#319: How Do You Streamline the Writing Process?
6 Apr 2022 · 5 min
Shelley Hitz shares how to speed up your writing without cutting corners: organize with outlines, batch similar tasks together, use checklists for consistency, and track your habits with the Writing Wheel PDF at trainingauthors.com/writingwheel.
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Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.
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Question in the writing section. How to streamline the writing process while maintaining high quality output. And I could talk a lot about, you know, for a long time about the writing process. Yeah. So, I mean, I think just organizing your thoughts and getting it in some sort of outline format before you start. That way you're not just sitting there looking at the blank page and thinking, okay, what am I, you know, what am I trying to write next? And once you, you kind of get in the flow of writing out an outline, and not all of us are. So even if it is just a very, very rough outline, that can help. But what really helps me with productivity, and that's kind of what it sounds like you're looking for a little bit, are systems. So doing things in a similar way every time or you know, having your, your, your stuff set up or, you know, you know, right where to find your manuscript. Right where to find the things, you know, you're, you're looking for, you're not digging for, for your notes, you're not digging. You know, everything is organized. Like, I even have folder organizations and I can actually, let me get that, that link for you guys, because I think a lot of people in Christian Book Academy have told me how much that has helped them, even just getting their computer folders organized. But forming systems. Systems are basically just like checklists. So it's a checklist of like, like when you're doing a blog post form, you know, I'm doing this step and then I'm doing this step and then I'm doing this step. Yeah. So you have systems and then and checklists and all of that and being able to find what works best for you. So in our writing week challenge that we used to do, it's now in a PDF called Writing Wheel. And if you want to grab that, if you don't have that yet, it's at training authors.com forward/writing wheel. It's not on Amazon. And in that I have you track your writing for like seven days. And so even if you just track your writing for a certain amount of time and you want to see like, where are, where do you write best? So when you are writing, like, do you get the most words when you're at Home or when you're at a coffee shop. For me, it's when I'm at home. For my husband, it's when he's out and about in a coffee shop or something like that is in the morning, is in the afternoon. Finding the days that, that environments, you know, even like finding your optimal, you know, times to write and if you can adjust that, you know, that's good. But also being able to do your research in one session. So if you're doing a bunch of research, do that all in one session. Instead of going from research writing, editing, research writing, and research writing, you know, instead of going back and forth, try it, just see if it works for you to do like a bunch of your research all at once. You get in the flow and then your brain gets in that research mode and it tends to get done faster. Then do all the writing at once, you know, and then you get in the flow. You're not going back and forth and switching tasks. Anytime your brain has to switch tasks, it slows you down. And then do all of your self editing and things in one session. So you're, you know, you can do a little bit of editing as you're writing, but you know, so you're, you're not trying again, trying to switch tasks. Your inner editor, your inner critic can shut you down. But you know, those, those are some, some ideas for you to try and to think about. But ultimately it's finding what's going to work best for you because every writer is different. And finding that system, finding that flow, you know, figuring out like what works best for you, if it is it, maybe sometimes to dictate, you know, works better for you than writing or so forth. There's so many, so many, so many tips. But in that PDF writing wheel there are some other things for writing productivity. And if you don't have that yet, I'd recommend checking that out as well.
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