The Best-Kept Secrets to Write Faster and Increase Readership

Use these techniques to write faster and publish more

When writers are first starting out, they often have difficulty writing a lot of good content. This can be frustrating, especially when seeing so many other writers producing copy daily or publishing more than once a day. Then there are all the articles that say that publishing at this frequency is the only way to become successful.

I remember how hard this was for me at the beginning. Sometimes it would take me several days to get out a single article and when the writing wasn’t flowing it would seem like pulling teeth to get anything out. If I published something 2–3 times a week I was doing well.

It’s true that a writer’s goal shouldn’t be solely to produce as much content as they can in the shortest period possible. It’s not a pie-eating contest. Creating high-quality writing does take time.

However, there is some truth to the idea that to be a successful writer you need to be visible which means staying in the public eye. To do this you obviously need to write good content at a rate that you can publish regularly enough so that your readers keep you in mind.

While some folks criticize the advice saying that writers need to learn to create new content quickly, this is a reality in today’s market. The truth is that there are plenty of writers in every niche who write great content quickly and publish once or more than once daily. The only way to compete with them is to learn to produce new work fast.

While this article won’t speak to writing skills, this obviously plays into the response you receive from writers. If you are publishing five poorly written posts a day that are sloppy and have glaring errors, you still will not attract regular readers. It’s important to learn how to write well and to polish your writing skills before starting out.

Providing your writing skills are up to par, there are some simple techniques you can use to increase your writing speed. These will enable you to publish more frequently to increase your readers, engagement, and earnings.

Don’t compare yourself to other writers

“Comparison is the thief of joy.” — Theodore Roosevelt

Social comparison is a common method that we use to gauge where we fall in some areas of our lives. We use it to see how we stack up compared to others doing the same thing. Writers constantly compare themselves to other writers, especially freelance writers who determine the course of their own careers.

“Am I publishing as much as other writers?” “Am I making as much as other people?” “Is my writing as good as others?” “Am I getting as much attention as other writers?” “Am I as popular as others who write in my niche?” The list of questions goes on and on.

This is one of the problems for those publishing online, which is the majority of writers today. The internet is undoubtedly a great source of support and information and provides numerous opportunities that most writers didn’t have before. But it also provides the ability to see how other writers are doing and use this information for the purposes of comparison.

As the natural inclination is generally for people to post their successes as opposed to their failures, writers, especially new writers may see a lot of posts about how well others are doing. It’s likely not the case that there aren’t probably far more failure experiences than success ones out there. It’s just that people are less likely to write about how they failed.

The way to combat this is to let yourself be okay with the level you are at and to focus on improving it over time. Don’t worry that if you aren’t where other writers who are successful are at that your efforts aren’t amounting to anything. While it’s fine to look up to other writers, you don’t want their success to get in the way or your own growth.

Choose what you look at online and in print with regard to other writers. Limit yourself to only searching for and reading posts that you need to in order to conduct your business. Don’t search for things like, “Average earnings for freelance writers” or “How often do successful bloggers post” or worse yet see how much the top writers in your area are making or publishing.

It’s fine to keep up with trends like Google algorithm updates and new SEO techniques. But don’t spend a lot of time on social media monitoring what successful writers are saying about their writing experiences. Just work to continue improving in your ability and the quality of your writing and you will naturally find yourself posting more over time.

Change your internal monologue

The subconscious mind has a powerful effect on our moods and the beliefs that we hold about ourselves. We have a constant internal monologue that plays in our heads all the time. While this may be conscious at first, after a while, we push it into our subconscious so we won’t hear it anymore. But while we may not be perceiving it consciously, that doesn’t mean it still isn’t rearing its ugly head from where we’ve stored it.

If you find yourself constantly worrying over how fast you are writing or how much you are publishing, you may be telling yourself things like, “This is just how fast I write, I can’t do any better” “There’s nothing I can do to learn how to write any faster than this,” “I’m a slow writer by nature,” or the like. Those thoughts will define what you are able to do and it will become your reality until you replace them.

Before you start writing for the day, close your eyes and relax. Then replace critical thoughts with other more positive ones, such as, “I am getting faster at writing with each passing day,” or “Like anything else, it’s just a matter of learning the skills to write faster which I am doing now.”

Don’t try to change things by thinking thoughts that aren’t true such as, “I’m the fastest writer anywhere,” as your subconscious won’t accept them when you know they aren’t accurate. The aim is to replace negative thoughts with more positive, adaptive and accurate ones.

Begin with the end in mind

Before you start writing, determine what you want your writer to walk away with. For example, when I started this article, I had already decided that I wanted to present an actionable list of things that will help you write faster that aren’t presented in every other article on the topic. Of the techniques I chose, I wanted at least one or two to address internal factors such as thoughts and feelings which might stand in the way of writing faster and how you can address them in a positive manner.

