you wish you could improve your health and wellness? What is stopping you or holding you back? Number 3: Filling the creative well for increased energy. Over the course of my years as a creative, I've come to the conclusion that energy is a huge factor in how much I can accomplish each day. I hit 50,000 words per month for 2 months straight in September and October of 2013, working only about 50 hours total. But by the end of my 2 months, I was incredibly burnt out and didn't write another word of fiction for months afterward. Now, some of this can be attributed to end-of-the-year slowdown and holidays, which always trip me up, but most of it should probably be attributed to the fact that I did not have an ounce of creative energy left to do the work. I will never let that happen again. What I realized after that experience is that we all have a well of creative energy that we draw from. At the end of those 2 months, my creative well was completely dry. I didn't write again for several months because it took me months and months to refill that well. Journaling prompt: Have you ever experienced burnout? What do you do to avoid it? How do you cope when it happens? If you can buy into this premise analogy I'm using to describe my experience, then you may be wondering what this well of creative energy is, exactly. Here's how I would explain the equation: You use energy, and deplete your creative well by creating art. You gain energy and replenish your creative well by getting inspired. You must replenish your creative energy well, on a regular basis. This isn't a suggestion, it's a work task that you must make time for on a consistent basis, the same way writing is a work task that you must make time for on a consistent basis. After my crazy 2 months and subsequent lack of crazy 2 months, I've settled into routines and systems that both replenish and deplete my energy on a consistent basis. This equation is pretty easy to understand. Basically, you never want to be creatively bankrupt. You can maybe charge your purchases on a credit card for a few months, but the piper will come after you for payment eventually. Journaling prompt: Do you buy the analogy of the creative well depleting and refilling? Have you experienced this in your personal life? What does it look like? How do you replenish this energy and get inspired? And what does it even mean to be "inspired," anyway? Well, it's going to be different for each person. Some very common elements of inspiration are: Nature. Going outside is one of the healthiest things you can do in a society like ours, where we spend so much time at desks and in front of screens. Even a 30-minute walk can make a huge difference. Exercise. As my grandpa, who has had 3 heart surgeries, has told me, the number one piece of advice I'd give young people is to get your heart rate up at least once every day. The benefits of exercise extend beyond the physical, and exercise has more recently been shown to improve mental and emotional health. Exercise can serve as inspiration time too, especially if you combine it with one of the others on this list. Ending your workday. One of the most common shared traits of the uber-successful is that they have specified work hours and specified play hours. I love working at night, but I don't do it much anymore because it doesn't give me a break from work. Nowadays, my evening routine does not include working on fiction. Instead, it includes cooking for my fiancé, writing in my journal, and cuddling with my fiancé and my dog. If I do work on fiction, it's because I want to, not because I still have leftover tasks. Spending time with loved ones: Even if you're an introvert, you'll be surprised by how much certain people in your life can renew your energy. Spending time with your family is crucial to having strong, healthy, and meaningful relationships, but don't forget to schedule time with extended family and friends as well. Date nights for just the two of you: Couples' nights for double dates, Family nights when you have kids. Girls' nights or bro nights for friends. Several yearly extended visits with family and friends out of town. Weekend getaways. Several yearly vacations and staycations for just the family. Unplugged weekends. Careful media consumption. Consuming media doesn't make us happy, research shows, but consuming specific media can probably inspire us. Many writers read nonfiction business books, while others read books in their genre, while others still watch scripted television or head to a museum. As long as you consume purposefully and have specific reasons for what you consume, you can draw a lot of energy from others' art. And how cool is it that part of your job is to enjoy what others create? A related hobby: Cross-training is important for both athletes and artists. So don't be afraid to spend some of your time practicing an instrument, painting, kickboxing, or learning survival tactics. It all contributes to your writing. Downtime—waiting in lines, standing in the shower, sitting on a train or in a car, trying to quiet your mind before bed—all are times that you can designate for brainstorming, thinking, chatting with others, sussing out good ideas, or consuming others' ideas. Inspiration is literally all around us, and especially for fiction writers, everything counts. When I focused too much on word count, I did so at the expense of all the things I enjoyed, which eventually did me in. If you are the type of person who already has a regular workout routine, or who already finds ways to unplug on a regular basis, you probably won't encounter this issue. Journaling prompt: How do you refill your creative well? Which of these suggestions might work for you? Developing Systems to Refill Your Energy Well: Using Inspiration. If you are like the average person, you may need to get serious about developing a system for staying inspired, the same way you develop a system for getting more writing done. There are a few distinctions that will help you