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Tracking Tools
There are some automated programs as well, and on my 20K page, I'll show you a bunch of the different options out there. I don't like to fill my books with product reviews and links because I want to focus on the core message. The tools I use change all the time, and it's much easier to update my website as my techniques change.
All the tools I mention, links to different templates I use, and loads of additional content are available at https://servenomaster.com/20k. You don't have to try and remember a bunch of links, just that one. I made some videos demonstrating the tools that I like, so you can see what the software looks like in action.
There is also an entire blog series where I track my progress and write about my progress creating this book. There are some cool pictures of my little slice of paradise as well.
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Go Public
Another tracking method is to create a group on social media or start a blog and post your rolling word counts. Each post can start with a word count, and then you write a paragraph about that writing session. You might not want to be so public, but some people do better with this type of motivation.
You can even record videos if you want to give your hands a rest.
My first big success online was a blog. It was never meant to become public. It was a way of tracking my progress on a project and writing about my experiences. Back then I thought of a blog as a private diary online.
Anything that other people can see creates a sense of accountability. Your readers and followers will expect those regular updates. If you respond to accountability, this tracking method can be very useful.
Knowing what works for you is important. If you are terrified of sharing your word counts publicly, then there is no need to use this method.
Some of us respond to positive reinforcement, and some respond to negative reinforcement. Knowing your personality is critical. Be honest with yourself, and you can decide which tracking method works the best for you.
The number one most efficient way to increase your writing totals is to experiment with every aspect of this process, including how you track.
If using spreadsheets makes you more efficient, but you never fill them in, it's not the best process for you. Find a method that works for you and one that you can maintain.
This is the first step on the path to writing fast.
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What Data Should You Track?
This is the number one question I get. “What should I track? What columns should I have in my spreadsheet? Which is the most important number?”
Nobody wants to get buried under a pile of data, and all of these numbers can become overwhelming. Words per hour is the base measurement, and most books about speed writing focus on this metric.
Strangely, most of these books never recommend writing for an entire hour. They are obsessed with how fast you can write in short periods of time. They're all about the sprint, and that's a great place to start. But it's not the entire journey.
The 20K System is about more than just writing a few articles a day. We want to hit those colossal writing numbers, and those require longer blocks of time.
This is a book about writing books and not just articles. Words per hour is a useful number during your initial training phase. While we are developing your writing rhythm, we will use this number. It will help us to find the best times of day for you to write and the right length for your writing sessions. Because of my writing style, I'm an aberration. I would rather just crank for four hours without a break and then have the rest of the day to do whatever I want.
But that is my personal writing rhythm. Next, we are going to find the best one for you.
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Marathon Writers
Our goal is to become marathon writers. People who can write consistently over days and weeks, not just people who can write fast for twenty minutes.
Words per day are our core metric, but it's not precise enough when you are in the development and training phase. We want to find when you enter the zone and when you feel it fade away. While building up your skill set, we will use that words per hour metric.
When learning how to type, we track words per minute. Most people who transcribe or take notes for a living track words per minute. However, that is way too precise for this process and would probably drive you insane. It would break up your efficiency too much. Just as we don't want measurements that are too large, we don't want numbers that are too small.
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Pomodoro Blocks
During some of your training exercises, you will write for specific blocks of time. When you do this, you need to track the words you wrote and how long each session was. As you master this sprinting technique, you may transition into a Pomodoro writer. This is where you write for a specific block of time and then take a break for a specific block of time and then get back to writing.
We will cover Pomodoro in much greater detail later in this book. When we start testing that technique you will need to write down the time you started a block, the length, how many words you wrote and how long your break was.
It is important that the way you track matches the way you are training and writing. Our goal is to generate numbers that we can use to adjust your writing process.
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Stamina
Before we play around with Pomodoro blocks, you will start with sprinting sessions. With a sprint, you will write as much as you can in a fixed block of time. We will keep extending the length of that block until we find the limit of your stamina.
How many words can you write in how many minutes? This is the measure of stamina, and it will take a little while to get there.
