The Fastest Way to Write Your Book

by Dave Haslett

  I also play the noise recording when I’m browsing for books in libraries, or trying to write in them.Libraries are supposed to be quiet places, but they rarely are these days.

  You can download my noise recording and use it yourself. Email me at mail@ideas4writers.com to request your free copy.

  Time of day

  Are you a morning person or a night person? It doesn’t matter which you are as long as you’re able to write when you’re at your most creative and productive. See if you can arrange your schedule to accommodate this. It will definitely be worth it.

  In the first edition of this book, I said morning people had an advantage because they were energised and refreshed from their sleep. As they were at their most alert then, they were bound to get more done. But a 2011 study has debunked this. It found that the best time to write is when you feel it’s the best time to write. That’s definitely not the morning in my case!

  I’m a night person and I always have been. I tried forcing myself to write in the early morning – before it was debunked – and it made me ill. I usually start writing at about 10:30 pm. I usually limit my writing to around two and a half hours per day, but I’ve often written right through the night until sunrise. (Another big advantage of writing books for a living is that you don’t have to get up for work the next morning.)

  Sleep

  You’re much more productive after a good night’s sleep (or a good morning’s sleep if you’re a night person like me). The ideas come more easily, you feel more positive about your writing ability, more optimistic about your chances of success, and you have more energy for other things, such as marketing your books.

  If you have trouble getting to sleep, or you don’t get enough of it, put special effort into fixing this, because it will significantly improve every area of your life, not just your writing. Search online for “better sleep”.

  Dreams can be useful too, but we’ll talk about those later.

  Exercise before writing

  If you’re planning a long writing session, it’s a good idea to exercise before you start. Clear your mind with a brisk walk, or spend ten minutes on an exercise bike or a treadmill. Or how about some yoga or gentle stretching? Anything that gets your body warmed up and your blood pumping to your brain is good. Otherwise you’ll feel tired before you even start, you’ll slump in your chair, and the writing will feel difficult.

  It’s worth taking the time to exercise at the end of a long writing session too. Your muscles will have stiffened up after all that time in the chair, and you might have built up quite a bit of tension that needs to be released. Try some more stretching, perhaps followed by something more vigorous.

  Dancing along to happy music is a great form of exercise – and it can cheer you up! If that sounds too embarrassing, do it when you’re alone and can’t be seen. Or play the music on a pair of headphones, draw the curtains or close the blind, and lock the door.

  Or you could just tell everyone you’re a writer, and it’s what writers do. Everyone thinks we’re an eccentric bunch anyway.

  Take a break

  I recommend taking a short break from your writing every twenty minutes. At the very least, stand up and have a good stretch. If you write in twenty-minute mini-sessions, which we’ll look at later in the book, the breaks will occur naturally. But if you write in longer sessions you might like to use a timer to remind you when to stop. Or you could set an alarm on your computer or phone.

  You should also take longer breaks from time to time. If you’ve spent the entire morning writing, take a break for an hour or so before you begin the afternoon session. Do something that takes you away from the physical act of writing. Ideally, you should give your mind a rest too. Do something else that you need to concentrate on, so you’re forced to stop thinking about your book for an hour.

  You can think about your book during your break if you want to, of course. What you can get up to depends on your personal circumstances, but here are a few suggestions:

  walk, run or jog

  walk the dog

  go for a bike ride

  swim lengths at your local pool

  go to the gym

  do your laundry

  While you’re doing this, you can think about your book and any problems you’re having with it. Let the ideas and solutions come when they’re ready. I find that the best ones usually come in the second half of the exercise period. Nothing much seems to happen during the first half.

  Writers communicate well

  All writers need to be able to communicate their ideas well. You don’t necessarily have to be literate, or physically able to write or type your work; you could get someone else to do that for you. But you need to be able to share your ideas and knowledge, or tell a good story. Can you hold an audience spellbound? Can you fill them with excitement about your subject at the same time as you fill them with knowledge?

  If you can’t communicate well, any time you spend writing will be wasted. You need to be able to communicate well. And if you want to write books quickly, you need unshakeable confidence in that ability.

  If you have even the slightest doubt about your ability to communicate your ideas, knowledge or stories, take a writing or storytelling course. You’ll soon find out whether you have any weaknesses. Then you can concentrate on ironing out those issues instead of wasting time writing a book that’s fundamentally flawed.

  You could take an online course or one in the real world. It doesn’t matter which. But choose one wherea tutor gets to see your writing and gives you feedback on it.