pull your system together. Are you an extrovert or an introvert, or somewhere in between? This to me is one of the most important distinctions when understanding creative energy. Many people have the misconception that extroverts are outgoing and introverts are homebodies, which is not quite true. If we are going by the Myers-Briggs definition, extroverts are people who gain energy externally, which means that they get energy from their environments. Introverts are people who gain energy internally, which means they get energy from spending time alone. This corresponds roughly to the misconception, but doesn't completely explain discrepancies. What does this mean? Depending on your answer, you'll be able to decide whether you're going to book lots of time with new people or people you don't see often, better for extroverts, or with close friends and family, introverts. Whether you're going to work in a busy spot, extroverts, or in an office alone, introverts. Whether you're going to exercise outside, extroverts, or inside, introverts. Whether you're going to listen to music or background noise, extroverts, or have complete silence, introverts. Journaling prompt: Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Which activities will better refill your creative well? How can you use your knowledge about your personality type to stay inspired? Are you a routine person or a stimulation person, or somewhere in between? Most people gravitate toward one of two types of work: doing something different every day or hour, prevalent in management or any other job where you're reactionary to problems versus having a routine of what you're expected to accomplish each day, prevalent to sales, speaking, etc. If you picture the extremes of these two types of work at the ends of a spectrum, where would you fall on it? Depending on your answer, you'll be able to decide whether you're going to work on multiple projects at a time, better for writers who need stimulation, or stick to one and focus, Better for writers who like routine. Whether you're going to vary locations—coffee shop one day, living room the next, bookstore the day after—or whether you need to have a dedicated space in your home. Whether you can stick to a time block at the same time each day—from 2 to 4 PM each day—or whether you want an overall goal of time spent, 2 hours a day, whenever you can fit them in. Whether you need to write sequentially or whether you can hop around within your manuscript. Knowing the answers to these questions will help you decide what kind of writing routine you'll have and what's going to work for you to actually sit down and produce words. Journaling prompt: Are you a routine person or a simulation person? Which activities will better refill your creative well? How can you use your knowledge about your personality type To Stay Inspired. Are you a burst of energy person, or a slow and steady person, or somewhere in between? When it comes to writing, your manuscript progress will be almost entirely driven by how much energy you have to devote to the project. Energy levels vary not only by person but also by external factors, like how well you're sleeping, eating, exercising, what your natural circadian rhythm is set at, and what hours of the day you feel most productive. In addition to those things, some people are the hardcore "I'm going to kick out this draft in 2 weeks" types, and others would rather write 500 words a day on the draft. Depending on your answer, you'll be able to decide whether you're going to set a small daily word count goal and try to hit it every day, slow and steady, or clear your weekend, hole up in a hotel room, and crank out your story all at once—burst of energy. Whether you'll write, then edit, then write, then edit, or whether you'll do a block of both each day. Whether you'll have strict deadlines or follow your whims. Most people will fall somewhere in the middle on almost all of these scales, but once you know this, you can plan and block off times for your drafting. Based on how you like to work. Journaling prompt: Are you a burst-of-energy person or a slow-and-steady person? Which activities will better refill your creative well? How can you use your knowledge about your personality type to stay inspired? Journal it: Using Your Energy to Advance Your Writing Goals. I've observed dozens of professional writers and have concluded that the successful yet manic-depressive and alcoholic writer is the exception rather than the norm. And hey, Stephen King backs me up in his memoir on writing. Most of the successful writers I know have better-than-average personal habits that include regular workout and diet routines, regular contact with friends and family, and limited soft addictions—internet, porn, mobile gaming, and so on. Most writers have also escaped workaholism, social media addiction, and impulsive or perseverating email checking, because it simply depletes this energy well. Ignoring the energy well is like ignoring the gas tank on your car. You can get away with it for short periods, but eventually the car stops moving. Don't let this happen to you, because it is not easy to get back on the road again. Energy is all about knowing yourself and listening when your body, mind, or soul needs to take a break. Ideally, you'll schedule them on your calendar. And if you've ever needed an excuse to improve another area of your life—food, exercise, smoking, socializing, and so on—let your writing goals drive you forward. It all contributes to your ability to perform at peak level when you are at work. How can you use your understanding of energy and the creative well to move your writing goals forward. Chapter 10: Next Steps. Thank you so much for listening to this book to the end. Writing faster has been a game-changer in my writing career, and I'm so grateful that I've done the work to improve my skill set in this area. I hope you found my intense fascination with increasing your writing speed through experiments