5 Ultimate Reasons Why You Should Write Fast

They’re all about discovering the fun, the pleasure in the process.

If you read any of my articles on Self-Gamification, which is the art of turning our lives into fun games, you would have seen that I am a big fan of kaizen. Kaizen is breaking challenges into small digestible ones and also making progress in small steps.

I wrote articles about slowing down and how that slowing down helps us accelerate the process of whatever we might be up to.

But here comes the seeming paradox. I am also a big fan of writing fast. I became one since testing it at the end of 2019 and practicing it on at least parts of the five books I wrote and published since then and until June of this year. I also use the approach of writing fast for many of my articles, including this one.

You might find it strange that I urge both slowing down and doing something fast. But there is no conflict in that. Let me explain.

I think you need to break everything into the smallest steps, and if you don’t have a deadline or it is not that urgent, then make just one or a few steps in that project every day. With that, you will stop resenting the task and start enjoying the process because it will become effortless to achieve.

I often use a timer and set it to five to ten minutes for that one step in the project. Sometimes I forget to do it, and then, at some point, I end up daydreaming and worrying.

That is why I highly recommend to time your writing, and as soon as you hit “start” on your timer, write fast.

I am not the first to advise writing or working fast when you actually do it. I learned about it from many others.

The prolific writers

There are whole books on the art of writing fast. These are just the two of them:

• 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by Rachel Aaron
• How to Write Fast: Better Words Faster (Stone Tablet Singles Book 1) by Sean M. Platt and Neeve Silver

There is even a whole discipline on writing and self-publishing fast, which they call “rapid release.” That applies to both fiction and non-fiction. Here are just a few examples of books on that:

• Rapid Release: How to Write & Publish Fast For Profit (Rapid Release Series Book 1) by Jewel Allen
• Rapid Non-Fiction: How to Write & Publish a How-to Book Fast for Profit (Rapid Release Series 2) by Jewel Allen
• Writing and Releasing Rapidly (Indie Inspiration for Self-Publishers Book 1) by Elana M Johnson

As you can see, Jewel Allen writes a whole series of books on Rapid Release, which is about writing and publishing fast. The third book in the series called Rapid Regency: An Author’s Quick Guide to Regency England will come out in October of this year.

Our favorite writers and what they do

If you have never tried writing fast, you might have reservations against it. I know I had. I wanted to produce something of value and entertaining, and at the same time, of high quality. So I needed to invest time in that, as great writers did, or didn’t they?

When I looked closer, I realized that, more often than not, our beloved authors were also prolific writers.

My favorite fiction writer and one of the most successful authors in the world, Nora Roberts, has written over two hundred and fifteen novels after having started to write in 1979 and have the first of her stories published in 1981. It makes over two hundred novels in forty years, which is more than five novels every year.

You can’t produce such amount of great work in such a short time without creating at least some of it by writing fast.

And here are the reasons

A large amount of work to produce in a lifetime or a specific amount of years is only one of the byproducts of writing fast. There are other brilliant benefits here as well.

I could identify at least five. Here are these five reasons for writing fast.

1. You’ll stop overthinking

When you write fast, then you limit the time you write in one go. And then, for example, when you set the timer for five minutes and write, you stop overthinking. You might even forget the “Backspace” button on your keyboard altogether, and instead, you just write. In a way, you say to your inner editor, “Just wait this few minutes out, and then I will pay you my full attention.”

After finishing writing during those five minutes, you said what you had to say, and your inner critiquer didn’t have anything else to do than listen and see what happened during that creative spree. Often, a completed and fully formulated thought gives a better picture of what you want to create, and your inner editor will find there at least some bits worth keeping.

Thus, the first and the most significant byproduct of writing fast is that you stop overthinking and let your words flow on your screen or page without reserve.

Here is what writing fast is about:

The key to writing fast isn’t having to think whether to write or what to write, it’s just doing it.

— Sean M. Platt and Neeve Silver, How to Write Fast: Better Words Faster (Stone Tablet Singles Book 1)

2. The quality of your writing will improve

Many writers think that they need to polish their writing, even as they write. I used to believe that my sentences should be perfect as I typed them. Curiously, I was afraid to press the “Backspace” button too often. The funny thing when I write fast, I do touch that button, but just quickly and shortly while noticing a typo or using the word that stopped the flow, and then I continue to type.

I experienced the positive effect of writing fast on the quality of my writing only during and after I tested it. After consciously giving it a chance last year and for many months since, and after writing and publishing five books within a year, I saw how vastly the quality of my writing improved.

Those bits that were written quickly got less revision. They had less fluff and unnecessary words in them. They had both rhythm and flow, and they sounded exciting.

I sounded excited about what I was discovering when I was putting the words on the screen or paper. Both in writing fiction and non-fiction, I sounded more honest and open in those bits, which were written fast than in those slow ones where I tried to package my truth into something soft and less scary.