  It really is worth taking the time to do this. You might be tempted to skip this step because you want to get on with writing your book. But you’ll soon make up any lost time once you’ve ironed out your weaknesses. You’ll not only be able to write more quickly, you should also be able to sell pretty much everything you write. You’ll also lose the nagging doubt that you might be terrible at characterisation, dialogue, punctuation … or whatever you think might be holding you back.

  You should read as many books as you can find on the craft of writing – and do the exercises in them too. It takes years to learn to play the piano to a professional standard, and you need to practise for several hours a day. It takes the same amount of time to become a decent writer. How many years have you spent learning your craft, and how much time do you spend writing each day?

  Reaching the peak of achievement takes years of dedication and daily practice, and that means you need to love what you do. George Leonard explores this more fully in his book Mastery, which I highly recommend.

  If you have lots of ideas, stories or information that you want to get across to people, but you’ve come to the conclusion that you’ll never be a good enough writer, don’t worry. You can still write your book. You just need to find a writing partner or a ghostwriter to work with.

  The more I practise, the luckier I get

  Successful writers tend to just get on with it and write regularly – every day if they can.

  The more you write, the more likely you are to be struck by inspiration – usually when you’re right in the middle of a writing session. If you write regularly, you’re also going to finish projects, of course. That’s more than most people ever achieve – including quite a few who claim to be writers!

  Know your subject

  If you write non-fiction, you should know your subject inside out before you start writing your book. At the very least, you should have a good knowledge of the particular aspects of it that you’re going to write about. The more familiar you are with those aspects, the less research you’ll have to do and the faster you’ll finish your book.

  But it’s not enough to know your subject. As we saw above, you also need to be able to communicate your knowledge to your readers. Try explaining an aspect of your subject to someone who knows nothing about it. Then ask him to explain it back to you. If he has any difficulty doing this, or if he gets anything wrong, see if you can explain it to him
again in a way that’s easier to understand. If it’s a tricky subject, you might have to do this several times before he finally gets it. But once he fully grasps what you’re saying, and he’s able to explain it back to you correctly, use that version of your explanation in your book.

  If you write fiction, you need to be a great storyteller. Whenever there are people around, use the opportunity to spin them a good yarn. You don’t need to be able to make it up on the spot though; try out some of the material from your new book and see how well it goes down. Then see if you can improve it. See if you can get them on the edges of their seats, hanging on your every word. See if you can squeeze in a few more laughs, make them gasp, make them scream, make them cry, and so on. And next time you tell that story, see if you can improve it even further.

  An audience means any group of people. They could be friends who’ve come for dinner, people you meet in the pub, people waiting to have their hair cut at the barber’s shop, people hanging out in the kitchen at a party, and so on.

  If you walk into a room and people beg you to tell them one of your stories, you’ll know you’re well on your way to success. On the other hand, if everyone seems to avoid you or ignore you, or the room empties when you start speaking, you obviously have some way to go!

  Write using your speaking voice

  As we noted earlier, the fastest and easiest way to write is to be yourself and write the way you speak. Use your own voice in a natural, conversational style, as if you were speaking to a friend.

  Don’t be over-formal or pompous because you think that’s how someone in authority should sound. Be a wise, caring friend and an entertaining guide, not a stuffy, irritating know-it-all who uses long words and jargon no one can understand.

  A passion for writing

  As well as knowing your subject or story, and being able to communicate it well, you need to be passionate about what you write. And, once again, you need to be able to communicate that passion to your readers.

  If you’re passionate about your book, and you can finish writing it in less than a month, you won’t get bored of writing it and your readers won’t get bored of reading it. You’ll write it faster, and with enthusiasm and excitement. Time will flash by and the words will come easily. And you definitely won’t abandon it – as many writers do when they get bored of writing their books.

  Before you start

  Before you start writing your book, try to come up with the following things:

  A great title – or a good working title that you might change later.

  A table of contents with all of your headings and sub-headings (or chapters and scenes) listed. Again, you might change their titles later, but the key concepts or basic storyline should remain the same.

  An outline. Go through your table of contents and write a sentence that describes what you plan to write in each paragraph of your book. When you write your book, you’ll expand these sentences to create the full text.

  A thirty-second marketing pitch.

  A brief profile of your target audience.

  An introduction. Why are you writing this book and why are you the best person to write it?

  A blurb for the back cover: 100 to 150 words.

  An irresistible query letter to an agent or editor. It’s a good idea to write this even if you’re planning to self-publish your book.

