The solution to each problem isn’t always an exercise, but it certainly helps to have one available. We’ve already covered a few solutions to each of these problems, but now it’s time for exercises that will help you break through before the problem occurs.
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A Note About Tracking
You absolutely must track your numbers for these exercises to work. The more data points you track, the faster you will master the 20K System. Keep track of your performance over time as well. If you have a fantastic Monday but are too burned out to write a single word Tuesday, that needs to be in your notebook.
The last thing we want is to build a strategy around a false positive. This is not a pie eating contest. It’s not about writing as many words in a day as you can once; this system is about creating something replicable. By the time you complete your training, you will be able to write twenty thousand words a day consistently. As a master of the 20K System, you will be able to generate one hundred thousand words per week and still enjoy a lovely long weekend.
Nothing is more important than tracking your numbers. Please don’t slack off here or the system will falter.
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Typing Drills
If your limitation is technical, then your first stop will be typing drills. If you have to look at your hands while you type, that will always slow you down. There are loads of fantastic free typing programs out there, and I have provided links to some of my favorites on the 20K page.
The only way to run fast is to run a lot. It takes training and practice to build up those muscles. When I was younger, I had to look at the keyboard while I typed. This was such a limitation. Eventually, I knew where most of the keys were and only occasionally had to check the keyboard.
You might be pretty good at typing, but do you have to look at the keyboard to find certain punctuation? I sometimes have trouble finding the exact symbol I want, and that can slow me down.
Even if you are pretty good at typing, I recommend taking the assessment and then playing with a few typing programs. Even if you only increase your typing speed by one word per minute, this adds up to sixty words per hour and over the course of a year can easily add up to an additional book for your catalog.
Typing training shifts in and out of vogue. It was popular right before and right after I was in school. I was just in between the two generations that took this skill seriously. Now, most people use phones and tablets, so typing is falling out of fashion again.
The typing programs aren't the coolest out there, but they will help you write faster, and that is all we care about.
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Small Sprints
We have already dabbled with sprinting, but let’s dig a little deeper together. Writing fast is a skill, and if you don’t practice with enough frequency, it can atrophy. A small sprint is a way to keep up your skills even when life has you too busy for a proper writing session.
Every day, set aside five minutes to blaze through a little sprint. Write as much as you can in this tiny block. Keep track in your notebook and watch your numbers improve, even when you're busy with life.
There are a few critical rules for sprints that you must stick to. Turn off all spell and grammar checkers. Turn off all distractions. Do not hit delete or backspace no matter what happens. You are only focused on quantity, not quality. Do NOT allow the editing part of your mind to distract you.
Your goal with small sprints is to grow. Start with five minutes and add a minute to your sprints every day. Keep track of your total word count and also your words per minute. You want to find the peak of your performance bell curve. Your best length may be nine minutes, or it may be twenty-seven minutes.
Once you have found your sprinting "sweet spot," you can move onto our Pomodoro exercises, which is a way of daisy-chaining small sprints.
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Chain Your Sprints
We have talked about Pomodoro at a few points in this book, but let’s dial into Pomodoro for writers. If you only dedicate forty minutes a day to writing, your book will take months to finish, no matter how fast you write. Therefore, we can’t follow the traditional and strict Pomodoro guidelines.
Once you have found your small sprint “sweet spot” it’s time to play with breaks. For some writers, short breaks are perfect. You write for twenty minutes and then take a five-minute break. Then you are ready to pound out another sprint. Other writers need longer breaks to find the zone. Consistent tracking of your word counts is critical here. It’s the only way to find your peak writing rhythm.
For your first exercise, start with a one-hour block. Break it up into sprints and breaks. Track your performance with multiple sprints and play with longer and shorter breaks. If your break is too short, your mind won’t feel rested. If it’s too long, you will lose your rhythm and have to start over. You will lose your connection to the zone.
As you start to get in touch with your ideal rhythm, lengthen your writing block. Expand your session up to two hours and watch your word counts soar. Once you can handle a four-hour block of writing and controlled breaks, add in a longer break. I don’t recommend writing for more than four hours without a long break because you risk burning out over the course of a few days. Don’t forget that you need to write tomorrow as well.
Pushing yourself too hard today can cost you tomorrow, and that will hurt you in the long run.
