The Schnellschreibe Method · 2:20pm May 27th, 2015
One of the biggest problems that people have when participating in writing competitions is that they are unable to finish their story within the time limits. This is especially true of the pony Writeoff competition, where one may have as little as 24 hours to complete the assignment. However, I have no problem, and in some cases have been able to submit multiple complete stories within the time limit. At the request of other competitors, I've decided to explain how I am able to do this, using what I have described as the "Schnellschriebe" (German for "Fast Writing") method.
1. Develop the physical capacity
The first and most important part is developing the ability to write at sufficient speed to begin with. This means you need to develop a fast typing speed. There is no way to do this other than to practice. Touch typing is essential, and you will want to get a decent keyboard designed for the input of text (you can get a good one by Cherry for under $20 these days) rather than relying on your gaming keyboard or a touchscreen. A keyboard with physical feedback will enable your fingers to develop the muscle memory to where you can know where each key is and recognize when you've hit the wrong one even when your eyes are closed. I use a Lenovo T400 laptop, because its keyboard was developed for data entry. But equipment isn't enough, you'll need to spend a lot of time developing the skill, so find something you enjoy doing (commenting on YouTube, writing Amazon reviews, roleplaying via chat programs, etc.) and just start doing a lot of it.
2. Eliminate distractions
The largest cause of slow writing speed is distractions. You should take your writing as seriously as you would formal employment, and eliminate distractions such as television, instant messengers, YouTube, etc. Music is okay if used to drown out other noises, but loud music, and especially music with lyrics, will not work. Anything with spoken words you understand (unknown foreign languages are sometimes okay) will engage the language center of your brain and pull its focus away from your writing. You should also have a part of your house physically assigned for writing, with nothing else to do there but write. This is why I went with a Lenovo T400 laptop, I have given it a desk with nothing else on it, and while I am sitting there, I do nothing but write. If you can't dedicate a part of your house to be "the writing corner," see if there is a quiet place (a library is ideal for this) where you can go to regularly and sit undisturbed for long periods.
3. Figure out what you want to write
Outlining is essential for writing quickly, as it enables you to assemble a "scaffold" upon which you can build your story. You will need to spend a lot of time figuring out what you like to write, and why you like to write it. In all likelihood, there is a certain type of story (serious, comedic, uplifting, etc.) that you prefer to write, and you should work on figuring out how to develop ideas that pander to that type. Spend time sitting down and writing brief outlines and summaries of stories you might like to write at some point, and keep doing it until you can develop a fully crafted beginning-to-end idea in under ten minutes. These ideas will be rough, of course, and will need refining to become fully fledged stories, but you need to develop the ability to come up with something complete, coherent and sensible in a very short period of time, even if its an idea you never end up using.
4. Develop a style
All too often, "style" is used as an excuse to avoid improving one's writing, i.e. "it's not wrong, it's my style." This holds back most amateur authors, who do not have an editor who can "correct" what is wrong with one's "style." You will need to teach yourself to write in a way that is unique, but readable. Learn proper grammar, punctuation and word use to the point where it becomes second nature. Develop a broad vocabulary so you don't have to use the same words all of the time. Read your text aloud to yourself, to ensure it is readable and clear. Examine texts that you find fun and easy to read, and figure out why they are so, then emulate them. Put your writing before others, and find out where they stumble or get confused. You should write to be understood, and anything which impedes being understood must be eliminated, no matter how much you may personally find it appealing.
5. Kill your babies
The last and biggest problem most authors have is an inability to let an idea go, or to cease working on it even when it is clear nothing will come of it. When you are working under a severe time crunch, it is essential that you discard any idea that is not working as soon as you see that it is not working. No matter how much time and effort you have put into a story, if it isn't working now, it probably won't be working later, and even if it does it'll be too late. Just throw it out, learn from the failure, and move on to another idea. Only a tiny fraction of your ideas will be any good, no matter how smart you are, and it is important to fail quickly rather than to become enveloped in a bad idea. If you get stuck, don't sit there and try to fix it, just throw it away.
6. Accept the unfinished
No story is ever "finished," it is merely "abandoned." You can spend an eternity writing and re-writing something and you will not only miss the deadline, you will deprive yourself of future opportunities to practice your writing. In an ideal world you should be able to write a rough draft, then make a single editorial pass over the work and eliminate the vast majority of the errors. I don't think anyone is actually capable of this, but it's what you should shoot for. When you're under a deadline, you need to get your work turned in, not perfect. If you really feel the need to edit your story, go ahead and turn it in, then focus on putting the "director's cut" version on FimFic. But understand that your work will never be perfect, it will never be complete, it will just be turned in.
