by Dave Haslett
You don’t have to keep the money from your book if you find that sort of thing distasteful. You could give all or some of the profits to a worthy cause. There are plenty that will be glad of it.
How was your day today? Are you happy with your job? Do you like sitting in traffic every morning and evening? Do you like waking up at some unearthly hour to the sound of an alarm? Are you happy with just four or five weeks’ holiday each year? Are you happy to organise your life around your employer’s needs rather than your own?
Life doesn’t have to be like that. As a professional writer, you can live wherever you like, work whenever you like, take time off whenever you like, avoid traffic jams and long commutes, and throw your alarm clock in the bin. How does that sound to you? Luxury? Maybe. But it’s easy to achieve.
And yet…
Most people who read this book won’t take any action. And many people who buy this book won’t even bother to read it. I know this is true because I emailed hundreds of people who bought the first edition and asked if they would write a review. A significant number of them hadn’t read it more than a year after buying it.
If you enjoy this book, I’d be enormously grateful if you could let me know how you get on with writing your own. Even better, leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, and other sites. Just a single paragraph will do. Thanks!
This next section might sound like boasting, but it’s just intended to show what’s possible if you use the techniques described in this book and take the appropriate action – i.e. write some books!
Writing books the fast way changed my life. As I write this, I’m sitting up in bed in the middle of the afternoon. If it was summer, I could be writing this in the garden or at the beach or at the park. But it’s mid-November, raining heavily, and close to freezing outside. I think it’s a Wednesday, though I had to think about that for a minute. The day of the week stopped mattering a long time ago. I don’t get the Monday blues or the Wednesday hump or TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday).
I can stop writing this whenever I like. I don’t have a boss and I don’t have a deadline. I could go back to sleep, or get up and go for a walk or a bike ride, or do whatever I like. It’s entirely my choice.
Most people will be at work for another two or three hours yet – and they don’t have a choice. After work, they’ll sit in traffic or trudge through the freezing rain to get home. When they get there, they’ll feel exhausted, depressed and full of dread about having to do it all again tomorrow. My life was like that once too. But never again.
You don’t have to be a full-time writer to make significant changes to your life. If you could just make enough money to cover part of your salary, you could reduce the number of days or hours you work each week. Then you could spend the extra time writing more books. Or you could spend it at the beach or the golf course or whatever you fancy. Or you could leave your stressful career and take a lower-paid but more enjoyable job closer to home. Perhaps you could do something that helps people in your local community.
How secure is your job anyway? No one wants to think about redundancy, but if you work for someone else there’s always a chance that it might happen. As a writer, you’re never without a job. If you need more money, write another book or increase your marketing efforts on those you’ve written already.
And speaking of money, writing books is a great way of earning it. In a regular job there’s usually a limit on how much you can earn. There’s your salary, perhaps some overtime, and maybe the occasional bonus, but that’s about it. A lack of money can cramp your lifestyle and your freedom. But if you write books for a living, you can work harder for greater rewards. The more you work, the more you can earn. Your income from your books could replace your salary entirely, and potentially go well beyond it.
Some people get rich from writing books – and you could too. You either have to write one or two exceptional books, or lots of reasonably good ones. In this book, we’ll focus on the latter approach and write lots of reasonably good ones. But that doesn’t rule out the possibility that some of them might also turn out to be exceptional and earn you a fortune. The more books you write, the more likely that is to happen.
Writing books isn’t for everyone – though we’ll look at some ways around that later – and not everyone is successful at it. Some people slave away for years, never make a penny from their writing, and become more and more depressed. But if you use the techniques in this book, you’ll find out within a month or so whether you’re any good at it.
If it turns out that you aren’t any good at it, try something else instead: music, painting, pottery, or whatever takes your fancy. It’s better to find out now that you aren’t a natural writer than to waste years of your life feeling miserable and not getting anywhere.
There are hundreds more reasons for wanting to write books, but I’ll end this section with what I think is a good one. People want and need books. They want and need entertainment. They want and need education and information. Bookshops need products to sell. Most of us like to curl up in bed with a good book. Books keep us company when we’re lonely or bored or ill. We use books to relax and unwind; we take them on holiday with us. Books improve our lives and increase our knowledge. Books let us find out about ourselves and the world we live in. They let us escape from our worries, grief and pain. People love books. And someone has to write them. That someone is you!
Why write it fast?
