I can't help you get better at something that's a natural talent; I can only help you get better at skills, which is why my entire approach to writing is skill-based and research-based. I can help you get better at research. And when you do your research properly, you will fly through the rough draft.
More than anything else, at this point in the book, I want you to remember that fast and efficient writing is about chopping each task into small, manageable tasks. The more small sections you break your outline into, the more tiny sections within your Scrivener document you have, the easier it is to write faster and the better the quality of your work will be. If you organize your story into large sections, it's very hard to write excellently and quickly.
Don't think of your outline as simply having ten chapter titles. A good framework should have two hundred sections. A longer book might have five hundred. The more sections you put together now, the easier it is to write your book very fast.
I don't find dictating this book daunting, even though I've never dictated a book before. I could be very nervous about this process, but because my outline is so strong, I'm not worried. The effort I put into my second phase is paying off now.
In this experiment, the only thing I'm changing is the method by which I take the words out of my body and put them into the computer.
I have a very strong outline with a solid rhythm, so the rest of this process is mechanical. It's simply painting by numbers. It's simply going through the steps that I know how to do. That's the beauty and the simplicity of creating a deep outline with all of your beats and your story structure and your character arcs first. That's what makes writing fast so possible.
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Catching Problems Early
The ability to self-analyze is imperative for this process to work. At the end of every hour or every writing block, you should take note of how many words you've written. When I'm writing in Scrivener, I can keep a pretty good running tally for how fast I'm writing. I can see how fast the little target tracker blocks are filling up from 0 to 100 percent. If you notice that your word count is dropping below fifteen hundred words per hour, that is a dead giveaway that there is a problem in what you're doing.
If you're dictating, you can use a simple audio editing tool to see how much of your recording is silence. Inside Audacity, use the truncate silence tool and look at how much you remove.
(There is a truncate silence walkthrough at ServeNoMaster.com/20k showing you exactly how to do it. I use this same process to remove long silences from my podcast episodes as well.)
You can look and see how much silence and wasted time there was. If you record for an hour, and after truncating the silence you have forty minutes of useful words, that is a red flag. The problem is not how fast you talk, but instead how much time you spent saying nothing. You just threw away twenty full minutes of silence. That's a lot of waste. You spent a lot of your time thinking about what you wanted to say next. Those moments of silence aren't nothing; they are you thinking instead of talking. You were making decisions instead of just writing.
Think of these writing check-ins as the red light inside your car's dashboard. When you notice your word count dipping, that is the red “check engine” light in your car. It's a warning sign that something is going on and you need to take action now before the problem becomes systemic.
There are many reasons your word count can drop. Maybe something distracted you. You went and got a snack, you forgot how you wanted the story to end, or you had to decide how you wanted the fight or the conversation or the dialogue to play out.
If there's a missing piece in one of my outlines when I start my rough draft process, I will lose time correcting it. Even with all the preparation that goes into my outlines, I always discover new sections that I want to write or that I hate a direction that book takes. I come up with a new idea that I think the book needs. I will be writing a section in the middle of the book, and I’ll realize I want to look up a fact to see if I can take the scene in a different direction.
When you need more research, or you get creative and change a scene, this will kill your word count for that hour.
We want to minimize those instances as much as possible, so keep track of your word counts as we're working. If your word count right now is very low, there is a very strong possibility that the problem is in the pre-writing process.
There is a reason I've spent so much time talking about preparation and outlining. There's a reason most of Breaking Orbit is about the outlining process. There is a reason that my video courses and blog posts contain such extensive training on outlining. This part of the process is absolutely critical. It's the foundation for everything.
The three phases of writing your book are:
Prepare
Write
Edit.
Phase One is researching, outlining, and sketching. Phase Two is the writing process, creating your first version and your big rough draft. Phase Three is the rewriting and editing phase. The more efficient and more successful you are in Phase One, the shorter the other two phases become. If you do Phase One perfectly, the writing and editing stages can be ten times shorter.
Most writers prefer to focus on the middle step. We create very rough outlines, and we say things like, “Oh, I know where the story is going to go; I know how it's going to play out.” We have the big picture in our minds, but the big picture is not what you're writing.
You're writing your story one step at a time. We have to put every single brick into that yellow brick road. As much as you can have the big picture in your mind, we need more. When writing, we can only create one section at a time, and without that deep outline, you will meander.
