For much of my life I struggled to write stories faster than a sloth crossing a highway.
Then I discovered something that changed everything.
I went from writing 300 words an hour to consistently hitting 1500. I wrote half a novel the following week!
It felt amazing, and I immediately wondered if it would work for others as well as it did for me.
The answer is obviously yes, because I’m telling you about it in this email.
Before I get into it though, I want to preface this by saying that writing is a personal journey. Different writers have different styles and different approaches. Not every technique will work for all writers all of the time.
In fact, each writer has individual goals. I’m not particularly concerned with publication (funny, since I’m a publisher). You may write as a creative hobby, for stress relief, or any number of other reasons that don’t jive with my philosophy—and that’s okay! You should always write for yourself above all.
But if you dream of writing stories for a living, then you’re in the right place.
I emphasize getting to a professional level as fast as possible. Life is too short to tell bad stories slowly.
Most of us have tons of ideas begging to get written. We also have other responsibilities—jobs, families, sleeping. A hundred things take time out of our days, and there’s precious little left to tell stories.
If you want to write, you should want to write well.
And if you’re like me, you don’t want to waste months and years learning to do it. You want to be a prolific author, writing meaningful stories people love to read.
That is definitely not too much to ask, and it’s certainly doable.
Probably in less time than you think.
Let’s get into it.
The Distinction of Experience
A novice painter must learn the rules. Composition, color theory, the golden ratio.
Breaking those rules usually leads to a poor painting.
But, an expert painter can break those same rules and create a masterpiece.
This doesn’t seem fair on the surface, but the expert has paid their dues in the form of experience. They have a sense for what works—and what doesn’t—earned through repetition.
They mastered the fundamentals and went on to experiment, learning through trial and error. They couldn’t have done so without first understanding the rules.
Brandon Sanderson, one of the most prolific fantasy authors of our time, gave a great example of the Distinction of Experience in practice:
Imagine you invited two pianists on stage. One has been practicing for a year—not brand new but far from the best—and the other is famous for playing in concerts worldwide.
How long would it take for you to know which is which?
You’d know almost instantaneously, within seconds of the first notes played.
You don’t need to be a skilled piano player yourself to recognize the difference. Most people know without being able to articulate why.
It’s instinctive.
The same holds true for novelists. You’ll know if the author is an experienced storyteller within a few pages, often after only a couple paragraphs.
Most people hear this and feel like becoming a pro is that much more unattainable.
You shouldn’t.
It only means you need to acquire that experience as fast as possible.
Here’s how you do it.
The Danger of Aiming for Perfection
An excerpt from Atomic Habits by James Clear.
On the first day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film photography students into two groups.
Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.
Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.
At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.
Obviously, this can be applied to writing, too.
Time spent studying does not equal time spent writing. Reading how-to books has diminishing returns over the long term when compared to equivalent time hitting the keyboard.
If you show up everyday and write, you will get better.
But the real insight comes when we make a distinction between “writing” and “storytelling”. The former is spelling, grammar, and sentence flow. The latter is character, plot, and pacing.
The best way to improve writing is to write.
The best way to improve storytelling is to tell stories.
Here’s a question for you: as a new writer, which novel do you think will have the best storytelling…
Your first book, or your fifth?
For most of us it will be our fifth.
The more stories you tell, the better you will be at telling stories.
Clearly, the wisest path is to tell as many stories as you can, as fast as you are able.
But how do you do that if it take years and you struggle to finish even one draft?
How to Excel Quickly
Imagine for a moment your dream is to play volleyball.
You need to be able to serve. At the pro level, this means 50km/hour and up.
To do so, you wouldn’t spend years carefully planning how to take your first attempted serve. You would grab a ball, find a local court, and start practicing.
Many authors get caught in the trap of treating their first book like something they can study hard enough for to ace on the first try. Now, everyone can pull examples of someone who hit a home run on their first go, but if you want to plan on that you probably have better odds buying a lottery ticket.
To begin working on your pro volleyball serve, you should spend a little time preparing first. You want to know what size a regulation ball is, how to hold it, and whether you should focus on standing or jump serves. Learning the basic technique gives you something to work towards, and prevents you from developing bad habits you’ll have to work hard to break later.
Writing is the same.
Your goal isn’t to write a bestselling book on your first try.
Your goal is to rapidly increase your storytelling abilities so you can quickly write quality novels.
The techniques you want to focus on to get to the writing equivalent of a pro volleyball serve are:
- Ideating and planning
- Deep characters
- Story structure
These are the building blocks that, when learned, will free you to serve the ball again and again, confident you are making progress towards a professional level.
The repetition of serving the ball is the act of writing your draft.
Just like the photography students took 100 photos, each time you hit the ball, each time you put words onto the page, you are progressing.
Let me ask you this: Are you here because you want to write one book, or because you want to have written multiple books over the course of your life?
Do you want to constantly improve?
Of course you do. Who would want to write the best book they ever will on their first go?
That means your first book is ideally going to be the worst one you ever write.
You don’t want to peak right away. You want to get better, tell more engaging stories.
You want your 10th book to be better than the one you write now. Ideally, you will improve so much that the first book makes you cringe.
Think about that. Success means you won’t be able to look back on your early work without thinking, “Oh God, that’s so embarrassing!”
So why fuss over making it perfect if you plan on hating it in the future?
None of this means you shouldn’t care about the quality of the book. Writing 10 piles of garbage won’t help you either. It would be like serving the volleyball softly with the plan that eventually you’ll just happen to get to 50km/h.
It doesn’t work like that. You need to push yourself to improve.
That’s what my philosophy is about.
It’s streamlining the storytelling process to help you write the best book you can as fast as you can, so you can get the reps in and achieve a pro level while minimizing wasted time and agony.
I’ve experimented with many approaches and found ways to speed up every stage of the writing process. They worked for me and they’ve worked for other writers just like you.
One student came to me with little experience and nothing but an idea. She wrote 97,000 words in 24 days after adopting my philosophy and methods.
Another wrote an average of 550 words per hour when I met him. After working together? 885/hour. That means he writes his novels 63% faster now.
You can have these results too.
I show you how, step-by-step, in the New Novelist Accelerator.
To be clear, you can absolutely do this on your own too.
But if you want to skip the hundreds of hours I spent studying and experimenting…
Join me for a week-long intensive course that I guarantee will have you writing better books faster.
