how to write faster

[RandomAnthony]

How to write faster....

http://www.slate.com/id/2301243/

What do you think?

(Also, I changed this category to "books/writing" but I'm wondering if writing should have its own category. If another mod wants to change the categories, go for it, I'm not sure of the best path.)

[Kevin]

oh, thought this was some kind of speed pencil deal. carry on...

[RandomAnthony]

oh, thought this was some kind of speed pencil deal.

TWSS

[Cynthia]

In Journalism School, we had to write fast. Reporting 101 class usually involved going to a public meeting, hearing a speech or interviewing someone and then writing a story and turning it in 30 minutes later.

We sat down at the typewriter (no cut and paste, no rearranging) and banged it out. Wham.

We quickly learned to come up with the lead paragraph that summarized the story--you had to be able to get the gist of the piece in the first few sentences.

It was terrifying but exhilarating.

[Lobstergirl, el principe]

If Michael Agger hadn't been writing so fast, maybe he would've caught his typo:

In Outliers, he discusses the now famous 10,000-hour rule—the amount of time it takes to achieve true mastery—and quotes the neurologist Daniel Levitin: "In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concern pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again." Fiction writers? Really?

[Lobstergirl, el principe]

When I think about the types of things that are being written fast, because their writers are on deadline, an enormous amount of it is total shit. Maureen Dowd. Thomas Friedman. (Insert most other NYT columnists' names here.) I don't read Hitchens and didn't read Buckley (though I love watching Buckley on TV shows). Buckley in addition to his columns wrote spy thrillers, or detective novels or whatnot. George Will's column often reads as if he's written it in 10 minutes.

So I don't think writing fast is necessarily a virtue.

[Jonathan]

I tend to agree. Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, and George Will can all be quite interesting, and they do write well when they have something to say--but because they have to file two columns per week, they often just spin their wheels and up saying very little.

In any case, speed is probably less important than consistency if you're a professional writer. Graham Greene, for instance, was a very prolific author. He didn't write terribly fast, but he was maniacally consistent. There was some set number of words that he used as his goal--I believe it was 400 publishable words per day--and he did that every day, six days per week, for almost his entire adult life.

To write 400 publishable words would naturally involve writing more and then editing and rethinking, etc. But still, it seems, on the face of it, like a fairly manageable goal--and yet it's vastly more than most writers can write. That's a pace to produce a hefty novel every year, plus a bit of journalism on the side. And Greene was consistently interesting too, not just verbose.

[Lobstergirl, el principe]

If you have an enormous amount of brilliance already in your head, I think writing fast is less of a risk. You have immense resources of knowledge, you are already a skilled writer, and you draw on that. The flow from your brain directly to your fingers is certainly much more facile. In addition to Greene, maybe we'd add Harold Bloom and H.L. Mencken to this category.

When you're Dowd or Friedman, on the other hand...

[Jonathan]

Mencken from the newspaper columns might surprise you: often not much better than MoDo in terms of uneven writing and sometimes even more misguided on world affairs than Th. Friedman. For instance, Mencken initially saw much to admire in Hitler. Some might say he should have written less.

[Lobstergirl, el principe]

Fair enough.