The increased quality of my writing didn’t come alone from writing fast. It came along with it. The more I wrote, the better the quality of my writing became. This “writing more” however didn’t mean to write more and longer on the same piece but to create more pieces, more words. The only way to write more pieces within the same amount of time was by writing fast.

But in general, the increased quality of a piece written fast goes back to that first reason — quitting overthinking when you write.

Writing is like riding a bike — you need to be fast enough to keep your balance, but slow enough to notice the bumps and holes in the road so that you don’t fall over.

Here are great insight and advice on keeping that optimal speed by a writer who writes enormously fast:

“My ultimate goal as a writer is to be able to put out fantastic novels as efficiently as possible. I think that fast writing, especially at the first draft stage, is fun, inspiring, and freeing. But fast as I go, I never lose sight of the real purpose: to tell a good story. I don’t think I have to say that quality of words trumps quantity every single time, because if you’ve ever read a good book, you already know that. So don’t be afraid to slow down and be inefficient if that’s what you need to do. It’s your book and your story. Enjoy it, and never be afraid to do whatever it takes to make your novel as good as it possibly can be.”

— Rachel Aaron, 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love

3. You’ll have a steady flow of ideas

I didn’t plan this article while sitting and daydreaming or planning it consciously and deliberately. The idea came to me while I was writing another article and writing it fast. One of the sections of that article was on writing fast, and I ended up writing many of the paragraphs you read now.

The fact that I had so much to say for that single bullet point showed me that the topic deserved a separate article.

And that is what writing fast will show you. When you are in the flow, the ideas flow. Here is an excellent insight into that:

“Whether you’re writing for love or money, ideas are your currency.

“You want a factory full of them that never stops producing? Learn to write faster. We are never looking for good ideas and probably never will be again. Because they happen every day as part of doing business. We already have more ideas and concepts than we could ever produce, and the gap is constantly widening. The more we write, the more they come to us. It’s a broken faucet with the nearest plumber two counties down. This state can only exist after all the years of writing fast. Every day.”

— Sean M. Platt and Neeve Silver, How to Write Fast: Better Words Faster (Stone Tablet Singles Book 1)

4. You’ll become better in recognizing which ideas you want (= are worth) to pursue

The prospect of having many ideas is fantastic, but you might scare off so many because a large number of ideas might overwhelm you. The “broken faucet” in the quote above does sound scary.

But there is another brilliant byproduct of writing fast, and that is the ease with which you’ll be able to identify and pursue the best of those ideas.

When you write fast, the writing is flowing; thus, you are in the flow. And when you are in the flow, you have fun. So this could be your indicator: if the article or book practically writes itself and the words are pouring out of you, then this idea is worth pursuing. That applies to both big book ideas and small prompts for the next paragraph.

Enthusiasm is the keyword, and it can help you increase both your writing speed and the quality of your writing even more. Here is a story illustrating it:

“The days when I broke 10k [words] were the days when I was writing scenes I’d been dying to write since I planned the book. They were the candy bar scenes, the ones I wrote all that other stuff to get to. By contrast, my slow days (days when I was struggling to break 5k) corresponded to the scenes I wasn’t that crazy about. This was a duh moment for me, but it also brought up a troubling new problem. If I had scenes that were so boring I didn’t want to write them, then there was no way anyone would want to read them. This was my novel, after all. If I didn’t love it, no one would.” …

“This discovery turned out to be a fantastic one for my writing. I trashed and rewrote several otherwise perfectly good scenes, and the effect on the novel was amazing. Plus, my daily word count numbers shot up again because I was always excited about my work. Double bonus!”

— Rachel Aaron, n2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love by

5. Writing fast will feel like a fun game

You can’t say that someone is fast in something unless giving this speed some kind of measure.

The same is with writing. You need to measure your writing speed at least approximately to be able to say that it changes over time. And to be able to see the effect of writing fast on the quality and other parameters of your writing, you need to measure the writing speed.

Thus, you need to stop time and record the word count for each writing sprint.

But if you do that, then you automatically play a game.

And the best feature of this game is that you are both the designer and the player of it.

Coming full circle

Thus, here is where writing fast comes full circle. It is not entirely about producing more and learning more in the process. Or at least not only or not directly. These are byproducts. Writing fast is about the following:

The goal is not to become a word machine; it’s to make writing a pleasure so the words come as easily as the actions behind anything else you’re dying to do.

— Sean M. Platt and Neeve Silver, How to Write Fast: Better Words Faster (Stone Tablet Singles Book 1)

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About the author:

Victoria is a writer, instructor, and consultant with a background in semiconductor physics, electronic engineering (with a Ph.D.), information technology, and business development. While being a non-gamer, Victoria came up with the term Self-Gamification, a gameful and playful self-help approach bringing anthropology, kaizen, and gamification-based methods together to increase the quality of life. She approaches all areas of her life this way. Due to the fun she has, while turning everything in her life into games, she intends never to stop designing and playing them.