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One True Way to Become a Faster Writer

10/26/2016 | Aubrey Collins, Creative Challenges

By nature, I’m not a fast writer. (Some would argue that by nature I’m not a fast anything… but I digress.)

 Over the years, I made peace with my pace, telling myself that it’s because I’m someone who likes to ponder, reflect, contemplate, and finesse my copy. Although that never quite acknowledges that it’s more that my contemplation turns into rumination, where I find myself considering, reconsidering, and then reconsidering the reconsideration. Endlessly. Which means I’m not merely a slow writer but more of an obsessive over-thinker who naturally self-edits to a fault.

A lot of us are the mulling-over-and-second-guessing-each-sentence type, embodying the Dorothy Parker quote, “I hate writing. I love having written.”

If you, too, lean toward creating content at a dawdling, dithering, downright frustrating pace and just assumed you were destined (or doomed?) to be a slow writer forever, I have some good news. Being a slow writer is not a life sentence, and it’s actually possible to improve your writing speed without sacrificing quality.

It all comes down to one word: Practice.

Yes, to borrow from another famous phrase, “Practice. We’re talking about practice.”

How do I know practice is the antidote for the agony of staring at blank screens and rewriting the same sentence 50 times?

I lived it.

About halfway through my career, I spent a few years as a copywriter, where my primary responsibility was to, well, write. On the first day, I looked at jobs assigned to me and assumed the traffic manager who allocated them made a mistake. Each day on the calendar, I was expected to produce enough copy to complete an array of newsletters, direct mail pieces, email blasts, flap copy, banner ad blurbs, and more. 

I can still feel the dizzying wave of red-hot panic when I realized that my natural pace would need approximately a month (or maybe two) to complete each day’s tasks. How on earth was I going to do this?

There was a moment I considered pretending I left something in the car and screeching out of the parking lot, but instead I spent the next two years abiding by the lessons in Copyblogger’s “10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer,” which you can now purchase as a poster for your workspace.

1. Write.

2. Write more.

3.  Write even more.

4. Write even more than that.

5. Write when you don’t want to.

6. Write when you do.

7. Write when you have something to say.

8. Write when you don’t.

9. Write every day.

10. Keep writing.

Granted, as a copywriter, I had no choice but to live by those words. By doing it, though, an interesting thing occurred. I got faster. Then I got even faster. Then even faster.

Over those two years, I wrote so much that I stopped letting self-editing stifle me. Self-editing is a natural part of human behavior and how we learn. For some reason, it is especially maddening when it comes to writing because we struggle to hit the pause button on the tendency, even for a few minutes. We use the backspace button so much, the key itself starts to show wear.

The best way to put your self-editing tendency in check and have it actually work for you so well that you can self-edit on the fly is to reach competency — which is the state your mind reaches when you’ve made enough mistakes that your brain is satisfied it can move on. The brain needs to make and correct enough mistakes to have a database of knowledge that it can summon at any time. 

The highest level of competency is fluency, which is when self-editing occurs so quickly that we don’t even notice. It’s wonderful. It’s magical. And you only get there with practice, which I realize is both good news and bad news.

Either way, get out that pen and paper or fire up that laptop and get writing.

Aubrey Collins is the director of marketing and communications at MediaTree, a supplier of branded digital entertainment cards. She fell in love with the promotional products industry in 2011 at her first PPAI Expo. She shares her perspective on everything from the industry, what parenting continues to teach her about business, to what marketing campaigns make her cry on her blog. Connect with her on Twitter or email her atacollins@mediatreegroup.com.

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