Do you find that sometimes you have little time to write? You want to make writing a priority, but other things “get in the way,” edging your writing time into an hour here, a half hour there.
Other times, you may simply find that you have 15 minutes of extra time on your hands, and you’d like to use it to write. However, you may have a hard time getting started; thus, you might lose five or 10 minutes of precious writing time just getting started. This could happen even during your normally scheduled writing period.
How do you break through and not only get started fast but write fast so you accomplish a lot in a short amount of time? Here are two tricks I use on a regular basis.
1. Leave your Inner Critic at the door.
I used to be a Voice Dialogue facilitator. As Hal Stone and Sidra Winkelman, the originators of this psychological process explain, we all have inner “selves” that at different times run our lives. When we are writing, we do not want our Inner Critic involved; this particular self slows down the writing process by constantly stopping us mid sentence to correct a word, change a phrase or delete a whole sentence or paragraph. Later, when we get down to editing what we have written, our Inner Critic proves enormously helpful. We want this self close at hand to help, if not to actually take over. the editing process.
When you sit down to write, tell your Inner Critic to remain outside the room, the coffee shop, wherever you might be working. (Instead, invite in your Inner Writer.) Each time you find yourself starting to correct your writing, stop yourself from doing so. Tell yourself that right now you are simply writing, not editing. You are creating a draft, not a finished piece. Don’t worry about misspelled words, incorrect grammar, passive sentences. (Tell your Inner English Teacher to go back to the school.) All of these things can be corrected later. Correct only what must be corrected now so your writing makes sense.
2. Don’t let your fingers (or hand) stop moving.
The best way to get a lot of writing done involves not allowing yourself to stop writing for any reason. Once you begin writing, you don’t ever allow your fingers to hover over the keys or you pen to rest motionless over the paper. You must always be writing something, even if it you only write the words, “I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write,” over and over again until something different comes into your mind. (Ask your Inner Writer or your Inner Muse to join you!)
This forces you to not get stuck mulling over your word choices or your train of thought. It allows you to have a stream of consciousness that you follow. Later, you’ll call in your Inner Editor/Critic and your more conscious self, if necessary, to clean up what you’ve written and make sense of it. Right now, in the little bit of time you have, you simply want to get words on paper. You want to use the time you have to actually write something–not to think about writing something.
If necessary, get an egg timer and set it for 10 or 15 minute increments and use these for continuous writing periods.
Try these two tips on a regular basis, and you surely will learn to write fast and get a lot of writing done in shorter time periods. Then when you more time to write, you can use the same methods and you’ll discover that you have the ability to produce twice the amount of written pages in the time it used to take you to do so.
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