possible to become prolific?

I realise we got a bit off-topic, but I believe that yes, with practise, you can learn to type faster, that is, not just banging away at the keys, but getting the ideas out.

If you train yourself to sit in the chair at a certain time every day, the words will come. Actually, have you read Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer?

scarletpeaches said:

If you train yourself to sit in the chair at a certain time every day, the words will come.

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QFT again.

The more you do it, the faster you'll get until you find "your speed".

scarletpeaches said:

If you train yourself to sit in the chair at a certain time every day, the words will come.

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I'll add to this: if you're like me and can't always manage setting aside a particular time every day to write, then train yourself to write anytime, anywhere, in any slivers of time (I know SP likes that phrase) you can find. I have a notebook or my Alphasmart Neo with me at all times, making it easy for me to dash off a paragraph or two if I find a free 5-10 minutes (waiting in line at the store, being on hold on the phone, waiting for my pasta water to boil, etc.). When I know I don't have all of the time in the world to get my words written, that extra edge of panic juices my brain and helps me write faster.

I say quit your job, become a drunk and write whenever the damned well hell you want.

I'm a bad person to ask.

thethinker42 said:

QFT again.

The more you do it, the faster you'll get until you find "your speed".

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That throws up the question; I wonder if people have a more comfortable 'default'? Like, for me, the first thousand words a day is like pulling teeth, but after that, the words flow. If I get 5k done, I'm happy.

Bubastes said:

I'll add to this: if you're like me and can't always manage setting aside a particular time every day to write, then train yourself to write anytime, anywhere, in any slivers of time (I know SP likes that phrase) you can find. I have a notebook or my Alphasmart Neo with me at all times, making it easy for me to dash off a paragraph or two if I find a free 5-10 minutes (waiting in line at the store, being on hold on the phone, waiting for my pasta water to boil, etc.). When I know I don't have all of the time in the world to get my words written, that extra edge of panic juices my brain and helps me write faster.

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Slivers or pockets, either work for me!

And I love my Neo long time.

Wayne K said:

I say quit your job, become a drunk and write whenever the damned well hell you want.

I'm a bad person to ask.

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Sounds like a plan to me!

*opens the Smirnoff*

scarletpeaches said:

That throws up the question; I wonder if people have a more comfortable 'default'? Like, for me, the first thousand words a day is like pulling teeth, but after that, the words flow. If I get 5k done, I'm happy.

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You may be right. My first thousand or so is usually agony, after that it's pretty smooth sailing. If I'm having a "normal" day, I hit the wall around 5,000...on a good day, I'll hit it around 10,000. But whether it's a 5K or 10K day, that first 1K is always a bitch.

I think everyone just has to find their own sweet spot. Whatever gets the words on the page in the proper order to tell their story.

In terms of knowing how to type, simply practice and make yourself a better typist. When I was younger, I crawled along at about twenty-thirty words a minute. Now I can cruise around 100 wpm.

When it comes to more psychological things, it's a matter of grasping onto that feeling in your gut that tends to come and go that drives your fingers to transcribe your thoughts. You simply have to want it--if you're just attracted to the idea of being a writer for the sake of it, you probably won't get very far. You have to feel compelled to write. Nothing less will suffice. If you are truly compelled, the words will come sooner or later.

wrtaway said:

Do you think that it is possible to become a faster writer (while maintaining the quality, of course)?

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Yes.

Some discipline, a routine you stick to, good work habits, focus, self-imposed deadlines that you meet. All of these things. when done together, can and will help someone to become a faster, more prolific writer without sacrificing the quality of their work (and in fact, their work is likely to get better).

THIS is the place in which you write.

THIS is the time during which you write.

At that time you go to that place and you WRITE.

It will not happen immediately, but if you stick with it for even just a few weeks it will become second nature and you will be more prolific and your work will improve. You will write faster. Your work will be more consistent. It will no longer be a struggle.

It's a skill, it is learned and practiced like any other skill.

I don't think the typing is the limiting factor. Say you type 60 words a minute, and you consider "prolific" to be 5000 words per day. Keep in mind that 5000 words per day equals a medium sized novel in 20 days, or a month if you work only weekdays. That's far faster than most "prolific" novelists write. That works out to be 83 minutes of typing, which obviously isn't much. The rest of your time is spent rewriting, plotting, and such.

wrtaway said:

Do you think that it is possible to become a faster writer (while maintaining the quality, of course)? Or, are some people just born to be prolific, and others, like myself, have to plod along at whatever pace inspiration strikes?

I'd love to hear suggestions from anyone who has managed to learn to write faster.

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I write faster now. I'm writing roughly twice as much as I was last year (and before that I wasn't writing). Most of the speed increase happened automatically through practise. I didn't do anything special.

I don't sit down at a set time or anything like that, as others are suggesting here. I do set monthly goals though, which increase as I get comfortable with meeting the previous goal.

wrtaway said:

Interesting discussion. As the OP, let me clarify a bit, though. I am not talking about writer's block. I'm just talking about the sentences emerging slowly but steadily. It seems that I need to think each one through very, very carefully -- words just don't seem to fly onto the screen the way some people manage.