7. Practice incessantly
If you want to be serious about writing, you need to practice writing every day. And I do mean every day -- it doesn't matter if you are sick, or tired, or busy, or really want to enjoy a movie/videogame/book you just bought. If you want to be a good writer, it needs to be as much a part of your day as eating or sleeping. This does not mean that you need to devote huge blocks of your day to writing, but you do need to set aside assigned time each day for at least an hour. You should aim to write at least 500 words within that hour, and ideally you will be writing 1000 or more (I'm up to about 2,000 on a good day). You will fall short sometimes, and you will miss some days, but you should always strive to set the time aside. You will want to pick up every assignment you can, and force yourself to write even when you are wholly uninspired. A lot of artists waste their lives away waiting for their muse to come along and guide them. This is folly. Your muse isn't some ephemeral spirit which comes and goes on a whim. It's the natural result of you spending a lot of time being creative. If you are out of ideas, edit, follow a prompt, do an assignment, something. You aren't going to get faster, or better, unless you put the time in.
I hope that this information is useful. Sadly, there is no magical quick writing method, there are no "tricks" you can follow. But if you put in the time and the effort and develop the skill, you can quickly become competent at writing fast, and over time you will become talented. This won't guarantee that you win contests, or fame, or even write things that anyone else ever reads. But it will enable you to write things you are proud of, and that should always be your goal.
1. (Learn to type fast) - Learning how to type fast is very useful. You can type faster than ordinary touch-typers if, after you learn to type, you re-learn to type common words. You can devise faster ways of typing some words than the standard mapping of the same finger always to the same key. The word "art", for instance, better typed with 3 different fingers. Some you have to plan out, like "often".
2. Eliminate distractions - Certainly. I don't have a special place for writing; I think it's more important to have an ergonomic place for writing, and that means a large, permanent desk with a giant monitor on it, and you're only going to have one of those. (No writing on a laptop! You'll injure yourself if you write fast on a laptop.) Some people listen to music with words while writing. It seems impossible to me, but I've seen lots of fimfiction authors write that they listened to a particular song while writing.
3. Figure out what you want to write
Is that a thing you can learn how to do fast? I'd never thought about that. I guess I could try it. I dunno. It seems to have very limited applicability--it's only useful for fimfiction Write-Off contests (all writing contests outside of fimfiction have MUCH longer writing periods), or for coming up with impromptu elevator pitches if you are a Los Angeles screenwriter.
4. Develop a style - What you describe is mostly not what people call developing a style, but just learning how to write correctly and clearly. That's certainly important. Having a distinct style probably makes writing faster, but I advise people not to develop a style. It limits what kind of stories you can write. Look at any great stylist, like Hemingway, Pynchon, or Philip K. Dick. They can only tell variations of one story over and over again.
5. Kill your babies - Yeah, that's very important, even for writing slow.
6. Accept the unfinished
I don't think this is something to shoot for. Often you need to write a draft of a story before you can figure out what it's about. Then you need to rewrite it. Trying to write stories in one pass would lead you to write only simple stories.
I think we have more people in the write-off who spend too little time on each story than too much. Time and time again we see comments in write-off threads like, "Sorry it wasn't a very good story, I wrote it in an hour." Those people should stop accepting (and submitting) the unfinished.
7. Practice incessantly - Practice is good. I don't think it matters whether you do it an hour a day, or 6 hours on the weekend, or two weeks out of the year. That's all a matter of personal lifestyle, discipline, etc.
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I do not think the idea as presented is applicable to everyone. For instance, I do not foresee pantsers would take to fully outlining everything before they begin. However, I do not think you give the core idea of examining/optimizing your planning methodology enough credit, especially considering Worldbuilder's Disease. Think of planning like stocking up on building supplies for a house. You do not want to move more supplies onsite than you have to because preparation gets nothing done on its own and buying more than you need is a waste of time and money, so we want to keep inventory as low as possible.
Translating this to a writing context, planning is not writing. In fact, I find it is something that is done instead of writing and half of it is thrown out or otherwise unused before the story is finished. At the same time, different people need different amounts of planning and need to plan different things or else they get halfway through and have to pause to untangle their worldbuilding or get themself out of a corner. If an author can sit down and figure out what kinds of information they get burned for not planning and what notes they generally over-detail and under-use, I could see them standing to gain quite a bit both in terms of saved planning time and a clearer understanding of what is important to their story.
