The joy of speedwriting

You can write very fast quality material. This is something not very hard to learn and very useful for most occupations. I will explain some of the skills involved.

Speedwriting is doable

We have been discussing speedreading on multiple occasions, but speedwriting is something I do not have a course for. It is doable, but the practice is different based on your goals.

People were not used to writing fast until the 19th century. When we consider the works of Alexandre Dumas or Carl Marx we notice the huge volume of the written text. It is not “junk”, but some of the most profound writing of its time. Some of these books changed the world.

Yet in 21st century the skills seams to disappear. Instead, we see kings and queens of social media with their short and typically meaningless blogs. Can we revive the golden era of philosophical and fiction writers? I think we can.

My current status

Personally I can write about 10,000 words of quality text in a day, but not every day. Not sure how this qualifies. The writing could be fiction, journalism, marketing communication or patent description. I am not as influenced by the kind of writing as I am by other factors.

Ten years ago this was not the case. Everything was a struggle. My pace was 1500 words per day and I used to get very tired afterward. I used to stop during the writing and think about what I want to write about next. This still happens to me, but now it happens in larger volumes of work, for example between sections of a course.

This is different from regular speedwriting advice

There are many books on speedwriting, only I think they are doing the job in the wrong way. I do not focus on getting the best working environment or practicing to improve the technique. I focus on generating the best possible understanding during the research stage. My research includes metaphors and content organization, and I pretty much remember everything needed up to keywords from the quotations I want to use. When I write, I simply revisit the research materials in my memory and pour them down.

Fast quality writing comes from immersion and flow

We still notice many examples of very prolific writers, only now some of these writers are generating code. There are very different figures, but some people say that 90% of the working code is written by 4% of the programmers. The main characteristic of these prolific writers is the flow state.

When we are in the flow state, we are very effective. To get into the flow state we should be dealing with a challenge comparable to our skill level, and be very engaged with the activity. When we discuss writing, this usually means total immersion in the content. If I am interrupted during writing, it takes me some time to get back to the subjects of interest.

Context and organization

To write fast the subject we are writing about should be very clear in our heads. This allows the writing to bypass the stage of deliberation and allows us to focus on organization and formulation.

The organization part is also not very hard for the people who organize the information during preliminary reading and research stages. I write almost exclusively about subjects, which I research for a while. So I am intimately aware of the nuances. By using diaries, mindmaps, and some other simple research tools, all the required information is preprocessed and memorized well before the period of writing.

For the writing to be more engaging, it needs to be supplemented by metaphors. If we keep using visual association techniques during the research stages, the metaphors are already preprocessed and ready to be presented.

Typing

I am using “blind” typing at relatively slow speeds. My focus should be on the screen and on the “inner vision”, not on the keyboard. Just like most musicians get the sounds through their “inner ear” slightly before we hear these sounds from their instruments, I get the relevant visualizations before they are translated into words.

This stuff works in every language I know fluently, with a caveat. In Russian, I can write fast only in handwriting. I do not have enough computer type to type automatically, and this is a huge limitation. Some people prefer handwriting in their main language, but I am not such a person.

I know that some people can do speedwriting on their mobile devices, but I prefer computers with large screens and external mechanical keyboards. For me personally, the large screen is necessary as I want to see the context of the text with multiple paragraphs.

Subvocalization

While we speedread, we often try to overcome the subvocalization in order to read faster. When I speedwrite, I subvocalize the text. My creativity and critical thinking can be very fast, as they can be visual. To get the text right with minimal corrections I need to use constant subvocalizaton stream.

As I said, there are some visualizations involved too. Typically I add one image to the text after completing the text to remind me my own visualizations. Quite often these visualizations are formulated as discrete triplets of words, often according to PAO memorization. Then these triplets are seamlessly integrated into the flow of the subvocalized text.

Somehow, subvocalization improves the coordination of eyes and hands, allowing better processing.

Creativity

Another thing that improves writing is creativity. To get better texts we should always consider the subject from multiple angles at the same time. This is relatively easy if we have a bank of the question, perspective, and methods that we can apply to each idea. For example, if we have two ideas we can introduce “genetic” manipulations, allowing for “children” ideas to have various properties of their parents.

Writing documents is easy once we have enough experience. When writing a patent I think “how else one can use the exemplary embodiment?”. In a technical document, the focus is on APIs between blocks and the functional specification of each block. In the blog posts, the driving force is an association between similar ideas. Fiction is usually driven by very well defined “world” and “characters”.

The idea of writing block for me is a state in which the main ideas are not well-defined. In this situation, I do not focus on the document, but try to develop the main ideas.

Editing

To be honest I do not edit my text. Occasionally I ask somebody else to edit my texts for me. Editing can be very effort-intensive and the end result rarely justifies the work involved.

To eliminate my own editing I use Grammarly and Readability scores. I monitor the length of the sentence. Often I rewrite sentences on the fly if they become too long. It is better to take a moment and find the right words, synonyms, and metaphors during writing than agonize over each word during editing. The main idea can wait. Alternatively, I can write placeholders for the words I need in capital letters and replace only them later.

Why is it joyful?

Proper preparation and technique eliminate all the tedious aspects. I do not know where my texts will take me in the mindmaps of the ideas I have. It is similar to driving fast on a good network of roads. All the efforts invested in building and keeping up the roads and the vehicle tend to pay off.

The work is creative and funny in part due to the associations involved. I simply enjoy revisiting them, with a small measure of nostalgia, creativity, and freedom. I feel that I am doing something very complex in a very effective way, to the point that the action itself is smooth and elegant.