Small sprints are any writing sessions under thirty minutes. Anything longer is a big sprint.
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Big Sprints
At a certain point, small sprints turn into big ones, and eventually they turn into marathons. There is no official definition for these writing lengths, so I can only offer my opinion. A small sprint is anything under thirty minutes, a big sprint is from thirty to ninety minutes, and a marathon is anything longer. This is just my opinion, so feel free to adjust the numbers to fit your reality.
Some people are Pomodoro writers, and some are marathon writers. The only way to be sure is to test both methods and track your numbers fastidiously.
Big sprints are where we will keep pushing your writing speed and strengthen those mental muscles. Start off with sprint lengths that you can manage. You may start out at five minutes, but every few days add a minute to your timer. We want to push you past thirty minutes to see if you enter the zone. For many writers, there is a dip in performance right before they break into the zone and the numbers skyrocket again.
During a writing sprint, you must not stop writing. If you get stuck or run out of ideas, keep pushing yourself, and skip to another section of your book if you have to. After the sprint, you can go back and work on that section of your outline.
As always, keep track of your sprint times and word counts.
With the small sprint exercises, we found your wall. Now it's time to break through that wall and push until we find your true wall. We are training for a marathon here, and that means pushing yourself to the limit. When you can write for two hours straight, hitting ten or twenty thousand words a day is a breeze.
After you have conquered your big sprint training, it's time to make some final decisions. Compare your performance with Pomodoro blocks. Do you write more in two hours with blocks or a marathon? Which technique gives you more words per day?
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Transcription Loop
This technique will help you to overcome a problem that may be hiding behind your "writer's block." Have you ever been trying to think of a certain word and it just won’t come? You can feel it on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t get the word to come out?
For many people, this is what writer’s block feels like. The problem may not be that you don’t know what is supposed to happen, but that you don’t know how to say it. You can’t seem to find the words you want to use to express yourself.
This is a technique that will help you to become a better writer. It’s very similar to a method that I use to teach new copywriters how to master their craft.
Find a gr
eat book and get a paperback copy. Sit down every day and spend twenty to thirty minutes copying the book by hand. In my office right now, I have a copy of A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway and a notebook.
Writing with a pen is a skill that we seem to lose after we graduate from school. Many members of the generation behind me have spent their entire lives typing and have no idea how to write in cursive. When you write this way, you activate a different part of your brain and almost as if by magic, these powerful writing skills will be absorbed into your mind.
If you stick to this simple exercise, you will become an incredible writer in less than six months. I know that might seem like a long time, but even after a few weeks, you will notice that the words start to flow a lot easier.
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Blind Writing
This is a simple ten-minute exercise that forces you to disconnect writing from editing. If you struggle to try and correct every misspelling while you are writing, this exercise will help you to break through. This technique comes with three rules.
Eyes closed
Write fast
Pen and paper
These rules will help you to push your writing to new heights. Without being able to see the page, you have no chance to go back and edit. If you try this with a keyboard, there is still the temptation to hit that delete key. With a pen, there is no delete key. Write as fast as you can during this exercise; in fact, write FASTER than you think you can.
You can try this exercise with random topics, but I find that leaves room for writer’s block to creep back in. I don’t want you wasting time trying to come up with a new topic to write about every day. Instead, take a scene or section from your book and write it this way. This way of writing is crazy, but you will come up with some real nuggets of gold.
Look back at your page and circle your favorite words or sentences. Pick one and write it at the top of the next page in your notebook. Now do another ten-minute writing session with your eyes closed. You will be amazed at what you come up with.
This is an excellent way to warm up for a writing day as well. I often travel to a new location for each book, and this is a way to warm up my mind and get ready to crank out some brilliance!
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Action Steps
Work your way through each of these drills and exercises.
Invest three weeks into improving your writing speed.
Track your numbers carefully in a notebook or spreadsheet.
Find a great book to copy by hand for your transcription exercises.
Commit to pushing through your writing walls to find how far you really can go with a big sprint.
Part XV
Speed Training
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
- Aristotle
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Create a Plan
To succeed at anything in life, you need a plan. Even if you are only planning a few days into the future, this action will bring you closer to success.
