If you know exactly what you need to write next at any given moment, you're unlikely to run into any snags as you work to fast-draft your novel. That's why I prefer to do a lot of pre-writing before beginning to draft, going so far as to outline my book scene-by-scene. I've heard that some pantsers enjoy fast-drafting, but I've yet to meet any fast-drafting pantsers for myself.
Looking for a little guidance as you pre-write your next novel? You may enjoy The Pre-Write Project , our page digital workbook designed to zap the overwhelm out of the pre-writing process. Click here to check it out today! Fast-drafting can be quite time-consuming in the sense that it's most effective if you can throw an hour or more into writing most days of the week. Knowing this, you'll want to be intentional about carving out blocks of time to write.
Let your friends and family know what you're up to. Take a day or two off work if you're able. Go on a television strike. In whatever ways you can, make your schedule work to your advantage. If you're fast-drafting a novel, your writing is going to suck.
Simple as that. The best thing you can do is ditch the idea that a rough draft should be anything other than rough and write. You'll thank yourself later, when you aren't ditching an unnecessary scene you put hours of care into crafting.
If you're the type of writer who can crank out 15k or 20k in a day, I don't think you'll have any problem fast-drafting your novel. But if endless writing energy isn't on your side, setting goals can help you see your fast-drafting through. I personally find it helpful to set a deadline for my finished draft, but you may wish to choose a daily goal instead, such as working for an hour or writing a minimum of 2, words each day.
Looking forward to more great content all year. Yes, I had a great time. Happy New Year to you, too! Somehow you struck me as someone who turns each draft into a published article. Did you change your mind on the idea you had?
Or did you lose motivation? Or did you feel stuck for some reason? I appreciate your additional comments. Welcome back, Henneke. As someone with an overloaded folder of semi finished ideas, this post spoke so loudly to me. Time for me to put fingers to keyboard and break out those ideas.
And Happy New Year. What holds me back I think is my content curation process I think I have an information hoarding problem. I collect some much content wanting to somehow use it to support my ideas. But I lack organization. You name it. The second problem I feel is having too many ideas. Another organization problem. I keep my ideas all over the place, including backs of shopping receipts.
I wonder, are others out there having this problem too? Oh, and I also like to include examples. I feel those are key to quality instruction, which is my preferred type of post. So finding examples and again organizing them slows me down. What helps me get unstuck is to view a blog post or a book not as a definitive piece of writing, but a snapshot of a thinking in progress.
Also, when I want to quote an authority, I look for a useful quote rather than aim for the best quote. I also always have too many ideas. I write them in a paper notebook. When I pick an idea for the next blog post, I look for an idea that grabs my attention and that I feel excited to write about.
I usually take it one week at a time and try to keep the topics mixed. I agree with you on examples. I guess good writing is just time intensive …. Gay, have you tried the Pocket App?
I find it so useful to just pocket an article when I read it, and add a tag if I remember. Then I have a library of articles to refer to for inspiration or linking to. I think this is a great process to follow. I especially liked your point about the getting the big picture right.
I find having more focus helps me write better content. Outlining the sub-heads at the outset also helps maintain focus and makes writing easier.
I also tend to write subheads as a kind of outline before I start writing. For those posts I do less revision. However, for more personal posts like the last post of , I often freewrite more and I have to do more revision to find the right focus and flow. I think I might pin your infographic and this article right above my computer so I can hear your voice in my head during the writing process, instead of my inner critic.
Thank you Kathy. I was thinking vaguely when reading the post that these ideas needed to be kept handy, rather than filed on my computer. So now I have a print copy. Hi Henneke, this is sooo helpful.
Thanks for creating these amazing articles for us. Oh, and a happy new year. What an useful post, I am guilty of starting articles that I never finish. The part I liked most and which will make me come back to your post is the question section on each point — so useful. Follow proven templates for specific writing tasks, practice your skills, and get professional feedback so you become a confident business writer.
Take on any writing project with gusto. Learn more about books and courses. I never saw myself as a writer, but in my early forties, I learned how to write and discovered the joy of writing. Learn how I can help you. Tips for beginning writers. Improve your writing skills. Popular blog posts. Skip to primary navigation Skip to main content Skip to footer Tweet Share Editing means making each sentence flow and choosing the right words.
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Create segues into paragraphs. Add a conclusion. Hardest part for me, Mark usually helps. So here's a Chrome extension that lets you. Any webpage that you can write on, you can now use Draft with. Just place your cursor in the box you want to write in, click the Chrome Draft extension, and Draft will open up in a new Chrome Tab. Choose an already written document or something new to write in Draft any text from the original text box will carry over.
When you're done, there's a menu button to paste your work back into the text box you came from. All of a sudden, everything you write everywhere is focused, versioned, and able to be shared with friends for help before you publish.
I hope you like it. This might be the handiest and neatest thing I've ever made. Click here to access the Draft Chrome extension. To further extend Draft to publish anywhere, you can setup WebHooks. WebHooks integrate themselves into a Publish button on your documents. Here's more documentation on WebHooks. Email is still the most used and convenient app on my mobile phone. So I've created a way to create a new document in Draft simply by emailing a secret address on your account.
Emails to that address from you the address you send from must match the address on your account will turn into new documents using the text of the email as the content. Images attached also get included. So take a photo of something that interests you while riding the bus, write a few words, then flesh it out into an entire blog post later with Draft.
I can't believe how much of a pain it is to transcribe even a short amount of audio. In order to write better , I've wanted to start including more transcriptions of podcasts, video presentations, and interviews in my writing, but the tools are in bad shape.
I found myself using iTunes for the keyboard shortcuts, but I'd have to flip back and forth to edit the text I was transcribing.
Now Draft can assist you with your transcription. The "New Document" button has a dropdown arrow next to it to start a "New Transcription". You can transcribe Youtube and Vimeo videos. Or file types like. You can have it hosted somewhere else and use a URL, or upload it to Draft. The green buttons allow you to skip back and forward. Once you get that loop transcribed, the skip buttons will increment the entire loop. Everything is tied to keyboard shortcuts, so you can quickly write, move the loop, write, move the loop.
Click the? It's been insanely handy. I used it to quickly transcribe a Vimeo video for a blog post. And people have been using it to transcribe interviews for their books and articles.
But it's funny how unportable those Todos are from system to system, unless someone spends time with their APIs. I really like what Github did. So in the spirit of spreading this, Draft now supports Github style Markdown Todos. I needed to create a presentation the other day, but found it was strange I was reaching for heavy feature-laden apps like Keynote or Powerpoint to simply display some big text on the screen. Why do I have to click so much to create new slides, when really I just have 12 bullet points I'd like to outline and be done with the presentation?
Not to mention - it's extremely difficult to version control and collaborate on a presentation. When you view your document, it's now a presentation. You can share your document to get edits, or choose Read Only mode to share the document just as a presentation.
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