Still learning
by Christine Kling
I have never been a fast writer. Getting the words down has always been a struggle for me, and writing a book seems to take me forever. Back when I wrote my first novel (not counting the book-in-the-drawer-book), I never really believed it would get published, so writing fast or slow was of no consequence. After that, I had deadlines and I managed to write the books faster, but that was only by spending more hours per day writing. My writing hadn’t really speeded up.
I remember one time I was on a panel at a writers’ conference with Stuart Kaminsky, the Florida novelist and film professor who wrote over 60 novels, plus many short story collections and non-fiction books. We were talking about the writing process and I said, “Writing isn’t typing. I can type fast, but I write slowly.” Stuart said, “I beg to differ. Writing is typing.” Then he went on to say that he wrote between 5,000 and 10,000 words per day.
I’ve never forgotten that day. I realized that day that there are all kinds of writers and some are just slower than others. I no more could comprehend Stuart’s ability to write so fast than he could understand my struggles. I resigned myself to being slow.
But one way that self-publishing has changed my life is that I can now see the direct relationship between more books on my shelf and more income. Older books no longer disappear. So I’ve grown more and more interested in figuring out how to speed up my writing process, and I’ve started reading about how to do it.
One of my favorite bloggers is Kristen Lamb. She advocates frequent blogging as good practice for getting into the habit of writing quickly and efficiently. Kristen, crazy woman that she is, writes her blog daily. I know I’m not up to that, but I will say that since I’ve shifted from blogging one day a week to two here at Write on the Water, the blogs have been easier to write. And in writing parlance, easier means faster.
In her book, 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love, Rachel Aaron explains that the reason writers are slow is because they don’t know what they want to write. This is absolutely true for me. The blogs I’ve been writing lately about my early days of sailing have been very easy to write. I know those stories. I can easily write a 900 word blog in an hour. Rachel suggests writing the details of a scene by longhand in a notebook before beginning to type. This suggestion is really working for me. I recommend her book to anyone who wants to learn how to increase their daily word output.
Karen Dionne recently wrote a piece for the Huffington Post on how she went from writing “2,500 words a week to 3,000-5,000 a day.” She advocates writing by longhand also. But Karen suggests writing more than just the synopsis. She writes her first draft by longhand. She attributes her success with writing longhand to the fact that she doesn’t stop and edit as much. The computer makes it too easy. According to Karen, “When an author working on a computer makes a typo, as I just did by typing “Whey” instead of “When” at the beginning of this sentence, they stop and fix it. Why shouldn’t they? The mistake will have to be corrected at some point, the author has noted the error in the here and now, and it only takes a second to correct it.” I haven’t tried this yet, but I see it as more evidence writing by longhand does create a different connection to the brain and it does free up creativity.
According to an article on LifeHacker, we learn better when we write by hand than when we type. There is a more direct connection to the brain. I haven’t been able to find any studies that show it is easier to be creative when writing longhand, but I have found that to be the case.
After years of leaving paper by the wayside and being an avid technology geek, I find myself filling up notebooks once again. My only issue? There is no search function!
Fair winds!
Christine
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