useful. I also hope you reach your writing goals, whether this book is a part of that effort or not. If there's anything you feel is missing from this book, please send your questions and suggestions to my team at team@theworldneedsyourbook.com. I'd love to help you out! Additionally, if you want to go even deeper with writing productivity, you can grab my two other books on the topic. The 8-Minute Writing Habit: Create a consistent writing habit that works with your busy lifestyle. The Productive Novelist #2: And Dictate Your Book: How to write your book better, faster, and smarter. The Productive Novelist #4. They are available at all retailers. What next? For starters, write your first draft. You are ready. Outside of writing your novel, you may be interested in working with me further. At The World Needs Your Book, I've created numerous resources that can help you draft, edit, publish, and market your book. The Productive Novelist All Access Pass. If you want to work with me through my self-study courses, you may be looking for an All Access Pass. There are 8+ courses in this pass, ranging from storytelling to editing to writing faster to launching and marketing. Through these products, we offer email support via team@theworldneedsyourbook.com plus a general group where we answer questions. To learn more, go to theworldneedsyourbook.com/shop. The Productive Novelist Books. The Productive Novelist series is 14 books spanning all topics related to writing, editing, publishing, and marketing your books. There are also several advanced books in this series for those who intend to make writing a career and want to build their businesses for longevity. The content in this series has been tested by thousands of authors when it was originally published as the Growth Hacking for Storytellers series. We've since updated all the content and added several chapters to the newer editions. To learn more and see what we have to offer, go to theworldneedsyourbook.com/shop. The Productive Novelist Channel, Podcast, and Blog. I share tons of free content on my YouTube channel, podcast, and blog. Some people like to get right to the solution with a course or a book, while others like to receive a drip, drip, drip week to week through my YouTube channel or podcast feed. Please connect with me on my channels. I would love for you to subscribe. TheWorldNeedsYourBook.com/blog. Your feedback, please. My goal for writing this book is to help fiction authors write the best stories they possibly can and work on their craft. There are two ways to leave feedback. Reviews. If you love this book, we can always use an honest review on our public retailer pages, where other people looking for the books can see what real people think of them. Choose your retailer and leave a review here. TheWorldNeedsYourBook.com/ReviewPN3 Feedback Form. If you have anything you'd like to share privately, please feel free to fill out our feedback form here. Theworldneedsyourbook.com/feedback. All answers are private unless you say we can use the responses publicly in our marketing materials. Heartfelt Thanks and Love. Lastly, I want to say thank you so much for listening to this book. I am fully aware that there are many, many people in the world who are trying to profit by stealing away your time, and distracting you from your goals. As such, I hope your time with me has been entertaining, educational, and productive. Spread the word. Can you think of 2 people who could use this book in their lives? Maybe a few other fiction writers who want to improve their writing speed? If so, I would love it if you could connect them to this book so they too can significantly increase their writing speed by 2x, 4x, Thanks again for listening. Press on, igniter. Acknowledgments. This book is better because thousands of you made it better. I'm so grateful to incorporate all the knowledge, experimenting, and testing you've done over the years, so that together we can help thousands more writers become consistent authors and make their dreams of writing a book book, or several, come true. Pass it along, pay it forward, and never let anyone tell you that it isn't possible. About the Author. Monica Leonelle was born in Germany and spent her childhood jet-setting around the world with her American parents. Her travels include most of the United States and Europe, as well as Guam, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. She is a USA Today bestselling author, best known for her young adult urban fantasy and paranormal romance series, Waters Dark and Deep, writing as Solo Storm. She also teaches writing, publishing, business, and marketing at theworldneedsyourbook.com. Her 3 nonfiction series, Growth Hacking for Storytellers, The Productive Novelist, and Book and Business Coaching, have helped thousands of business owners and aspiring writers write faster, become better storytellers, and find their way to success. Before becoming an independent author, Monica led digital marketing efforts at Inc. 100 companies like Hanson's Natural and Braintree. Monica is a lifetime member of Sigma Pi Sigma Honor fraternity and was a 2007 Chicago Business Fellow, graduating with an MBA from the Chicago Booth School of Business at 25 years old. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a minor in Physics from Truman State University. She's been an avid blogger of marketing and business trends since 2007. Her ideas have been featured in AdAge, Forbes Inc., LinkedIn Voices, The Huffington Post, The Amex Open Forum, Gigohm, Mashable, Social Media Today, and the Christian Science Monitor. In 2009, she was named one of the top 25 tweeters in the city of Chicago by Chicago Now, a subsidiary of the Chicago Tribune. Visit theworldneedsyourbook.com for email updates and additional resources. We hope you have enjoyed this unabridged production of Write Better Faster The Productive Novelist Book 3. Text copyright 2020 by Monica Leonelle. Production copyright 2022 by Monica Leonelle. All rights reserved.