Writer Wrangler

Guest Post by Carson Brackney

This post is not about trade-offs (real and imagined) involving quantity and quality.

It’s not about the relative merits of considerate, elegantly constructed prose and high-volume, machine gunfire output.

This post is practical.

Sometimes, you need to be fast.

If you’re working straight content jobs that don’t pay a small fortune per word, speed can be the difference between a six-figure income and wishing you could go back to the good ol’ days of working in retail for $7 per hour.

Even if you are hanging onto a higher rung on the pay ladder, there are times when a burst of speed can be invaluable.  Deadlines happen and meeting them is easier when you can push the turbo button.

So, how can you improve your speed as a writer?

Here are my five best pearls of high-speed wisdom:

Become a good typist. Believe it or not, there are many writers plugging away right now who stop and think for a few moments when they need to type the letter “V”.  Where is “V”?  Which finger do I use for “V”?  Etc.  That’s bad news.  If you can’t touch-type, you’re doomed.  Pick up a copy of some old Mavis Beacon program or something.  You must learn the tools of the trade.

Use the same keyboard. Pick a keyboard and use it as your primary base of operations.  Switching from that big replacement monster for your PC to the chiclet-eque keyboard of your laptop to the tiny keys of your Netbook will slow you down.  You and your preferred keyboard should be One if you want to peg the speedometer.

Research first. If you do your homework on the front end and have all of the necessary information to complete your task in mind and/or readily available, you’ll be much more efficient than the person who researches as he or she goes.  If you do encounter a situation where you need to double check a proper name, a location or a cite, don’t stop to get the information.  Do it after you’ve wrapped everything else up.  Just use an easily-recognized placeholder where the right words will later appear and keep plugging right along.  I like to use “GETYOULATER”, myself.  It’s hard to miss when you’re editing and cleaning up those loose ends.

Be a berserker. That fable about the tortoise and the hare?  Well, they were running a foot race through a forest.  They weren’t trying to wrap up a stack of articles with a deadline looming.  Slow and steady is a great idea if you accept a track and field challenge from a rabbit, but it’s a bad way to maximize output.  Go crazy.  Write as if your very life depended on getting those words onto the screen.  Sell out completely.  Don’t hold anything back.  You’d be shocked at how much you can produce in an hour if you’re writing as if someone is nudging your temple with the barrel of a loaded 9mm.

Utilize patterns and structures. If you’re going to do a lot of article writing and plan to regularly confront situations where speed is an integral part of your financial success, you need to have structures and patterns for your work in mind.  Once you develop and commit a few dozen of these “mental templates” to memory, you’ll be able to create good stuff faster than you’d imagine.

Bonus idea: Crank (and I mean CRANK) up a few favorite fast songs, preferably something with blistering guitar work and a gut-thumping drum part (example).  Even if it doesn’t work, you’ll get to rock out for a little while and there’s nothing wrong with that.

So, what’s your favorite trick?  What do you do when it’s time to deploy the nitrous and lay rubber?

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Carson Brackney is a writer and consultant who occasionally finds himself with a need for speed.

He welcomes you to read his freelance writing-heavy blog.

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