Lot of good stuff in here. I'm on my phone at the moment, but I'll type up some more complete thoughts tonight.
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3. It is indeed something you can learn to do quickly, and if you want to ever write something decent, it's a skill you'll need to perfect. The vast majority of your ideas will be stinkers, so you need to just get good at developing and refining them quickly
4. Hemingway, Pynchon, and Philip K. Dick each wrote a hell of a lot more literary quality work than you or I or anyone else reading this journal did. Your goal should be to specialize in one thing you do well, not do a bunch of things sort-of okay.
6. I must not have made myself clear here. What I mean is that you need to not incessantly edit and re-write a story, you need to focus on just getting something complete and then moving on to the next thing. You don't get better by infinitely re-doing the same story, you get better by writing lots of stories. Also if you have to edit a story a lot, odds are it isn't a very good story, and lots more editing won't save it.
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Planning is indeed separate from writing. Planning is like designing a house. Writing is like building the house.
I see way too many writers on FimFic charging into stories with no idea where they are going or what they are doing. Their stories meander, their OCs have nonsensical or superfluous backstories, and the end product lacks a clear cohesive structure.
A lack of proper planning seems to be the most common problem in FimFic submissions, and the ability to do so quickly is essential for the Writeoff competitions.
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I'm glad you don't think I wasted my time. I'm still refining and developing my technique, and I have a lot to learn. But I was editing a bunch of my stuff today, and for the first time in the 20 years I've been doing this, I felt proud of what I was doing, and happy with how good it was.
I just need to keep doing it for another 20 years.
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I'm interested in whether one can learn to come up with plots quickly. But I don't agree that you need to be able to do that. If you write one book a year, you need to come up with one good plot a year. Shakespeare did his best work when he stole plots; he had little ability to write plots of his own. (He was good at writing thematically-connected subplots.)
I disagree. In literature, over-specialization means the same thing as being overly narrow-minded. Hemingway had only one view and one perspective at his disposal, and his stories are limited because of it. They would be better stories if he cared about more things. Pynchon and Dick wrote a lot of novels, but I don't feel the desire to read more than 2 each. I don't want to write 40 novels on the same theme like Dick, so don't tell me that should be my goal.
ponychaism's ponyfic in the style of Dick has, IMHO, more literary quality (stylistically, anyway) than Dick's own novels. I've never thought much of Pynchon; he excels only as a sentence stylist. I could name dozens of writers on fimfiction I like better.
Again I disagree. Some people edit too much. Others edit too little. Sometimes great stories come out almost in the first draft (though mostly very short ones, like Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea). But I think few people here edit their stories enough. I consider a dozen passes over a story moderate editing. "The Magician and the Detective" didn't really firm up as the story it is until after about a month of editing. "Twenty Minutes" and "Mortality Report" each took about 4 extensive rewrites. I could have written 4 times as many stories of lower quality instead, but I'm glad I didn't, and it isn't obvious that I would have learned more by doing so.
Different approaches suit different people and different styles. Mozart wrote music in one pass. Beethoven spent years on each symphony, rewriting and rewriting. Beethoven wrote less, but I think what he wrote was better.
3106659 "...I see way too many writers on FimFic charging into stories with no idea where they are going or what they are doing...."
Hey! That's... justified, I suppose. Still, allow me to stand up for those of us who rush in boldly where angels fear to tread.
First, a confession. I hate outlining. I get the "Once upon a time" out of the way first, and I have a general idea of how "And they lived happily⁽*⁾ ever after" is going to go, but the stuff in the middle kinda/sorta writes itself as I go along. In a way, my first pass through creating a story *is* the outline/first draft, and doing it that way allows the action to 'flow' in a natural fashion and maintain a pace that I think is appropriate for the section. Ever since I quit publishing right after I got 'done' with a chapter, I think my quality has taken a great leap in an upward direction. It can take a month of wandering back through a chapter every few days and re-reading it, making little shifts, wiping out paragraphs and replacing them with pages, etc... before those rough drafts polish down into something far better, but I *can't* plot out the outline ahead of time to save my soul. (Well, as much of it as I have left)
(*) For a given value of 'happy' dependant on the situation. For example, I once had a story end with the primary character clawed nearly to death, dripping blood, and staggering off to a makeshift medical facility after killing two other characters. It classified as 'happy' in my opinion.