For every book I write, I start with my goals. I am in the middle of four or five writing projects at any given time. Right now I am working on a book for a new pen name I am developing, a book I am ghostwriting for a client, this book, and I’m starting to block out the next book in this series. I am also working on several copywriting projects.
With each of these projects, I start out with my goals clearly defined. I know exactly how many words I want in the finished product. I know that I’m guilty of abusing my word counts. I planned on writing a book under forty thousand words here, and it looks like I’m going to at least double that. I just can’t help myself!
When I get approached for a ghostwriting job, I always ask about the word count first. This is a critical step that some new freelancers and writers forget. Everyone has a different opinion about how long a book should be. One of my primary writing clients is a partnership. Each time they hire me, one of them asks for a book to be at least thirty-five thousand words, and the other one says that’s way too long and tells me to stick to twenty.
It’s pretty hard to please both of them, but at least I have a word count window to work with.
Whether you are writing blog posts, emails, sales letters, scripts, novels, or manuals, you must start out knowing your word count goal. When I get an assignment for a twenty-five thousand word book, I decide how hard I want to work on it. Normally, I like to write softly and put out five thousand words per day. This means I only have to write for about two hours each morning, and then I can spend the rest of the day doing other things that I love.
Many of my clients are shocked by my promise that I can crank out a book in a week. They assume that I’m over-promising, but because of my writing speed, I’m giving myself a buffer. I have written a thirty-five-thousand-word book in less than sixty hours before for a client emergency.
Planning is a critical component of any project. Here we have a different project. The goal is to write faster, and we need to plan out a long-term strategy to get there. Your plan should include the exercises from the previous section. Only you know how much time you have available. You may only have time for a small sprint every weekday and can work on your bigger sprints on the weekend.
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Use a Calendar
Build out a calendar that has a strict schedule. Add a minute to your sprints at least once a week. If you can grow faster, do that. Start out with a daily calendar of when you will perform each exercise. From there you can build out a plan for the next week.
Only after you have tried each exercise a few times will you know which ones are right for you. After a week or two, you can build out a training plan that lasts an entire month.
If you can dedicate the full twenty-one days to the 20K System, you will see the fastest results. I understand that some people don't have that kind of time available, so creating a long-term calendar to slowly improve your writing is a very effective method.
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Be Firm with Yourself
I could include a training calendar with this book, but it would be useless to ninety percent of the people that use it. I don’t know what time you get up in the morning or which exercise you need to perform the most. You are in charge of your destiny. I have given you the tools to become an amazing writer; your job is to implement them.
Be strict with yourself. Reward yourself for doing all your drills and punish yourself for failure. This is like any other training regime; your destiny is in your hands. Treat this seriously and you can quite easily become a six-figure writer this year.
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Training Versus Working
There is a difference between training and working. When I am copying a traditional sales letter into my notebook, that is, of course, training. But what about when you’re writing a chapter for your book in the middle of a writing sprint? Mingling our writing and training is easy.
Set aside time each day that is purely for improving your writing. This time is separate from your work time. Even if you only dedicate thirty minutes a day to training, you will keep growing as a fast writer.
Finding the correct balance can be a challenge at first, but set a clear goal right now. How many words do you want to write per hour? Per day? Per week?
Keep separate training sessions until you blast through all three of your initial goals. Until you can write twenty thousand words a day consistently, maintain your training sessions.
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Get Paid to Learn
I hate school, and I hate learning. I know it’s shocking to hear that from a professional trainer, but it’s true. I find it hard to even sit through a short training video. This morning I downloaded an eighty-minute training video on a new piece of software that I’ve been chomping at the bit to use for months.
They finally released it today along with a really val
uable training lesson. The content is pure gold. I sped up the video to 150%. But even at that accelerated rate, it took me more than five sessions to watch the video. After a few minutes, I get too distracted and hit pause. I only have about twenty minutes left, and I sure hope that I can crank through it.
The best way to overcome this hurdle is to get paid. Would you have paid more attention in school if they paid you? What if school operated like any other job and you were paid based on attendance and performance? What if you got paid twice as much just for sitting in the front of the classroom? Would you have worked a little harder?
I wanted to become a great copywriter. This is a new area where I have been pushing myself for several years. Every time I start studying, I get bored and start working on something that I know will make me money faster, even though I am aware that developing this skill will lead to a lot more money in the long run.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 17