May
22nd
2013
Write bestsellers using this one simple trick! · 2:50pm May 22nd, 2013
I just found Stephen Diamond's blog Disputed Issues, which is about writing legal briefs. His insights apply to any writing. In "A rare shortcut to better writing", he claims there is one simple thing you can do to improve your writing.
Learn to type faster.
The idea is that the more automatic typing is, the less you think about it (even subconsciously), the more you can concentrate on your writing. It makes sense.
It flies in the face of all the stuff I was told as a student back in the Pleistocene era, but that does make sense: any mental effort you're not having to expend on keeping your fingers in the right place is mental effort you can devote to your actual composition.
I am a lousy typist, but I'm a decently fast lousy typist (55-60 wpm with maybe seven fingers at best).
Perhaps. But for writing creatively, actually deciding what sentence to write is going to be the rate limiting step far more than how fast you can compose it.
Upon seeing your title, I immediately suspected a joke but that actually makes a lot of sense. Indeed, it may be one of the few quick fix solutions. Teaching myself to type odd characters like [], {}, _ and ! without moving from the home position made programming less painful.
I should really practice a little bit with a typing trainer just to brush up. My speed is decent, but I do have a habit of missing/substituting words so I should probably focus on accuracy.
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True, but if you're so bad at typing it breaks your concentration and pulls you out of the zone, that could be a problem.
Probably one of the most insightful essays on time management for mental tasks that require focus and concentration. Joel comes from the context of programming, but I think it applies equally to writing.
Planning what I write in excruciating detail will leave no time for the actual writing.
Though I'd plan the framework of the story first, think of the characters involved and some other minor stuff, and then let it fly from there.
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Oh, I agree that writing speed is important, but I disagree that it is the most important, or that increasing it at any level is going to lead towards easier and better writing. I'd imagine that there become a point, fairly low down, in which an increase of speed results in only a negligible improvement in the quality of creative writing.
I'm applying the Pareto_prinicple, in other words.
Excellent advice.
I'd also add that you should learn keyboard shortcuts. Bouncing on the cursor keys to move or delete blocks of text is far more efficient than stopping, picking up the mouse, and moving text with tweezers. Standard Windows/CUA shortcuts are a must, and if you really want to fly, pick up Vim and spend a year learning that.
The keyboard is your medium. A competent artist learns their medium.
Of course, there's a downside. There's always a downside. Effortless typing leads to the illusion that words have no cost; that in turn leads to blathering. (Granted, adept typists can edit themselves efficiently, so this isn't a big problem for the conscientious.) I've noticed that typing this very comment on my phone forces me to slow down and think more about what I'm writing.
On the other hand, the cumbersome touchscreen keyboard tempts one to give up on thoughtful writing and just spam emoticon-infested banalities. ("Great post! :LOL: :RASPBERRY: :POOP:") I imagine this is what happens to people who can't type. So you could just, I don't know, read what you just wrote, or something.
If you refuse to learn efficient typing, you'll be stuck slaving away at a keyboard...or your writing will follow the path of least resistance, which might be raspberry poop. Just learn how to use your fracking medium already!
From my standpoint, I feel like this is... a little misleading. I do think it's good advice, but I also think it's unnecessarily a couple levels removed from the actual task to be improved. Consider:
Is typing faster an end unto itself? No. It's a learning proxy for automatizing the process, which is said both by you here and by Mr. Diamond in his blog. So in point of fact, what's sought isn't even faster typing – it's more automatic typing. I don't type excessively fast, maybe 45-60 wpm, though I do take time to think about what it is I'm writing, which necessarily slows that down. If I were transcribing, I might gain a little efficiency. But my typing is basically automatic, even if it's at a slower speed. Now, I'll admit that there's almost certainly no better way to quickly automatize typing as a process than to practice doing it faster, but I think it's nearly as effective to just type a lot. That's how I went about automatizing the process: I roleplayed on MUDs in my late teens. Directed typing practice never did anything for me, but the act of trying to communicate with others through text in real time was a good forcing function to get me that automatization anyway.
So the idea here seems to be, if you don't have to think about an ancillary task like getting the words down, you can focus a greater portion of your attention on making the words good. But again, here I think we're missing the mark a bit. Because, in my opinion, this automatization idea is a very good one, and I think one is better taking it all the way into the writing itself. Generally speaking, I don't see much point in putting a lot of attention into sentence-building either. Now, you can think of this as "freeing up more resources for higher-level writing tasks" like focusing on characterization, plot, or theme. Sure. But I think there's more to it than that, and I'd tend to argue that automatizing the ability to do characterization and plotting are also steps in the right direction. Everything in writing is easier if it comes naturally. And first drafts need to be viewed as such, anyway. It's a poor writer that doesn't take the time to go back and look at whether sentence structure, characterization, etc. can be improved after the fact, when the piece can be seen as a whole.
