5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter

by Chris Fox

The goal of a writing sprint is to get you into the flow state, where your brain will naturally focus on an activity you are good at to the exclusion of all else.

It's a time and place your mind must associate with writing. When you're there, you write. It's that simple. This is why I don't recommend writing in the same space you do other activities. If you watch Netflix or mindlessly surf the web in the same chair where you write, it will be that much harder to buckle down and work when it's time to work.

You need a pre-defined start time and end time, and these times do not necessarily need to correspond with just one sprint.

If eating a frog is the toughest thing you have to do every day, then you should start with that or that frog will croak at you all day. Do the hardest thing you need to do first thing, because then you know it got done.

Do your writing first thing, before the pressures of the day begin to mount. Eat that frog, people.

Once you've mentally defined this space, actually write out a contract with yourself. 'I will write at my computer from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. every day.'

Each and every day you'll record your writing sprints. It's vital that you measure your start time and end time, because that's going to be used to calculate your words per hour.

You need to give yourself permission to suck. Once you start writing, you are not allowed to tinker or edit at all. After you've written the words they stay exactly as they are. That means no stopping and no going back, not even to correct typos.

I very quickly realized that on some level they weren't comfortable with my growing success, because it forced them to question their own lives.

If you begin cranking out novel after novel, many people in your life will begin to treat you differently. They won't be comfortable with the level of success you're attaining, but that's okay. What you need to do is cut out the worst offenders (those who actively sabotage you) and replace them with a new support group.

When you tell your brain that you want to become a best-selling author anything that will make that a reality suddenly becomes significant. You'll notice opportunities and tools that you never would have seen before, all through the simple act of daydreaming about what you want to achieve.