7 Ways to Write More, Faster
… while leaving time for the pieces that take a bit longer
What I’m proposing is the best of both worlds — a way to reliably churn out a steady stream of articles that can be done quickly and easily by someone with your knowledge, while also finding the time and focus to write the harder pieces that you love doing — at a moment’s notice and for as long as the muse beckons.
- Keep a live pipeline/queue — combining note-taking and writing saves a lot of time and opportunity and keeps you in voice.
Some people write first drafts of their stories in a favourite notebook while others favour Word or similar before their stories ever end up on Medium. Either way, it’s like making your babies at home, having them at the hospital and bringing them home again. It sounds like the only way to do it, except all it really does is waste an awful lot of time and opportunity, tying you to a specific time and place for every step of the process when you could just make and have the little sucker at home or wherever you happen to be, in stages if need be, whenever the mood hits you.
You might even be able to keep some, uh, babies that would otherwise end up in the, uh, drawer. I’m really starting to regret the baby metaphor. I’m trying to say write your stories in Medium, not some other place or format. Otherwise, the risk is just too great of forgetting — or deliberately discarding — a perfectly wonderful idea, because you think you need things to be just so. You don’t.
Using Medium (or equivalent) as your writing, filing and publishing platform is not only very efficient, it will remind you of what it is you’re doing — being an actual writer — which in turn will allow you to take every idea seriously, act on the good ones (you’ll know when you write an outline), and execute it as and when you’re ready, wherever that may be, all in one place. How does this work in practice?
Lately, I tend to begin with a self-explanatory title, one that spells out exactly what the article will be about, and then take a minute to write the entire idea down in the way it came to me. I do my best to avoid any attempt to perfect it (the point is simply to get it all down without forgetting), and I’m careful to include every magic phrase, idea or impression that inspired me in the first place.
Only then do I feel I can leave it for later. Because as we all know, a time will come when we don’t have anything to write about, and what a gift to be able to pick up something rough and almost ready again, just like that! No searching, deciphering, transcribing, planning, brain-wracking, any of that.
To do: Get the Medium app, and anytime an idea hits, spend a minute getting it down. Pull off the road as if you’re taking a phone call, tell your family to put a sock in it and wait while you get this rough diamond down, ready to carve and polish later. Carry a notebook if you must, but get that thing out of you and into a Medium draft as soon as possible.
2. Keep wasting time on stuff you like and can’t stop doing—it might just relax you, it’s productive downtime, and it’s all content.
Late yesterday afternoon, I sat down to watch a movie, catching a break from a day of semi-productive writing. And while it seemed like a good movie and would probably relax me and let my subconscious mind do its thing, I felt really guilty. Writing does that. Like alcohol, it gets me into a raving stream of consciousness and, once it’s burnt up, it drops me hard. If only I could switch off after a few hours of work, relax and come back to it! But clearly I can’t.
Writing consumes me. I have to carry on till the job is done, and if I’m too tired, I keep trying and stressing until I have to go to sleep on a wasted day or need to do something else. Which was a shame, because I wasn’t getting any more work done and also not getting into the movie and probably wasting some very productive unconscious mind mojo. In between brief defenceless naps from sheer mental exhaustion, I managed to piece together that the movie was actually pretty damn good, after I’d read all the reviews and none of them had given me a real sense of it.
I could have done a much better job. Well, why don’t I do that next time? Why force myself to switch off and take a break when I find it impossible in the middle of a working day? I realised I had to make a mental shift so as not to see my break as relaxation for the sake of it, but as simply another, different workaday task; an opportunity to have the next germ of an idea, because one will inevitably enter my mind when I’m in the zone, to be noted down and turned into a story later. This will give you fantastic motivation to sit the hell down and enjoy your time-wasting, because it’s not really wasting time at all.
Whether it’s scrolling through your Google News feed, writing pithy or pissy tweets no-one reads, ordering toys off Amazon or ratting out your neighbours on NextDoor, it’s all content that can be developed.
All of it. If you’re like me, you probably came to Medium hell-bent on finding an audience for your poetry and short stories, then found the poetic inspiration wanting and the views and reading time ultimately too paltry for your brilliant 3,000 or 5,000-word story that probably took a month in total writing time. But don’t waste time and emotional energy only doing what you consider to be your art. To do: Write that review. You’ll be surprised at what else jogs free from that anxious, cluttered mind. Like this article.
3. But don’t lose sight of your artistic vision. Your best articles don’t need to get done fast — they just need to earn for longer.
Actually — about that short story. It can pay, depending on what you consider to be fair payment. When you’re in the zone (whether by accident or using some of the techniques in this article — or your own, if you’ve discovered any that work for you), your best work needn’t take more than a day or two, three to write, which means you only really need $200-$600 in earnings from it over its lifetime.
And that’s a wild guesstimate — you’ll have a different idea of what is a viable time-to-earnings ratio. Sure, you can earn more than that if you’re a prolific finance or self-help or tech writer with a following, but sadly not so much if you’re a poet or fiction author. So now you’re thinking, OK, I’ll take $200 for my labour of love if I can churn out a lot of other stuff really quickly that earns at least as much as that. But maybe you don’t fancy your chances. $200 per article doesn’t sound like a lot to earn, but it’s damn near impossible to achieve at Medium’s rate.
Well, you’re right. $200 is not much, and yet it’s hard to achieve on Medium — I haven’t yet — but life is long. Give it time. I’m still earning money on articles I published three months ago when I started. The more you write, the more your name is out there and the more new readers will swell your read figures and re-energise your back catalogue. I’m convinced I can double my earnings here every month for a while yet.