You could easily spend a couple of years writing your book if you wanted to. Some people prefer to write that way, letting the story build over time and letting the characters find their own paths. Or they amass an enormous collection of research material that takes months to organise. They love to play with sentence construction, and revel in spending a week searching for the perfect word, an entire morning adding a single comma, and a whole afternoon taking it out again. There’s nothing wrong with that, and some purists might argue that it’s the only true way of writing a book.
But if you have a busy life like most of us, it’s hard to find any time to write at all. Spending a year or two, working for several hours a day, on a book that might never be published, or might only sell a dozen copies, would be a ridiculous proposition.
Instead, I suggest you spend the next two years writing books the way I describe here. It’s possible to write twenty or more books in that time and, as I mentioned above, each one increases your chances of becoming a bestselling author. Even if none of them are bestsellers and a few sell only moderately well, you could still be making a comfortable living from them by the time the two years are up.
You might decide to slow down at that point and write a magnum opus the traditional way, as I described above. But I doubt you’ll want to. I’m sure you’ll have learnt so much and be having so much fun by then that you’ll finish your masterpiece in a matter of weeks too. The excitement – and sheer enjoyment – of being able to write books so quickly really gets to you.
Many of us have books in our heads clamouring to be written. As I write this, seven novels are cluttering up my mind – all of them pretty much fully formed. Before I learnt how to write books quickly, they’d have stayed there for years, taking up valuable space and keeping me awake at night. But I expect to have all seven of them written, edited, published and on sale within the next few months.
The free space in my head will undoubtedly have been filled by several more books by then – but that’s a separate issue!
There’s an age-old argument that writing quickly means lowering your quality. But why should that be? If you write in your natural voice, the words on the finished page should be the same ones that you’d have written anyway, regardless of how long they took to write. The time factor is irrelevant. The book you write in just a few weeks should be identical in quality and content to one you might take a year or more to write the traditional way.
We’ve already seen that most people – including many professional writers – believe it takes about a year to write a
good book. And the longer it takes, the better it must be – or so they say. So it’s a good idea to tell everyone that you spend at least eight or nine months writing each of your books. When they see the quality, they’ll believe you. And they’ll still be impressed that you wrote them so quickly.
In case you skipped the introduction, I’ll repeat this tip here. If everyone thinks you spend months writing each book, and you produce a lot of them, consider releasing them under several different pen names. Otherwise people will question how you can possibly write that many books.
Another advantage of writing books quickly is that you don’t have time to get bored. That means your books get finished. Many writers abandon their books because they get bored with them. That doesn’t mean their books are boring or their writing is boring; it means the writers were unable to maintain their level of interest in them for such an extended period. They were probably excited by the idea at first. Their books might have excellent structure, and the writing might be of the highest quality. If they could only finish them, they might sell rather well. But when a project has been dragging on and on for a year or more and there’s no end in sight, even the most exciting project can become tedious.
Happily, that’s not the way we do things here. We’re planning a thirty-day adrenalin rush – and tons of fun. We’ll see our book growing in leaps and bounds with each passing day. And we’ll always have “The End” in sight, and it will never be too far away.
It’s even more fun when you know you’ll always be able to sell your books when they’re finished. Read the companion book The Fastest Ways to Edit, Publish and Sell Your Book to learn how to do this.
The money you can make from writing books this quickly can buy you your freedom. You’ll get to spend less time at work and more time doing the things you enjoy. Do you feel guilty about not spending enough time with your children or your grandchildren or your friends? Why not spend a month writing your book, and then enjoy yourself for the next eleven months? You’ll still produce a book a year, just like most professional writers.
You don’t even need to give up your spare time and freedom during the month you spend writing your book. You should be able to write it in under a month without sacrificing any of your quality time. In chapter 8 we’ll look at ways of writing your book in odd moments, during your lunch break, and perhaps for an hour or so at the beginning or end of the day.
Two months from now, you could be holding your finished book in your hands – even if you have no idea what it’s going to be about yet.
You’ll be able to start selling your book immediately. And as you finish other books you’ll be able to start selling them too. Two years from now, you could have twenty or more books on sale. If they each sell as well as the one or two books most authors would have written in that time, you’ll have generated ten to twenty times as much income. If a few of those books don’t sell quite as well as expected – which will probably be the case in the early days when readers are still discovering your work – it doesn’t matter. Some of your books might sell far better than you expected – or more than you ever dreamed of. They’ll more than make up for the others.
There’s nothing wrong with writing books the traditional way, of course. The average author might write a book every year or two and make a steady living from it. But it might take him his entire career to write twenty books. You could write that many in just a couple of years – and continue producing them at that rate. What difference might that make to your life?