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Words Per Day
In addition to your precise words per hour or words per block tracking, you need to track your words per day. This is the real number that will control your destiny as a writer. This figure measures the distance between you and the finish line for that book you're working on. It will tell you what you can commit to if a publisher comes and asks you to write a book of a certain length.
Writers at the top of their game know exactly how long a project will take them. They can estimate exactly how long each part of the writing process will take. The more accurate your timelines, the more you can charge for writing projects. You become a known quantity, and that higher level of trust will generate larger paychecks.
Most projects come with a word count and a deadline. It is much better to refuse a project than to take on more than you can handle and fail. I am a professional writer, so I know my numbers perfectly.
I know I can very casually write 10,000 words a day, and it's not an effort for me. Writing twenty thousand words a day is more serious and requires the majority of my focus. It will probably take five to six hours of writing to hit that bigger number, but I can bang out ten thousand words in a few hours while maintaining my other projects.
I can hang out with my kids and let their cartoons run in the background while I casually generate ten thousand words a day. I know my writing speed because I have made a living as a writer for years and I track my projects in great detail.
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Endurance
I'm very aware of how I spend my time every day, and I will carefully track how efficient dictating this book is. Endurance is how many hours you can write each day. At a certain point, your mind or body becomes too exhausted to write anymore. You reach the edge of your endurance.
Normally endurance is a measure of how long you can write until you get distracted or fatigued. With dictation, I have to track how long I can speak before I notice problems in my throat. As soon as I feel any soreness developing, I have to stop each session.
I don't want to risk a sore throat because it will kill my ability to record. I have to record podcast episodes and training videos nearly every day. Hurting my voice affects my entire business, so tracking my physical health is critical.
To be safe, I'm
sticking to one-hour sessions because I know that my throat gets tired if I talk any longer than that in a single session.
When you're writing with your hands, pay attention to when you start feeling the first glimmers of fatigue. You don't want to push yourself today only to affect your performance tomorrow. If you write twenty thousand words today, but tomorrow you are so worn out that you can only write one thousand, it's not worth it.
Pay close attention to your physical state. If your hands start to get tired or hurt, stop writing. Any issue with your body cannot be ignored. Write down any part of your body that hurts as part of your endurance tracking.
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Spirit
Our final metric is the one that most writers ignore, yet it is critical. Keep a finger on your emotional pulse. Keep a record of your emotional state, any feelings of fatigue, and the overall quality of your work.
If you notice that your work has a lot more mistakes suddenly, you want to keep track of that. Just make a note of it for now. We don't need to worry about doing a lot of spellchecking and grammatical checks while writing, but we want to notice when our quality starts to decrease.
If you push yourself too far, you can alter your emotional state. If you are in a bad mood, tired or feeling out of sync, your writing will often reflect that. You don’t want your emotional state to block you from writing that next crucial scene.
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Writing Fast is not Writing Badly
Writing fast is not the same thing is writing badly. It's very important to maintain the quality of your work even as you improve your writing speed.
This is why we're going to track how long it takes to edit. If you double your writing speed but halve your editing speed, you might come out a loser. We don’t want that to happen because of a tracking glitch.
Writing is about project completion, and that is our ultimate measurement. We are looking for a net increase in your efficiency. I don’t want to rob Peter to pay Paul. If writing and editing a book takes you sixty hours combined right now, that is your baseline. If writing faster causes you to make more mistakes, thus slowing down your editing process, you could end up spending seventy hours on the same project.
If that happens, you've gotten worse, not better. You must track your entire creative process to ensure we catch any glitches like this as quickly as possible.
Writing faster is not about lowering the quality of your writing. The 20K System is not about vomiting words into your book and saying that you wrote quickly. This is about efficiency and increasing how fast you can release high quality writing into the universe.
The main limitation on writing speed is my fingers. The speed with which I can move my fingers and type controls how fast I can write. At a certain point in the day, my fingers start getting weird, and they make all these mistakes that my brain isn't making. There is a disconnect between my thoughts and my fingers. This is the first signal that I’m getting fatigued, and it’s time to stop writing for the day. I have reached the limit of my endurance.