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Maybe picking one project and trying it a different way--writing whatever comes into your head so you can edit later--might help. I tend to be a pre-editor myself, and I find that it's useful to do that every now and then. Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones has some good suggestions about this.

Most of us can probably recall a time in our schooling when a few pages daunted us.

Look at us now.

You can become better, faster, less intimidated or whatever you choose with practice.

scarletpeaches said:

Now where did I say that? Must I preface every one of my posts with "This is what works for me, in case anyone else gets offended?"

As if I had to explain it again...talking about muses, inspiration, writer's block, etc...that takes the responsibility for writing out of the hands of the writer and places it firmly with something outside them - God, fate, the universe, whatever.

I'm big on personal responsibility. I refuse to believe writer's block exists and I refuse to believe there's anything I can't do if I put my mind to it.

I don't type fast because I'm blessed by God. I type fast because I trained myself to do just that.

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Right on, Scarletpeaches. You tell 'em.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm with Scarlet on this one. You can learn to type like the wind; that does help. I type very fast and average around 3000 words in a typical hour-and-a-half writing session. If I know what I want to write. Obviously a lot of sitting and thinking is involved in writing, as you try to work through the problems that come up while you work on a scene or plot.

As for becoming prolific, what's helped me is scheduling time to write. Specific time that seldom changes. While I was on my internship, it was as soon as I got home from work and scrubbed the smell of baitfish off of me. I wrote for about an hour and a half after my shower. That was my routine. Off my internship, I wrote in the morning hours, usually going to Starbucks to do it so I was in a different environment. I find that getting into a different place with some good white noise helps me to focus. I'm starting a new job tomorrow so I'm not yet sure what will work, but you can bet I'll be scheduling some regular writing time as soon as I've got the new routine figured out. I won't be handling any baitfish this time around, so that helps.

If you want to be as prolific as TheThinker42, become unemployed in a foreign country. That seemed to work for her.

Sure, you can get annoying pauses in your writing and you can choose to call them "writer's block" if you want to. The only way to get through them is to write through them. Not everything you write will be golden, so it doesn't really matter if you write crap through your block. You can always go back later and change it to non-crap. Or to golden crap; whatever.

And yeah, there are people who are writers because they write, and there are people who angst about writing. They don't write much. I'm not sure I'd call most of them writers.

Wow. I am amazed by tt42. I'm a pretty prolific writer, but I don't touch that productivity, not even on a good day. My brain would be oatmeal, and I would be walking into walls by the end of it! WOW!
Way to go.

Her brain is made of oatmeal. She hires a stable of eleventy billion ghost-writers, all chained in her basement and she takes credit for what they do.

wrtaway said:

Interesting discussion. As the OP, let me clarify a bit, though. I am not talking about writer's block. I'm just talking about the sentences emerging slowly but steadily. It seems that I need to think each one through very, very carefully -- words just don't seem to fly onto the screen the way some people manage.

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Maybe you should try some writing exercises. Try writing free-flow, just whatever little fragment of a story comes into your head, and make your goal to write as many coherent sentences as you can in five minutes (or two, or one.) The more you practice any skill--including forming nice sentences--the more adept and efficient you will become.

wannawrite said:

Wow. I am amazed by tt42. I'm a pretty prolific writer, but I don't touch that productivity, not even on a good day. My brain would be oatmeal, and I would be walking into walls by the end of it! WOW!
Way to go.

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And the scary thing is, her finished manuscripts are really good. I've known tt42 since we were both in our late teens and I've been beta-reading her mss ever since then. I've seen her progression. It's scary (in a good way.) The woman is en fuego.

scarletpeaches said:

Her brain is made of oatmeal. She hires a stable of eleventy billion ghost-writers, all chained in her basement and she takes credit for what they do.

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Ah-ha. So. That's the secret, then. I just KNEW that there was a secret to all this! See you later, guys. I'm outta here!

*off to go purchase for herself some ghostie writers.*

I think everyone can learn to write faster. I don't know whether everybody can become fast enough be prolific. But it's worth finding out.

tt42 is a wise one.

I heard somewhere (I'll have to look it up--I think it's in Dufresne's book...) that you can write for surprisingly long tracks of time after you make it past your first wind.

Perhaps this is what tt is experiencing?

By the way, have we defined prolific yet? Maybe you're not as slow as you think you are. And if you don't revise after the first draft, that counts also.

Ever read Camus' The Plague? There's a character in there who keeps writing and rewriting the first sentence of his novel to reach some kind of perfection and never gets any further than that. I suspect that's something of a cautionary tale for writerly types.

NaNoWriMo taught me the fine art of Just Plowing Ahead Even If It Sucks. Which means I now have a manuscript to revise instead of a neat idea for a novel. And, as others have pointed out, the more you write, the easier it gets. Get all your mistakes out in the open so you can fix them instead of keeping them bottled up inside.

Writing speed might also vary by project. Some stories can demand more mental resources than others, and thus get put on the page more slowly. Sometimes you might have to stop to chew on tough plot points or beat down the personal demons lurking over your shoulder.

For my current WIP I'm usually good with 500-1000 words a day. On other projects it's been closer to 1500-3000 words daily. I guess whenever I move on to my next project, I'll see if it was the project slowing me down, or just me slowing myself down.

Nicole