Look at all those television shows where people loved the first few seasons and then hated the endings. Every single time, they had no plan for ending of the television show, so the storylines started to wander. They don’t know if the show will last thirty, fifty, or a hundred episodes. Fortunately, you’re not in that situation. You have total control over the length of your story and how it will end.
If you run into that moment where you notice your word counts are consistently low and you're struggling, the problem is definitely in your outlining, research, and preparation process.
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Little Things Add Up
Even though I’m a marathon writer, my initial tracking metric is words per hour. I want to catch and diagnose a problem as soon as it arises, rather than eight hours later. Focusing on words per hour initially will allow you to catch any flaws in your writing process. If you’ve written twenty thousand words in a day, that’s a great success, but if it took you sixteen hours, that's not so great. We want to get that down to five or six hours or less.
We want you to hit your targets very quickly, and this is why we track several different numbers throughout the day. Whether you are using the spreadsheet that I have on my 20K page, whether you're using a tracking app, whether you're just using a little notebook you have next to your computer, whatever your process is, that tracking is vital. It will help you discover problems quickly.
My word count per hour for this session got messed up because I had to take care of my daughter for twenty minutes. It threw twenty minutes out of my schedule. I know that now I have to adapt. There are so many little time-wasting shifts that we typically wouldn't track.
We don't write down when we go to the bathroom. But if you spend fifteen minutes in the bathroom that is 25% of your available writing time and will affect how many words you wrote that hour. We have these little habits that we don't notice. Some people I know drink ten cups of coffee when they are writing. We develop all of these little time-wasting habits that become ingrained into our behavior, and we don't notice them until we start tracking.
I don't write in coffee shops. It's very distracting for me. I can't work in public like that. I can't work when I'm around people. It's the same thing when we go to the gym. People go to the gym and spend all their time talking to
everyone, and that forty minute workout ends up taking two hours.
If you're at the coffee shop and you're talking to people every few minutes, stop wondering why my system isn’t working for you. The problem is that you are distracted. And you won’t notice this problem unless you are fastidious in your tracking. We need to track our words per hour very carefully.
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Hitting a Wall
It comes out of nowhere. You're writing a section, a scene, a critical part of your adventure and you hit the wall. You feel stuck; you can feel your word count slowing down. One minute you are cranking out words so fast that the keyboard is smoking, and the next you hear that knocking sound in the airplane engine. The plane starts to fly a little wonky.
The space between words gets longer and longer, and you are struggling. You transition from being in the zone to struggling in quicksand. You are wrestling with the scene, that critical section of your book.
This happens in every book I write. There will always be a chapter here and a chapter there that I decide I hate when I'm writing them, or I just get stuck. There's this idea, this mindset that you should power through it, that you should fight through it, that you should finish the scene no matter what. That is not the 20K approach to writing.
Forcing yourself to finish a scene by writing three hundred words in an hour is a total failure, not a success. The reason I mention Scrivener as a writing tool all the time and the reason I talk about mind maps all the time is that they allow you to jump around and work on different sections.
I will reorder the sections of this book. I guarantee that will happen at least twice. The structure I have now will change as I'm editing because the story arc is so important. Once I have written the ending of the story, I have to go back and rewrite the beginning to make sure they tie together really nicely. And part of that has to do a little bit with the rhythm. With a nonfiction book especially, I need to finalize the rhythm after having the first rough draft because the way the book ends will change.
I have a vision for how this book is going to end. Part of this book includes my experience dictating for the first time, but I will also include sections about the editing process. I can’t write about them until after they happen, so the book will be fluid until I have completed everything. You may have noticed several little notes that I have added to the book during the editing process already.
I'm dictating a book for the first time, so I'll write that first draft, and then I'll go to the editing process and add in sections about how that ending process went for me. I don't know how it's going to go yet. I don't know how the story is going to end. For that reason, I'll go back and make some changes to the flow and rhythm of the entire book.
When you hit a wall or get stuck on a scene, just put your pencil down. You are a fast writer now. You can go and do another task and come back later. Go and write another section of the book. No rule says a book must be written in the order in which it is read. That rule doesn't exist; it's imaginary.
You're allowed to change the order of your sections. I guarantee that by the time you read this, I will have changed the order of the sections of this book several times. I'll probably change the beginning of the book four or five times until I find that perfect first sentence. And that's okay.
