Best writing lesson - write fast

The best lesson I've learned is to write fast and that's exactly what I'm doing at the moment. My goal is five pages a day and I'm getting more down than I have in a while.

I have been in final draft edit mode, agonising over every word but that's just not how I like to write, certainly not for first drafts.

I discovered writing fast during National Novel Writing Month, where I had to write 50,000 words in 30 days so I had no choice but to write fast - 1,667 words a day fast.

I still use the same method when I'm not doing NaNo as it stops me from getting bogged down in perfectionism and helps me to move through the story. Ideas come quicker and flow easier, often ideas I would never have come up with if I had been agonising over what to write or trying to craft the perfect sentence.

The next stage is the edit, that where I take time to remove all the extra bits I haven't filtered out but I still work fast, setting myself a certain number of pages each day. I always know I will go back and re-edit the pages and probably will several times, so it takes off the perfection pressure.

Writing and editing is a process of layering the story, adding details, taking away any unnecessary words and scenes until it just feels right. Once I got comfortable with that (or remember that) it all gets much easier and much more fun.

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