  Use these things to guide you as you write your book. They’ll help you stay focused on what you’re trying to achieve. We’ll look at each of them in more detail later in this book and in the companion book The Fastest Ways to Edit, Publish and Sell Your Book.

  Visualise the end product

  As you prepare your outline, and later as you actually write your book, try to keep in mind what you want the end result to look like. Can you visualise your finished book?

  Imagine holding it in your hands and flipping through the pages. Imagine a reader picking it up in a bookshop, reading the back cover, and skimming through the pages. See his eyes light up: it’s exactly what he was looking for. He takes it to the checkout with a smile on his face, then races home to read it. He might even send you an email telling you how much he enjoyed it and how much it meant to him.

  Visualise your ideal reader

  Write your book for the one person who represents your ideal reader. That person might be someone you know or someone you create in your mind. Put yourself in his position as you plan the book he wants and needs. Answer every question he could possibly ask – and many more besides.

  Fill your ideal reader with enthusiasm for the subject. Entertain him. Tell him where to find the extra information he’ll need if he wants to take the subject further. Tell him the best places to buy the equipment he’ll need, what features he should look out for, and what he should to avoid.

  Teaching experience will help here, even if you only teach one-day workshops or run occasional storytelling sessions.

  Write the best book you can

  Pack your book with as much information as you can, or with as much action and excitement as you can invent. You owe it to your readers – and to yourself. It’ll make the writing easier, it’ll be easier to get your book published, and it will be easier to sell. You’ll also feel happier in yourself, knowing you’ve produced a first-rate book rather than a third-rate one.

  Think it – write it

  The fastest way to write your book is to create the whole thing in your head first. Turn your thoughts into a detailed outline and write it down, then stick to it rigidly as you expand it into your first draft. Your book will come together almost as fast as you can physically type it. We’ll look at the best ways of doing this later.

  It’s much faster to dictate your book than to type it. We’ll look at that later too.

  Set a deadline

  Set a target completion date for every book you write. For your first book, the target should be exactly one month from the day you decide to start working on it. During that month, you’ll come up with your Big Idea, expand it and refine it, research it, prepare a simple outline and then a detailed outline, and write the entire first draft.

  Target dates and deadlines are important. We’ll look at them in more detail in Chapter 16.

  As you write more books and become more familiar with the techniques of writing them faster, you’ll be able to set shorter targets. Mine is currently eighteen days for novels, but the American science fiction writer Dean Wesley Smith has managed to get his down to just ten days.

  Targets and timescales

  How you choose to divide up the writing stage is entirely up to you. Some writers like to set themselves a daily target: number of words, number of pages, or number of scenes or chapters completed. I prefer to let the book set its own timescale.

  When I first started writing books quickly, I recorded how much I’d written at the end of each day and plotted in on a chart, but I didn’t set myself a target. I don’t keep a daily record any more, but I always have a reasonable estimate in my head. I also strike through each item in my outline as I complete it, so I know how much of the book I’ve written and roughly how long it will take to reach the end.

  Some days I write a lot, and some days I don’t write much at all. It depends on how I’m feeling, how much writing I want to do, and how much time I have. But it’s nice to have a choice. On average, I write about 3,500 words per day.

  Progress chart

  Some writers like to chart their daily progress on a graph. This is a hugely motivating thing to do, especially when you first start writing books quickly. As we just saw, you could choose to plot the number of words, pages, scenes or chapters you’ve written.

  Let’s say you’re working on a novel that you expect to be around 75,000 words long – that’s a fairly typical length. And let’s say you want the actual writing stage to take twenty days. That means you need to write an average of around 3,750 words per day.

  Draw a scale up the side of your graph, marking the word count at 250-word intervals. Dra
w a red line across the graph at the 3,750-word mark. Then mark twenty days along the bottom of your graph – you could number them from one to twenty or write the actual dates. As you write your book, mark each day’s word count on the graph. Aim for your word count to reach or cross the red line every day. If you miss it one day, aim to make up for it the next day.

  I used a graph for my first book, where I plotted the number of chapters completed – usually one per day. But I now find that seeing my book coming together in a matter of days or weeks is all the motivation I need. Some writers keep charts or graphs for every book they write, as they find them so motivational. If you think they’ll help you, definitely give them a try.

  If you keep missing your daily target and it starts getting you down, throw the graph away and stop keeping daily records. Let the book take as long as it takes. If you use the techniques in this book, it should still come together quickly, and that alone should be enough to motivate you. But it’s worth making a note of the date you begin writing your book and the date you finish it – just for your personal interest.