Life is short. You’ll enjoy it more if you’re not stationed at a desk writing all the time. You’ll enjoy the hours you do spend writing if, at the end of them, you have a stack of pages to show for it. In order to do this you must write fast!
I didn’t always write fast. I used to delay writing through an elaborate ritual I called Summoning the Muse. This ritual entailed that I was at my desk, make that my sacred writing desk, at a certian time. A cup of coffee had to be near and at least two packs of cigarettes hands. It wasn’t until I quit smoking that the ritual really faltered and I couldn’t write a single word. It was a blessing however as I learned to write in whatever space I was at. Grabbing coffee at Borders? No problem – add pages to the novel! Got a break between meetings? Throw down a page of dialogue.
Writing fast is more than avoiding ritual, however. It’s also avoiding the awful second-guessing that causes us to revise a sentence 1,297 times before being satisfied with it. Seriously, the reader wants to be entertained. If the story is engaging, he/she won’t fret about your sentence. Your best bet is to put it on paper using a basic Subject – Verb and go on.
The bottom line for me was realizing that writing didn’t require hours of tormented thinking. Remember, if it’s fun to write it will probably be fun to read. If writing it was akin to chopping granite into pebbles, well, the reader’s going to take a pass. Simple as that.
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