So, for the tl;dr crowd, here's what I say:
There is one simple thing you can do to improve your writing.
Write.
A lot.
If you squint a little, you can actually summarize this as: "The easier it is for your to convert thoughts to paper in whatever way you choose, the better they will survive the trip. The more you write, the better (mileage may vary)[1] your writing will become."
I'm actually more comfortable with a notebook and an eversharp (I hate always dull pencils and always dry pens) when scribbling out ideas, and with my leaky brain, I need to write them down as soon as the Muse drops them off. (Which leads to several of my story ideas being in my back pocket, scribbled on church bulletins, because the Muse works on Sunday too) Many people think when they start typing, everything needs to be perfect. In a word, no. In two words, Hell No. Write when you're feeling creative, and edit when you're not.
If you're more comfortable being creative on your iphone while sitting in the subway on the way to work, more power to you. Do you dictate your ideas to a voice recorder/iPhone when they pop up? That's great. When someday they invent the iHeadband that lets you write directly to the screen, I'll be first in line (well, right after they go on sale. I'm cheap). Until then, an eversharp loaded with B lead (HB is too hard) and any random paper in the vicinity, and I'm good.
(1) I'm afraid I'll always be a B writer in an A world. But with practice, I'm hoping for a B+
I've always had it as a point of pride to spend hours on a sentence. The thought of a lawyer - a lawyer, the kind of person who takes off days from writing hurried fifty-thousand-word reports on the specifics of the similarities between the dimensions of a pair of coloured plastic cases to write on 19 year old lawyers proclaiming that one day they shall look down from the lofty rocks upon the dwellings of man having his writing tips associated with fiction really is a bit too rich for one day's worth of cynicism.
I mean, obviously if you're a slow typist that's going to fuck with your writing, but having phrasing be associated with speed is hardly something you really want unless you write for a penny a word for a living.
i'm gonna side with Bad Horse on this one for a couple of reasons:
1. I tend to write train-of-thought and go back and fix it later. When I'm 'in the groove,' so to speak, any time I slow down is a chance to lose my place, and then it takes a me a little bit to get back into it.
2. I can't write longhand. Period. My handwriting's too slow, and I lose my place (see above).
3. I just changed from Word (which I've been using forever) to gDocs recently (previously, I wrote in Word and then imported it to gDocs for final editing). It's slowed me down because I don't know all the gDocs keyboard shortcuts yet.
4. I've also changed keyboards. That, too, is slowing me down, but I had to: I finally broke the keyboard on my old compaq.
Our trainer tells us to "get out our tool and play with it," because when we're in the middle of diagnosing a car with a bizarre issue (and, usually, the boss or customer or both breathing down our necks), that isn't the time to try and figure out how the tool works. I think it's the same thing with typing; I don't want to be trying to have to figure out what the keyboard shortcut for an em dash is in the middle of a thought, or not remember where the " key is. (I had an old computer where it was over the 2; how weird is that?)
Obviously, just being able to type without thinking about it doesn't make one a better writer (more prolific, perhaps). But anything that improves the interface between mind and page can't be a bad thing, IMHO.
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So in point of fact, what's sought isn't even faster typing – it's more automatic typing.
Right.
But my typing is basically automatic, even if it's at a slower speed.
Automaticity is not a 0/1 thing. There's always a cost, even when you're not aware of it, even to automatic things like walking. It's arguably like using a multithread processor. Your thread isn't aware of the CPU time being stolen for automatic processes.
Now, I'll admit that there's almost certainly no better way to quickly automatize typing as a process than to practice doing it faster, but I think it's nearly as effective to just type a lot.
For most people, typing in particular is a skill that doing a lot does not improve. I know many people who've typed every day for 30 years and still can't type 40wpm.
Generally speaking, I don't see much point in putting a lot of attention into sentence-building either. Now, you can think of this as "freeing up more resources for higher-level writing tasks" like focusing on characterization, plot, or theme. Sure. But I think there's more to it than that, and I'd tend to argue that automatizing the ability to do characterization and plotting are also steps in the right direction.
Yes--I think I said something like that in my post on Jack Bickham. He teaches rules that should be broken sometimes, but that should be a writer's default behavior, what should come out your fingers if you wrote in your sleep. It's probably something like playing chess. A computer considers millions or billions of possible moves per turn; a chessmaster, about five. The chessmaster sees patterns on the board and automatically thinks of those five moves. Similarly, a writer wouldn't waste time considering the plot of Double Rainboom because a writer just wouldn't think of a plot like that.
1097841 True, but if you're so bad at typing it breaks your concentration and pulls you out of the zone, that could be a problem.
The argument is more that there's just less brain, less glucose, less oxygen to use on the story, even if you're not aware of it.