The Write Tuition

Short Term Deadlines

People who write for a living, especially magazine and web articles, will tend to stress the importance of writing quickly. There are two main reasons for this. The best reason is by writing quickly you can bypass the irritating internal editor which makes some people polish each sentence as they go.

The other is more mercenary. If you can write three articles in three hours that’s three chances of a sale compared to other people’s one or two.

Whichever reason is most applicable to you one thing is certain. If you put yourself ‘under the gun’ you will have a first draft of an article which can then be polished (and submitted) a day or two later. Doing it the slow way you could still be writing your first draft those two days later and maybe becoming increasingly discouraged by the slow progress.

For those who are prone to ‘artistic dithering’ setting an almost punitive deadline can seem very alien, but is often surprisingly effective.

Buy yourself a kitchen timer, set it for thirty minutes, and see just how much you can get written in that time. Try not to backtrack and polish until the timer has buzzed. If a bit feels really wrong just frame it between two lines of dashes, like this;
=============,
Dodgy bit in here
=============,
to remind you, and then press on with the rest of your article.

Don’t worry too much about word counts at this point, unless you’re a demon-fast typist. If so, allow yourself less time.

In that half hour you’ll probably have somewhere between 500-1000 words. If you’re used to writing for magazines 500 words doesn’t seem much, but many a web article tops out around this mark. This is why some writing courses can talk glibly about writing ten articles a day.

Once you have your rough article - and sometimes it will be really rough - save it, and put it to one side for a day or two.

If you’re still feeling good, reset the timer and do another. Sometimes you’ll really feel in the groove and be able to write a whole series of follow-on articles which will feel like one long article divided into sections. When you feel it flowing like that just concentrate on getting it down on paper or screen. Keep that internal editor at bay until later.

Warning: At times like this you can easily forget to save. Fortunately most word processing programmes have some form of auto-save. Find yours and set it for something ludicrously short like three minutes. That way you’ll never lose much if things go wrong and the update each time will be little more than a flicker on-screen rather that a lengthy wait.

In summary then; invest in a timer, work fast, and polish later with a cool and more analytical eye. Creating and editing your own work are two very different skills and they benefit from being kept separate from each other.

Give it a try - a decent try - because even if it doesn’t work you won’t have lost much time. Apart from which self-imposed pressure is better than the external pressure of meeting a looming deadline you’ve been trying to ignore.

You’ll probably find it surprisingly effective.

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