This is the perfect place to mention one of my favorite websites: http://750words.com/
750 words is really fantastic if you want to practice writing every day, especially if you want to practice writing quickly. The site keeps a live word count and pushes you to write 750 words (roughly three pages) every day by tracking your streaks and awarding badges for hitting certain milestones. On top of that, the site tracks how many interruptions you have while writing your 750 words and how long it takes you each day to write.
I had a 149 day streak broken when I lost track of time and forgot to write until after midnight one day, but I'm back up to a new 40 day streak. I was shocked to learn that I'm usually able to write 750 words in under 15 minutes, and on some days I like to push myself to try to write as quickly as possible (I've gotten as low as 8 minutes one time). Of course, writing quickly sometimes means writing somewhat lower quality, so I don't always "race the clock".
If you have any interest in improving your writing skills, I can't recommend 750words.com enough. I started less than a year ago, and I've written a total of 185,022 words that I probably never would have written otherwise! Of course, by writing so quickly I've spent only 56 hours writing on the site, so I have a long way to go before I reach the 10,000 hour mark.
I'm also curious what exactly you are writing about. I'm interested in writing non-fiction and opinion pieces, and I find that it takes me a very long time to write about stuff that requires research, math, attribution of sources and the like. However, writing opinion pieces that are entirely sourced from my brain go 3-4 times faster.
It really depends on the day. I like to try to think of topics during the day, often new game ideas. Then when I sit down to write (I usually write towards the end of the day) I'll record the ideas that I like and usually I'll come up with new related ideas while writing, so I'll write those too. These are probably my favorite days.
Often, though, I'll just write stream-of-consciousness and then I can end up jumping from topic to topic. This can still help me to organize and make sense of my thoughts and kind of bring closure to my day, plus these entries can be interesting to re-read (to me: I doubt others would be so interested). My brain likes organizing topics and finding connections, so I'm not sure I'd call even this "moving aimlessly from topic to topic" as I like to throw in some kind of segue.
Those are the entries that I write quickly. I have some ideas for fiction stories I'd like to write some day, and so sometimes I take more time in my 750words entry and do a bit of world building or character development, or I'll just write down some of the difficulties I'm facing in proceeding with a story idea, and that can help. Sometimes I'll google writing exercises and find one that looks interesting and do that for the day's entry.
I hesitate to prescribe speed-writing to everyone. Similarly, I am leery of such a teleological view of the evolution of a writer's "10,000 hours," i.e., the claim that all writers mature into speed writers after a certain amount of practice. Some certainly do. Others seem not to, and I do not think less of them for it.
The thing is, different writers have different modes of writing. Some are wholly capable of producing, in spans of 15 to 20 minutes, perfectly serviceable content on any topic imaginable. Others pore over every word, agonizing for possibly days on end. Nabokov, for instance, fell into that latter category; he was notoriously slow and picky about his construction, and his daily bursts sometimes yielded a sentence or two at most. Yet I doubt there's a credible critic around who would assail the beauty of Nabokov's results, or claim that he wanted for practice.
As a bit of a speed writer myself (it takes me ~12 minutes to produce 800 words of thought-flow and about 30 minutes to produce a proper 500-600 word blogpost) the main advantage of speed writing I see is just vomiting out content onto the page. It produces a sort of flow that people find easy to read and I don't get stuck in the details too quickly.
Then, after the speed writing is done, if the result is to be published, I usually spend another 30 minutes poring over every word and polishing it up.
The result is something people find reasonably pleasurable to read and I don't agonize over for hours wasting time.
I'm in the same camp, more or less. I can speed write well. Sometimes even very well. At the same time, I'm under no illusion that I'm churning out Shakespeare when I speed write. And I think it's important to keep that in mind, so that I later go back and place almost as much emphasis on the editing as I did on the initial "burst."
Also, I find myself doing a lot of in-situ editing, as the article suggests. But rarely have I found that it's fully sufficient for work I really care about. And therein lies the rub: for 99% of my daily writing, the burst method works near-flawlessly. But for anything that I want to stand the test of time, a.k.a. publishable fiction or academic work, I will give the revision its fair course (and then some).
I still have pages of fiction at home that have more red than black on them (I really like editing by hand when I want something to read really well). Unfortunately the red is very discouraging and that novel will likely never make it past the first two chapters.
When I was in high school, I spent a summer interning for a TV writer. It was laborious and menial work. Essentially, I would take his heavily redlined and annotated scripts, type up the revised versions, then drive them back to his house. Then I'd repeat this exercise the next day. At the time, I remember thinking what a chore it was, and wondering -- sometimes aloud -- why he didn't just save different versions in a folder on his computer, skipping the intermediate step -- me -- entirely.