When the spelling mistakes start spiking, I know it’s time to hit the locker room. For most of us, the initial speed limitation is physical, not mental. You can think faster than you can speak, and you can speak far faster than you can write.
(Having dictated this entire book, I can confirm that I spoke this book nearly four times faster than I could have written it.)
As a simple experiment, time yourself silently reading a single page from this book. Then time yourself reading the same page out loud. I can assure you that the second reading will take longer.
If you could write as fast as you can think, you could write your next novel in about fifteen minutes. We think so much more rapidly than we talk; the limitation on your speed has nothing to do with your mind.
You can create just as much as you do now in less time; it's your body and your physicality that is limiting you. Everything I'm going to teach you is going to increase how quickly you accomplish the same tasks.
The exercises and techniques in this book are designed to decrease the differences in how fast you think and how fast you write. The closer we can get to those two numbers, the closer we are to hitting your real maximum writing speed.
With the 20K System, there will not be a decrease in quality, so you don't have to worry about that.
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External Variables
After tracking all these different numbers, if you bring in a new variable make sure you track that as well. Our goal is to apply the scientific method and find the perfect writing scenario for you. There are many changes that you want to track, such as:
if you write in different locations
if you write using different computers
if you dictate some sections into the computer
if you dictate other sections into your phone
Please write down any additional variables you add to your writing process. Initially, please limit these variables so that we can maximize your speed with a single baseline. Let’s focus on maximizing your speed, writing on your computer at your current prime working location, before you start adding other variables, or it will take you longer to hit your maximum speed.
If you cannot control your situation, then at least track any of these extra variables. You will start to notice that you write faster listening to different music or in a different location. Even a different seat in your favorite coffee shop can alter your speed. If you sit facing the street, you might be distracted by all the people walking by. Someone else might be the opposite and write slower when facing a wall, as the blank wall starts to depress them.
Everyone is unique, and only experimentation will help us perfect your writing process. We are scientific partners on this venture, and I want you to hypothesize and think about changes you should make to improve your numbers.
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You are the Driver
Track every variable when you write, and at the end of each week, examine what went right and what went wrong. Ask yourself what you think you can do next week to improve.
This book is static; it's frozen in time. When I finish the publishing and editing process and upload it, that is the version of the book you will always have. If you have the Kindle version of this book, I can release a new update and push the updated version through Amazon, but the odds of that happening are very slim. We both know that the odds of me doing massive updates that you notice and motivate you to go back and reread a chapter are not very high.
I’m giving you a set of skills and tools you can use to improve your writing speed. However, you are in the driver’s seat. You must actively participate in this process. Look at what works for you and what doesn't work for you and what changes you think you should make. Try new things and be proactive in this process. You are the only one who can track your progress. You are the only one who can analyze your data to find ways to improve. The more you actively participate, the shorter the time between now and when you're a much faster writer.
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Action Steps
You must come up with a system for tracking how many words you write each day. Decide if you will use a notebook, spreadsheet, word document or another method.
Use your tracking system. If you need to buy a special notebook, go do it right now.
Begin tracking your metrics immediately. How many words did you write yesterday?
Once a week, look at your records to help you figure out how, where, and when you are most productive.
Track your state of mind. Sometimes it's good to give up a little efficiency for more happiness.
Whenever you make a change in your writing, track it.
Achieving micro goals are critical to success, and Scrivener is a great way to track them.
Analyze your writing data to figure out when you should write and when you should take breaks.
Part VII
The Art of Research
I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research... for ways of augm
enting story-telling.
- Malcolm Gladwell
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Know Your Audience
Whether you're writing fiction or nonfiction, certain parts of your research process will be the same. The initial research process is identical for both, however they do diverge when you transition into the deep outlining phase. Telling a story is different from educating people.
Research starts with understanding what your audience wants. Many authors make the mistake of sitting down with an idea they want to write about and immediately cranking out a book. They publish it on Amazon, and when no one reads it, it's devastating.
Why didn't anyone like it? Why didn't anyone read it? It often comes down to the fact that you didn't check for an audience first. The brilliance of Amazon is that every single book is ranked. You can look at a book and see how many copies sold in the last day and last week and last thirty days.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 7