A lot of times before I begin writing a new article, I’ll actually write the end or the “takeaway” for the piece. This helps prevent me from getting lost as I write as I have a habit of somethings meandering all over the place, providing information that is only tangentially related to the topic of the piece.

If I feel like I’m getting off-topic, I reread the end which helps me refocus. This cuts down on my writing time by making sure I’m not writing a bunch of content that doesn’t need to be included and it also decreases my editing time since I don’t have to read all of that excess material considering whether or not it has a place in the article as I review what I’ve written.

Keep a list of questions to use as topics to write about

One of the most frequent things that writers say gets in the way of their ability to create good content quickly is the inability to regularly come up with good topics. When your goal is to publish frequently, there will be days that you can’t think of anything to write about that interests you or that you think will interest your readers. When this happens, you try to force your writing, focusing on the thought, “I have to get something out today, no matter what it is,” instead of focusing on writing something of substance that provides readers with an answer, solution or experience they can connect with.

When I find myself in this situation, two things happen. If I can hang in there long enough, I will produce a post that I’m not really proud of, which I publish anyway and then feel bad about because it results in little engagement.

The second thing that often happens is I get to a point after spinning my wheels and just writing to write, where I realize the article says nothing and is going nowhere. I slam my computer shut and give up for the day. Obviously neither of these outcomes is going to result in quick, concise, high-quality writing that others want to read.

A lot of articles about writing fast and publishing frequently advise keeping a list of ideas to write about. However, I’ve found that when I go back to use one of the ideas I came up with, many no longer seem relevant, were related to a one-time event or very specific situation that others won’t likely be able to relate to. Or they were ideas that though I got excited about in the moment, but that I realize aren’t really particularly interesting after all. Just because we can generate a lot of ideas through the day, it doesn’t mean that they will result in great content.

I’ve learned that no one really wants to read about my own personal thoughts about mundane topics that I may have throughout the day. While this may once have been the focus of blog posts, this has changed in recent years. Now readers look for stories for specific reasons. The most common reason is to answer a question that they have.

So instead of just keeping a list of whatever ideas I have that I might want to explore more, I keep a list of questions that I have as well as those I come across from others who I interact with throughout the day and that I see asked online.

I also frequent sites like Quora and Reddit to see what the most commonly asked questions are based on how many views and followers they have. Since I’ve been doing this, I’ve had less of a problem coming up with topics worth writing about and find that this helps me write faster instead of struggling with my work.

Create a 30-day content plan

Although I’ve seen this recommended, I admit I ignored it until recently. I felt that it would limit my creativity and at times make it more difficult for me to write because there would likely be days I wouldn’t feel like writing about the scheduled topic. I know that just because I think a topic is interesting with a lot to say about it one day doesn’t mean that I’ll feel the same way later on.

Since I knew I needed a better structure to keep me on track, I decided to give this technique a try. I remembered the blotter with the monthly schedules that I’d had as a child (and never used) and found an inexpensive version on the internet.

I then took my list of questions and created a plan which set what I’d write about for each day of the next month. To make sure I wouldn’t run into a problem because I didn’t want to write about what was scheduled, I listed two different questions for each day to give myself a choice. The questions I didn’t answer I wrote at the bottom of the blotter so I’d have a list of options in case there was a day that I wasn’t able to generate any good ideas for either of the scheduled topics.

At the end of the month, I used the list of new questions I’d generated for the next 30-day plan. Since I hadn’t generated sixty new questions, I used leftover topics to fill out the schedule. Not only did this system help me write faster since there was no wasted time related to topic generation, on many days, the list of topics often gave me a push to produce more than one story.

Using this system helped me write faster in a few other ways as well. The fact that it was a desk blotter meant that to use it as productively as possible I needed to sit at a table of some sort rather than laying on my bed to write. Despite preferring to be on comfy furniture when I work, it probably is better to sit at a writing surface that is associated only with that activity. It also gave me somewhere to write new ideas and keep track of which ideas I’d used and which ones were still open, serving as a stimulus to write more than one piece when I finished my first piece early in the day.

Takeaway

Although some people may feel that focusing on writing quickly is the wrong approach to take, in today’s writing market, there is an expectation that writers who produce blogs or other column-like formats produce new content frequently. The ability to write high-quality content quickly is, therefore, an important skill to have in order to remain visible and keep your readers’ attention. Determining some reliable ways of writing new content fast so that you can publish regularly, can go a long way in helping you become a successful writer.

Natalie Frank has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and often writes about how to create a more satisfying and successful writing life. She is an editor for The Partnered Pen & One Table, One World and is Editor in Chief for Promposity & Mental Gecko, both of which she created. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications.

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