The only thing that matters, in the end, is the final experience of the reader. By the time you are reading this or hearing this if you grabbed the audiobook version, everything will be perfect, and the order will be fine. No one cares how the sausage is made; we only care how it tastes. Or if you’re a vegetarian, perhaps you do care how it's made. But we don't care how a television is made; we only care that it works.
As long as the book in the final product is good, the way you created it is irrelevant. So when you get stuck, when you get caught at a scene, I recommend going and working on another part of the story. You can come back later, and if you're stuck again two days later, you might need to make a dramatic change. Perhaps you need to go to some of your fiction scene writing tools looking for help or specific techniques to help you get through a tough scene.
But ninety-nine percent of the time when we hit a wall, the cause is a problem during the outlining phase. Otherwise, you simply have a bad scene. You just don’t like the structure. Sometimes when I go back to my original outline, I realize that I hate a section. I wasn’t that enthusiastic when I put it into the outline, and now that is coming home to roost.
If you don't like the beats within a chapter, rather than get stuck there, just work on another section. When you come back tomorrow, you'll have fresh eyes. That broken chapter will be percolating in the back of the brain. After a night on the back burner, it will be ready.
This technique will keep your word count up and allow you to deal with problems later on. It's not procrastinating because we're putting the issue in the back of your mind. We're dealing with it in a more efficient manner.
When you finish that first rough draft, you may have four or five scenes that you skipped when you got stuck. Now you can go back into your decision-making state of mind. You can spend an entire day fixing these scenes. You know what happens before and after them, so fixing them will be far easier now. This is far more efficient than trying to fix your broken scenes on the fly. We want to separate the writing and the decision-making processes as much as possible.
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Action Steps
Perform some competitive research: other authors’ table of contents, and reader reviews.
Find a book that you want to model. Break down the beats, write them down, and use that to start your outline.
Write a detailed sketch or skeleton of your whole book.
Write your rough draft - no editing allowed yet. This is the part where you just let your creative juices flow.
Track, track, track your word counts during the rough draft phase. Analyze your results carefully. The more data you have, the more useful it will be to you.
Part X
The Zone
As for the zone, I always find the zone immediately after I am sure I will never ever find the zone again because it has left me for some other, better writer.
- Sarah MacLean
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The Runner's High
We've all been there and felt that moment where time just seems to disappear; you're writing so fast that you don't even feel the time flying by. You look at the clock and one or two hours have disappeared.
This is that perfect place, that perfect state of writing nirvana, that we want to achieve as quickly as possible. We have achieved this perfect state of concentration. All of the distractions disappear, and writing goes from difficult to easy. The words just seem to fly right out of your brain and onto the screen.
Our goal in this section is to diagnose and discover exactly how to get you into the zone and turn this from guesswork into a replicable process. Runners always call this the runner's high. They talk about that moment when you run so far that you start to feel euphoric. Runners know exactly how far to run before they hit that moment, and we want to find that exact moment for you as a writer.
It's the state of complete immersion that is necessary to achieve the high word counts we're looking for. To become fast, we need to reach this state as frequently and as quickly as possible. It begins by finding that state where all your distractions disappear, and you feel almost at one with the keyboard, in sync with your computer.
With many ways that we seek to improve our lives, it’s not about adding, but instead about taking away. You don’t need additional techniques and tools to find the zone. Often, it’s about minimizing distractions or removing the things that hold us back. It's very hard to achieve the zone when you're flipping back and forth between your document and a news website, YouTube, or any other social media site. Or when you have the television on in the background.
These distractions make it easier to get through the day, and that's why we have them. We don't like to be bored. With these distractions
, we write a little bit, relax a little bit, and then write a little bit again. The problem with this process is that it keeps you from ever achieving the zone. It keeps you out of the zone permanently.
The initial writing phase is the hardest. Your muscles are cold, and you’re wondering why you got up so early to jog anyways. You don’t have your rhythm yet, and your mind keeps wandering. This is when you have to grind. You have to power through this phase.
It's a little bit tough because you're fighting against your desire. You're not enjoying writing, so you set up a system where you do some work and then reward yourself. You write for three minutes and then reward yourself. Then you write for five minutes and reward yourself.
This process is perfect for low-motivation tasks. But it keeps you locked in that initial phase, and you’ll never break into the zone. While having a nice distraction provides short-term pleasure, in the long-term it hurts you and decreases your effectiveness as a writer.
I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else. It’s a terrible habit that I picked up in high school and which took me a long time to break.
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Declutter Your Mind
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 11