I don’t know how you do it! (Writing speed)

My wife takes care of posting EDGE issues to the archives. And she has told me before…

“I don’t know how you do it!”

In other words, how do I write so much. So often. And come up with ideas.

Writing is pretty easy for me. It is one of my “super powers”, as it were. Other types of online content (like videos or podcasting) are far more work for me, but writing is easy. Honestly, if all I had to do was write stuff like the EDGE, it’d be like the perfect business. Hey, maybe I can turn my RV site into such a thing using the “email blogging” method. (More to come on that front later).

Anyway, this isn’t about me. I want to talk generally about the issue of writing speed.

I know this is an issue for many. You feel like it just takes you FOREVER to write a damn blog post! And then you see the “blogging gurus” out there saying how you have to create super awesome blog posts and do it often and… well, you just wanna crawl into a hole and suck your thumb.

Now, there’s no ninja tactic I can give you here to make a writing ninja out of you. Like many things, there’s something to be said for experience.

I’ve been writing on blogs for 2 decades now. And that isn’t an irrelevant fact. You just get better at things the more you do it.

But, here’s something I find helps a lot…

Don’t write and edit at the same time.

For instance, my daughter likes to do some writing. However, she takes FOREVER to do it. She’ll sit there on her Chromebook and work on her writing for like an hour… and basically she’s got a paragraph to show for her time.

But, what I found was that she spent most of her time NOT WRITING. Instead, she was sitting there reading it back to herself, questioning it, wondering if it’s any good, editing it, yada yada. She was doing a whole lot of things that did NOT include actually… writing.

I have found it is best to separate the two things.

• STEP 1: Write.

• STEP 2: Review and edit.

And when you’re writing… you just write. Just brain dump. Let the words vomit out all over the screen (ok, there’s a visual). Don’t question it. Just get it out there. I don’t even want you to stop and correct a typo.

When you’re done, go do something else. Then, come back with a fresh mindset and put on your editor hat.

It might seem simple, but yet easy to forget. But… what do writers do?

Writers WRITE!

They don’t sit there and ponder. They WRITE.

Now, here’s another thing that helps me out quite a bit…

Write naturally and conversationally.

Just write like you talk. Keep it informal and normal. Be willing to piss off an English teacher.

Remember…

You’re just talking to another person. You might think you’re writing for a whole group of people, but every single reader is just a single individual. So, writing online content doesn’t  have to feel all that much different than writing an email to a friend or colleague.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, there’s no such thing as perfect and you end up wasting a TON of time trying to achieve it.

So, want to speed up your writing and be able to do more with less time? Then…

Separate writing from editing.

Write conversationally.

And accept imperfection.

And, in what may seem like a heaping load of irony, chances are you’ll become a MUCH better writer that way.