And I’m not sweating the how. I have yet to learn all the tips and tricks that will get me there, and I’m still having fun, so I’m pretty committed to my self-actualisation spiel. To do: Knuckle down, mix up bursts of quick and easy writing with sessions of slow writing, which lets you take it easy on yourself, make time for everything and complete them at their own rhythm. After that, just let the chips fall where they may.
4. Put your babies to work — ‘cannibalise’ the stories you still think you’ll publish one day but realistically never could outside Medium (or equivalent).
A friend I made on Medium (follow her, she’s cool) remarked on how isolated modern writers have become, which she points out is pretty ironic considering how easy the Internet makes it to have valued personal and professional connections. It’s also totally against the time-honoured spirit of writerly friendships and partnerships. Maybe I’ve been thinking along the same lines, because the idea of connecting and learning from others as a way to boost output underlies this point as well as all the rest in this article.
The first connection I’m thinking of was with the ‘family accountant’, Jon. (None of us uses an accountant, including him, but he’s family and he’s an accountant.) Jon represented many London artists in a previous life, as they say here, and he understood why I wanted to be on Medium right away. “Sure, why not?” he said. “All those stories just lying there on your hard drive and in notebooks gathering dust — why not put them to work and earn a few bob off them?” Why ever not indeed. Which is why I told another writer I follow on Medium (follow him too, he’s cool too) that I’m just cleaning house and selling all my old crap. To do: Find all your old crap, dust it off, put it back together in a different way if need be, and sell it.
5. Get a reader — you may be a crackerjack writer, but you probably can’t see the problems and potential in your own stuff if they paid you.
Given time, many writers working in self-imposed isolation become better at being objective about their own work, but let’s face it — how many years has that taken off their lives and output, and will they ever be as good as literally anybody else?
If the thought of giving your mom your story to read before hitting Publish makes you go pale, you are on the cusp of a great truth — you haven’t thought about her yet, have you?
Oh God, what will she think of all the crap you threw out at the world, unthinkingly? Let’s take another example. If you showed your work to the guy at the corner café, would he think you’re very funny, or would he just not get it? Whatever you think, unless you’re very, very sure he’d love or hate or be indifferent to it, you probably haven’t thought about him either. The point is that you don’t know what you don’t know, and then there’s a shit ton that you do know that you don’t know, such as the opinion of the guy from the corner café.
To do: Go ask your friend. Pay someone. Find a good couple of people who don’t think like you at all, and ask them what they think. Prepare to accept that whatever they say, they are always going to be right for liking or not liking something, even if they’re always going to be wrong about their reasons.
6. Use a ghost writer — or form a writer’s cooperative
Oooh, controversial… I haven’t tried this one, and after thinking about different variations of it for some time, I haven’t actually had cause to follow up on it.
But let’s say I was a famous columnist, and I had access to tons of talented writers wanting to work for or with me. Couldn’t I just get them to complete the stuff that was boring me beyond belief just as soon as I’ve penned down an idea for a story?
I mean, which kind of writer am I really in the think-write-polish continuum? And I the ideas guy, the one with the hooky turn of phrase, or the one whose work gleams with the polish of the true professional? Maybe there’s always gonna be somebody better than all of us at everything, so maybe I shouldn’t be too precious about my so-called talent in any of them. Maybe parts of it should be left to the pros? But again, how would this work in practice?
Well, if I had a ghost writer — and clearly there’s a case to be made for it (or people have tried) — I would write the core of an idea in a way I would understand and recognise later. I would then pay said ghost (less than the cost of my time per hour, to make economic sense) to write it out as close to my voice as possible. And I would edit their draft and get them to polish it. Let’s take another scenario.
At one point during the past year, I was feeling positive enough about enough creative and clever types I work with to think maybe I could invite them to a virtual retreat programme for two weeks, wherein we’d brainstorm ideas for a novel, workshop the narratives and plot out the character development and other elements. We’d then disperse for a month to execute it in teams that would remain in contact with each other and the other teams, and rejoin for up to three months to critique and further develop the work.
I mean, couldn’t you write a shit ton more that way? Isn’t this the wave of the future? How will we compete with the top studios or machines otherwise? I’m pretty sure that’s how Hollywood does it, and therefore, so should we.
To do: Find your tribe, fire them up with talk of shared-risk entrepreneurialism, and engage in some productive, cheap barter.
7. Recycle your stories
Sometimes a story doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Even you, the author, can see that. You’re reminded because someone picked it up months after it was published and gave it its due, perhaps the first person to do so. The relief of recognition washes over you, almost making it worth all the enterprise and pain. But why leave it up to alignment of the planets and be satisfied with crumbs?
You could republish — not entire Medium stories, that’d get you penalised on Medium for sure — but an excerpt/summary and link to a past (Medium, not external) story that you think deserves another chance.
Interestingly, republishing an entire story that already exists on another site seems to be OK, according to some Medium cognoscenti. Just keep the reader on the platform and don’t duplicate intra-platform content. But do your own research — I don’t want you to get penalised, whatever that might entail on Medium.
To do: Publish a list of your greatest hits. Publish a list of your worst-performing, most deserving stories. Publish all your previous stories about stories. Just republish. It’ll revive your back catalogue and, like an entirely new story, it’ll fill up your pipeline and keep the cadence and awareness going. Without actually being new. But be careful to follow the rules.
So there you go. Even though all of them make sense to me, not all are to my taste exactly, so I’ve put only about half of them to work in my own life. And while I work much harder than ever before, I also have a sense of purpose and enjoyment from valuing, professionalising and scaling up my writing. Even if it doesn’t pay very well yet, it’s more than what I’ve earned from it at any point in the past. Perhaps this isn’t how you like to write, but tell me if you’ve used any of these — or have your own productivity tips and tricks.