Most writers would like to write faster. The problem is that speed can easily become the wrong objective. Producing more words is not especially useful if those words require twice as much rewriting, fail to communicate clearly, or never become finished work.
Learning how to write faster is really about becoming more efficient. The goal is to reduce wasted effort while preserving—or improving—the quality of what you write. After more than six decades as a professional writer, I have found that the biggest gains usually come not from typing faster but from making better decisions before and during the writing process.
That is one reason I developed the POWER method: Prewrite, Outline, Write, Edit, Review. Each stage has a different job. When you try to perform all five jobs simultaneously, writing slows down and becomes harder than it needs to be.
One of the fastest ways to waste writing time is to begin before you know where you are going.
Before you start drafting, define the purpose of the piece. Are you trying to explain something, persuade someone, provide instructions, tell a story, make a recommendation, or sell an idea? What does the reader need to know or do when finished?
If you are writing fiction, the same rule applies: What is your speaker trying to do? Explain, persuade, instruct, tell, recommend, or sell?
You do not need a formal mission statement. A single sentence may be enough. If you can say, “The purpose of this article is to show writers how to produce good work more efficiently,” you have already made dozens of later decisions easier. Or “the purpose of this scene is to build trust between the participants.”
Writers often blame slow progress on their difficulty in finding the right words. Sometimes the real problem is that they have not yet decided what they want those words to accomplish.
Prewriting saves time because thinking is less time-consuming than rewriting.
Gather the facts, examples, names, links, quotations, figures, or other information you expect to need before you begin the draft. If you constantly interrupt your writing to search for a date, check a spelling, find a reference, or decide what comes next, you repeatedly lose momentum.
You do not always have to complete every piece of research first. Sometimes you can insert a note such as “[check date]” or “[add example]” and keep writing. The important point is to avoid turning every small question into a reason to stop. In writing many of my books, I used the asterisk (*) to mark places I need to come back and verify or fix when I edit.
The more complicated the assignment, the more valuable preparation becomes. A five-sentence email may need almost none. A 2,000-word article benefits from considerably more.
Some writers dislike outlines because they associate them with rigid Roman numerals and school assignments. An outline does not need to be complicated. Its purpose is simply to give you a route through the material.
For an article like this one, the outline might consist only of the main subheads in their logical order. Once those are in place, each section becomes a small writing assignment rather than the entire article being one large, ill-defined problem.
This reduces one of the great time-wasters in writing: stopping after every paragraph and asking, “What comes next?”
Remember, too, that an outline is not a contract. Change it when the writing reveals a better arrangement. Its job is to help you move, not to prevent you from changing direction.
Perhaps the most important way to write faster is to stop trying to perfect every sentence while you are drafting it.
Writing and editing require different kinds of attention. During the draft, your main job is to get the ideas onto the page in a useful order. During editing, your job is to improve those ideas and the language carrying them.
When you continually switch between the two, you create your own traffic jam. You write half a sentence, revise it, change a word, reconsider the first sentence, adjust the punctuation, and eventually discover that ten minutes have passed without advancing the draft.
Give yourself permission to write an imperfect first version. You already know you are going to edit your own writing.
That permission can be remarkably productive.
Sooner or later you will reach a sentence, fact, transition, example, or paragraph that does not come easily. Do not automatically let one problem stop the entire draft.
Mark the problem and move on.
I often use a simple reminder in brackets: “[better example],” “[verify],” “[transition],” or “[rewrite].” The marker tells me that something needs attention without requiring me to solve it at that moment.
This works especially well when the missing information is not essential to writing the next section. You preserve momentum and return later when you are editing or checking facts.
Writing faster often depends on knowing which problems must be solved now and which can wait.
Professional writers rarely reinvent the form of every assignment.
An instructional article normally needs an introduction, an orderly explanation, useful examples, and a conclusion. A business proposal follows a recognizable pattern. A query, report, newsletter, product description, or sales page usually has its own structural conventions. A scene from a fictional story needs a setting, character description, location, purpose, and a resolution, or at least a movement toward resolution.
Use them.
Templates are not necessarily shortcuts to formulaic writing. They are ways to avoid repeatedly solving problems you have already solved. Once you know the structure that works for a recurring assignment, save it and adapt it.
The same principle applies to your own habits. If you regularly write articles, create a standard document containing your preferred heading levels, byline, spacing, and closing information. Spend your time on the content rather than rebuilding the container every time. If you write fiction, develop your characters, their needs and goals, mannerisms, the various objectives they will have, and the resolutions.
Long writing sessions are not automatically productive writing sessions.
For many assignments, it is easier to work in focused stretches with a specific objective: finish the introduction, draft two sections, revise 1,000 words, or complete a chapter outline. A defined task makes it easier to begin and easier to recognize progress.
The important measurement is not how long you sat in front of the computer. It is how much useful work you finished.
Some writers work best with a timer. Others prefer a word target, a section target, or a scheduled stopping point. The method matters less than having a clear boundary around the work.
Writing requires concentration, and concentration is easily fragmented. Email, news sites, social media, notifications, incoming messages, and unrelated browser tabs all offer small interruptions. A single interruption may consume only a minute, but recovering your train of thought can take considerably longer.
Before beginning a focused writing session, close what you do not need. Keep open the research and tools required for the assignment and remove the rest from immediate view.
This is not an argument for working in isolation all day. It is simply recognition that writing time should actually be writing time.
Every writer develops habits that either improve or reduce efficiency.
Perhaps you spend too long on openings. Perhaps you research beyond what the assignment requires. Perhaps you revise every paragraph before moving to the next. Perhaps you procrastinate until a deadline supplies the concentration you could have created earlier.
Pay attention to where your time goes. You do not need elaborate productivity software. For a week or two, simply notice when you begin, when you stop, what you accomplish, and where you stall. Patterns usually become obvious. Identify and fix them.
Improving your writing speed begins with understanding what is actually slowing you down.
There is an important difference between efficient writing and hurried writing.
Efficient writing eliminates unnecessary effort. Hurried writing eliminates necessary effort.
Research still has to be accurate. Instructions still have to make sense. Facts still have to be checked. Sentences still have to be edited. The final work still has to serve the reader.
The objective is not to skip those jobs. It is to perform each one at the right time rather than all of them at once.
That distinction matters. The fastest route to a finished piece is rarely to produce a careless draft and then repair the damage.
Here’s your takeaway: When you want to improve your speed without lowering quality, use this sequence:
Define what the piece must accomplish.
Gather the information you are likely to need.
Create a simple outline.
Draft without trying to perfect every sentence.
Mark minor problems and keep moving.
Finish the draft before doing serious editing.
Edit for structure and clarity.
Proofread only after the editing is finished.
Notice what slowed you down and improve that part of your process next time.
None of these techniques will make every writing assignment effortless. Writing still requires thought, judgment, and work. But a good process prevents you from spending that effort twice.
The more often you use an efficient process, the more natural it becomes. You begin to prepare better, make decisions earlier, draft with fewer interruptions, and separate creation from correction.
That is how to write faster without sacrificing quality: not by rushing, but by wasting less of the time you already spend writing.
Want more practical help with your writing? Download my free ebook, Working Writer Tips: How to Write Anything Better, Faster, Easier, and receive my weekly Advanced Writing Tips. And check out my other free Writing Guides!
–Dan Ramsey, Working Writer