Before we dig into the heart of the book, here’s another famous example. You’ve probably heard of Isaac Asimov, the well-known science and science fiction writer. He was one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote so many novels, non-fiction books, essays, short stories and articles that it would take a reasonably fast reader nine years to read them all.
We’ll look at other famous examples later in the book. And we’ll find out how they did it!
3. Before you start
In this chapter we’ll look at some general hints, tips and common-sense ideas that will help you write your book faster. There’s no magic here – that comes later. But we need to take care of the basics first.
Ergonomics
It’s important that your computer, desk and chair are set up properly and that you’re comfortable. Writing lots of books at high-speed can damage your health, causing things like repetitive strain injury (RSI) and carpal tunnel syndrome. You don’t want either of those things, so it’s wise to take sensible precautions right from the start. The staff at your local computer shop should be able to advise you. Or take a look at the Healthy Computing website.
You should also make sure your workspace is lit correctly, your screen is clean and free from reflections and glare, you’ve had your eyes tested within the last two years, and, if you wear glasses for computer work, that they have an up-to-date prescription. These simple precautions should prevent you from getting eyestrain and headaches, which will slow you down and reduce the amount of time you can spend writing.
Getting organised
If you have all your reference materials and notes close at hand, you won’t need to stop writing to look for them, so you’ll be more productive.
If you write on a computer, it’s useful to have everything you’re likely to need in that session open at the same time, so you can switch between them as needed. Most computers let you run several programs or documents simultaneously. I usually have just two programs running at a time: my word processor and my web browser.
You can open several tabs at a time in your web browser, so you can keep as many pages open as you need to, and quickly switch between them. I usually open several tabs relating to whatever subject I’m writing about, as well as some general reference tabs for Google search, Google maps, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com and Power Thesaurus.
Keyboard shortcuts can be useful here. In Windows you can switch between programs by holding down the Alt key and pressing the Tab key (commonly written as Alt+Tab). On Macs it’s Command+Tab. To switch between the tabs in your web browser use Ctrl/Control+Tab. Mac users can also select which tab to open by holding down the Command key and pressing 1 to 9 on their numeric keypad.
Just write
Having said that though, one of the biggest secrets of writing books quickly is to just write. If you know your story or subject well enough, and you’ve done all your research, and you have a detailed outline to work from, you won’t need to stop to look anything up. So close down everything except your word processor. That means no web browser and no email. You should be focused entirely on your writing. Closing everything else down will minimise distractions and interruptions.
If you feel you need to look something up, leave a gap for now. I mark the place in my document with *** so I can find it easily later. You can fill in the missing details at the end of the current writing session, or leave it until the editing stage when the whole book is finished.
If you need to look up something that will have a major impact on your book, stop writing and do it there and then. But if you’ve completed your research and you’re working from a detailed outline, you shouldn’t ever need to do this.
Keep a notepad and pen handy, or have a separate word processing document open, so you can quickly jot down notes about things that need fixing, or new ideas that occur to you while you’re writing.
Aural distractions
Do you get distracted by noise? Or does absolute silence kill your inspiration? One solution to both problems is to play music in the background while you write. It gets rid of the silence, blocks out noise, and provides a rhythm to type to. The interesting thing is that within a few minutes you’ll be so immersed in your writing that you’ll forget the music is there, and you’ll stop hearing it – consciously at least. In fact, it can come as a shock when the music ends; you’re brought back into the real world with a jolt. Surely it can’t be finished already?
When the music ends, take a break fr
om your writing for a few minutes. Get up, have a good stretch, and walk around – ideally outside.
As you don’t consciously hear it, it doesn’t matter what type of music you play. It doesn’t have to be gentle; rock or pop works just fine. I prefer instrumentals when I write, but other people say lyrics inspire them, so you might like to try both options.
If you can’t bear music playing while you write, you could try natural sound recordings instead. There are plenty available: flowing streams and rivers, waves – lapping or crashing, thunderstorms, country meadows, forests and jungles, birdsong, whale noises, and many more. You can also get recordings of natural sounds mixed with panpipes, flutes or guitars.
When I need to block everything out , I use a recording that’s nothing but noise. It sounds like the static you hear between analogue radio stations. It’s actually a carefully balanced mix of frequencies: white noise, pink noise, brown noise, and purple noise. One blocks out speech, another blocks out traffic noise, another blocks out general household noise, and so on. When they play simultaneously (on an endless loop) through my headphones, I hear nothing but noise; all the external sounds disappear. And after writing for a minute or two, I stop hearing the noise as well, leaving me in peace.
