Write So Fast You Leave No Room for Fear or Self-Doubt

Writers, start your engines — we’re about to write quick

When I first started writing I was so self-conscious I rarely published anything I wrote. I was afraid of rejection, afraid of failure, afraid of looking like an amateur, and afraid of coming across as an idiot. In fact, I wrote five full thrillers before I published my first.

That ugly, nasty writing fear is paralyzing. No matter what you write — fiction or non.

Although the fear never leaves, there are things you can do to mitigate its effects on your best work.

I tried many different methods to relieve this fear: mediation, positive affirmations, listening to positive podcasts — but nothing worked anywhere near as well as the method I’m about to share.

If you want to stop being scared, self-conscious, or reluctant, it’s time to go all Ricky Bobby on your writing. We’ve got to go fast.

Myth: fast writing equals poor writing

I hear it already. I know you’re thinking it, so let’s open the windows, air-out the old cabin, and dispel this myth now.

Writing fast doesn’t mean writing poorly.

When you write fast you become nothing more than a note-taker for the movie in your mind. The words pop-in and the pen pops-out.

When we write fast we don’t have the dirty middle-man of self doubt, translating and distorting the message halfway between the mental movie and the delivery to the page.

Fast-writing taps into the biggest, hardest-working parts of your brain — the subconscious.

When we wrote slow, we write consciously, using the wimpy part of our brain. Also the analytical part. And the part that worries whether or not you’re a real writer.

It may feel counter-intuitive to avoid you conscious mind, but the good stuff — the legendary writing you don’t remember doing when you re-read the next day — we want more of that.

Let’s get more of the good stuff.

Writing fast means not apologizing for your work as your write it

Remember, bleach is cheaper than milk. You’ll say some stuff that won’t be taken as well as you meant.

There’s room for cleanup later. But if you spend all your writing time effectively pre-apologizing and watering your writing to the point of bleh, then you’re milking your story too hard. You’re pandering to an audience who doesn’t exist — the audience of pleasing everyone.

Bleach is cheaper than milk

…and apologizing doesn’t have to be literal. When we write too slow we have a tendency to leave the daring stuff out. This is pre apologizing. When we pre-apologize we write too slow. We write predictably. We don’t write from the heart.

There’s room for editing later.

There’s room to apologize later.

There’s a lot of room to write a better story later.

But we’ve got to write fast if we want to come up with great writing worth apologizing for. If we write milk, we end up with an average story the reader read a thousand times. The writing will be so uneventful there won’t be a reason to apologize. You’ll have no readers to apologize to.

We need daring, magic, spontaneity, and wonder. We need you to go fast.

How to write fast

When you write fast there’s no room for all the doubt. You’ve got so much going on between your fingers and your subconscious there’s no time to waste on worry and impostor syndrome.

• Don’t self-edit as you type
• Set a timer in your phone and push yourself to hit a certain word count, or finish a scene in 20 minutes
• Push yourself hard, so your writing goal becomes the time or word count. When you do this the writing becomes vocational/transactional, not emotional. We want to dump those emotions during the first draft
• Write so fast you transcribe the movie in your mind, without the second voice throttling your decisions
• Scan the outline (if you need one), but flip it over while your writing. You don’t need to see the entire book in your mind. All you have to do is get to the next sentence. Then the next
• Use some kind of talisman or desk ritual. I have a little Buddha statue I tip over before I write, and stand it up when I’m done. This tiny, physical habit will focus your mind on the ritual and away from all those negative voices
• Did I mention go fast? Like, really fast. You’ll be pleasantly surprised when you re-read your work later

Fast writing is the blue collar approach. We punch the clock. We turn the crank until our shift is over. We go home. There’s no crying. There’s no self-doubt. The impostor syndrome is on a shelf in the stockroom somewhere.

There will be plenty of time for all the fear and doubt later.

We’re not eliminating these old friends, don’t you worry. We’re distracting them so we can get the words on the page. There will plenty of time to puke on your shoes later. Right now we need something to edit. So, we gotta go fast.

The other benefit of fast writing

I’m able to write over a million words a year, using this process. Whether you use that productivity towards books, content, or articles — you’ll have a lot more writing done in a year, compared to the average writer.

We don’t have time for average.

We’re indies.

We know that no one is coming so save us.

When you write fast you create more amazing content to serve your tribe. Your tribe is the group that feeds you and maintains your addiction of living indoors.

Your tribe is everything.

So, not only should you write fast, but you also need to grow your tribe in the process.

If you build your tribe now, you’ll have a pre-built, rabid audience ready when you launch your next book (or re-launch your last books). This should be a list you own (instead of relying on social media or some other big-business platform). Tap the link below. Enroll in my Tribe 1K indie email masterclass. I’ll show you how to get your first 1,000 subscribers (and your next 1,000) without spending one hot nickel on ads.

We’re waiting for you.

Enroll in my Free Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.