At the end of the internship, he asked me what I thought of the script. And I found myself able to speak with candor, precision, and something approaching intimacy about the way it had evolved over the months I had seen it. At that point I realized that he had basically Miyagi-ed me. Wax on, wax off. Paint the fence. Etc. It was a humbling, but (in retrospect) cool experience.
I think you've hit on the key point when talking about writing. You have to do what works for your style, and for the way your own brain works. Everybody else's statements about what they do are interesting, but in the end the only way to get good at something is to do it. With writing, you have to find your own voice, and methods that work for you, and not worry about whether your approach matches anyone else.
I worked with Matthew Parris briefly when he was the parliamentary sketch writer for The Times in 1995 on a student placement.
He knocked out his daily sketch in a very short space of time (15 mins?), having spent little more than 30 minutes in the chamber.
It was incredibly impressive, and would have seemed very casual were his focus while working on it not so intense. At one point he said words to the effect of "I might seem very rude in the next few minutes, but I must concentrate very severely on this".
The best tip (which I hadn't heard before) - do your planning, then throw it away (or hide it from view). If you look at the plan while you are writing, you will try to correct the plan, and the context switching will slow you down.
If the plan is really high level, or embedded (i.e. topic intros), maybe that's different.
While I see the value of that advice (longer flow periods), for academic or technical writing it is often impossible. It might work for fiction or punditry, but detailed analysis requires frequently looking to citations and notes.
This does not work very well for me; if anything, I like to have an outline and miscellaneous file open. In fact, I meant to write a short post with screenshots of my current workspace embedded, but by accident I went away an hour ago and am back with a much larger post discussing many aspects of the article in question that just so happens to have some screenshots of the way I've been working embedded, along with explanations. Sorry! http://jseliger.com/2011/08/11/how-to-be-a-faster-writer-don...
Write. A lot. In my case that means spending years chattering online on various discussion boards & blogs about whatever interests me. Use argumentative realms & subjects to hone the art of clear concise replies. This forces attentive writing in a forum where perfection isn't required (so what if you screw something up, it's just a blog post) but close thereto helps (kudos for a clear & helpful explanation, or delivery of a devastating retort, is satisfying & encouraging).
To wit: Gladwell's 10,000 hours. Wanna write fast - well? Then write fast - a lot.
BTW: Stephen King's "On Writing" is marvelous. Most of it is interesting autobiography, but the slim chapter on "toolbox" is worth more than the book's price.
Yep. It's the story of the teacher who divided his class into two groups: One would be graded on how many pots they crafted and the other on the quality of a single pot over the course. The students from the first group also had the finest pots.
For those who missed Dave Winer's API designers should be writers[1]; a helpful tip for individuals not in the writing field - say it directly; and edit later.
It's interesting that sometimes you can mentally prep to get into a long multi-hour session of code writing. But in reality I never really do that. It's always burst-pause-evaluate. The tiny iterations stacked up on top of each other could be called "flow" or "in the zone".
Doing more of what you want to be good at has never been a bad idea. My wife, who trained as an actor, has always coveted the idea of being on a soap opera. Not that they are high quality gigs, but the actors are the work horses of the acting industry. You can spend hours a day acting, more then any other job in the industry.
As someone who writes endless reports about the flaws of other peoples' security systems I find it quite easy to write in certain styles, but quite hard in others. I have standard terms that just drop out of my head onto the page for common vulnerabilities as I often find it quicker to do a mental paste rather than open a document, copy and paste to another one. Do any of the programmers or designers on HN do this?
My latest project - freeblogging.me - forces you to free write for 15 minutes. I find it genuinely helps my productivity if I free write non-stop for 15 minutes at the start of each day.
1. Write a first draft.
2. Remove as much filler and redundancy as possible.
3. Fix syntax to match reduced content.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until content is 100% informative.
As a writer and programmer, my goal is to produce content that is both elaborate and efficient. Speed writing can help me with the first step, but without the editing I feel like I'm reading rambling.
750 words is really fantastic if you want to practice writing every day, especially if you want to practice writing quickly. The site keeps a live word count and pushes you to write 750 words (roughly three pages) every day by tracking your streaks and awarding badges for hitting certain milestones. On top of that, the site tracks how many interruptions you have while writing your 750 words and how long it takes you each day to write.
I had a 149 day streak broken when I lost track of time and forgot to write until after midnight one day, but I'm back up to a new 40 day streak. I was shocked to learn that I'm usually able to write 750 words in under 15 minutes, and on some days I like to push myself to try to write as quickly as possible (I've gotten as low as 8 minutes one time). Of course, writing quickly sometimes means writing somewhat lower quality, so I don't always "race the clock".
If you have any interest in improving your writing skills, I can't recommend 750words.com enough. I started less than a year ago, and I've written a total of 185,022 words that I probably never would have written otherwise! Of course, by writing so quickly I've spent only 56 hours writing on the site, so I have a long way to go before I reach the 10,000 hour mark.