Write Faster⁠↗

If you write quickly, and don’t worry much about writing well, the quality of your writing will improve. That’s probably the best general writing advice I can give you: write as fast as possible. Go for at least 500 words per hour. Just hit the fucking keyboard.

When we start reflecting at length on what kind of story we should tell, or what kind of writer we should be, we become lost in the sea of data our senses provide us, and lose the brio of playfulness. It’s like how when you think about how you’re walking, you start walking stupid. You’ve just got to trust that you know what you’re doing: that, as a sense-making creature, you will largely make sense.

However, there’s one way of defeating the inner censor that’s reliable. Just outrun it. If you’re writing 500 words in an hour, there’s just no time for paralyzing cogitation. I wrote this in about 25 minutes, and then I revised it in another 5 minutes. If I’d done it a little faster it probably would’ve been a little better. I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t know you. You make me afraid. But I drowned out the sound of my fear with the sound of my keyboard, and that got me, at the very least, to this last sentence.