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You're right to not just publish as soon as you're done. My rule of thumb is to never submit a draft the same day I wrote it unless it is due on that date. I try to always go back the next day and at least read it aloud to make sure it works. People seem to think I am advocating against editing, that isn't true. I'm advocating against using editing as a crutch, using it as an excuse not to write the best first draft you can. And also I advocate against endless re-writes. If you have to keep re-writing a story over and over again, it probably isn't a story worth salvaging. If there are any good ideas, you can use them later.
I used to hate working out and eating vegetables but now I'm okay with both most of the time and I even enjoy some of it some of the time. It's a matter of doing it until you see the benefits, and learn to look forward to them, even if the experience remains unpleasant on its own. Try writing summaries instead of formal outlines. A summary is just as good, so long as you've figured out what you wanna do in large scale later.
1) Nothing much to say here, only that a good screen and a very good keyboard are worth every dollar you spend on them, and can save you health related trouble further down the line. I will also sacrifice my family to defend my old ergonomic keyboard, as it seems you have to search for similar non-wireless models in the lost ruins of the patagonian jungle nowadays.
2) While everyone would love a writing shack this is one of the things that one can have or not, with not much of a chance to change everything outside of some major turning point in the life (moving is a major turning point, it's where people decide there is no god or that there is god and he/she/it hates them).
3) In the IT world we already had this discussion, we are still arguing and opinions on the matter can get rapidly in the NSFW rating. What seems to have come out is:
-with enough experience you can write short programs with good quality on the fly, until then outline a bit.
-big projects need planning. If you do them without planning be ready to watch them crash and burn or to have a metric f***kton of work waiting for you down the line to fix things.
-UML is the best/worst thing ever.
-if you are genius with enough experience and work ethic and you work alone do whatever you want, we don't care and you will nail it anyway.
I feel that something similar can be applied to creative writing, but I am relatively new in the field so maybe this are only past experiences coloring my current vision. I also am convinced that the next biggest boost in productivity will come when we have a decent IDE for creative writing. Scrivener is almost there but still not enough.
4) Working on it...
5)Kill them but don't throw away the corpses, there may be something that can be harvested there later (and this metaphor became just a bit too creepy).
6)I agree that nothing will ever be perfect and that the magic of not having to print stuff allows for a bit more playroom, but one needs to develop a feeling for a threshold of readiness that must be cleared to not publish something unpleasant (in the technical sense).
7) This goes almost in the same category as point 2, when you can do it great, if you can't then sometimes there isn't much to improve the situation, especially if writing is not the way you bring bread on the table.
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I just have a spot on the kitchen table and a chair. You don't have to go all out like George R. R. Martin or Steven King. You just need a place that you can mentally associate with writing.
Anyone who claims they can write a large and excellent piece of software without a clear plan is either lying or stealing or both. In my experience, any creative person who can't clearly explain and demonstrate their process is a fraud. Anecdotal evidence is really just evidence of evidence, but with the internet quickly and easily pointing out everything from tracing to song theft, it's become more and more clear that most "Geniuses" who claim to not need an outline or plan are really just thieves, and the reason they can't explain their methodology is because they have none.
You have time for what you value. If you value your writing, you will find time for it. If you claim to have no time to write every day, then really what you're saying is there are other things in your day that are more important to you than your writing. In which case you might be better off focusing on those things, because writing requires an intense time commitment.
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I've seen (I know, anecdotal evidence) people produce decently written, complex, software without much written down. The cases where this happened had all the following things in common:
-Really capable programmers with 30+ years experience
-At least 15 years experience in the general domain they were working on
-10+ years of experience on the specific domain
This means that while they did non write down much, they obviously had a clear model in mind. I think the same goes for writing. When you are a pulp writer churning out 20 novels at year, you don't need to plan that much, you know your domain, you have a model in mind and you work with that.
I am not of that school, I need (to program and to creatively write) my pile of notes, diagrams and all the other fancy stuff.
I beg to differ. Saying that means that you may say the same for cooking, learning to play an instrument, painting, practicing a sport, learning a martial art and so on. It's true that you will never live from your writing, but your position seems a bit too lapidary.
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I'm not saying you need to give up your entire life and do nothing but write. I'm saying that if you care about writing, you'll find time for it every day, so you can get better at it. If you care about martial arts, you'll find time to do them every day. If you care about cooking, you'll find time to cook every day. If you care about learning how to play the guitar, you'll find time to practice every day.
Most would-be writers I come across spend hours each day fiddling away with things they don't even remember doing later. Watching forgettable TV shows, playing videogames they aren't too interested in, or just finding excuses not to write. This is what prevents most writers from ever getting any good -- they just don't make it a priority in their lives, and therefore they never put in the time and effort to get good.