Techniques for Speed Writing: Writing for Progress

writing for progress

You have learned that revising your work while you are still working on it is detrimental to your goals of enhancing your writing. But how can you proceed when you notice a change that must be made while editing? What do you do? How can you remember the issue at hand without jeopardizing your progress?

The strategy is called "As If" strategy. On a sheet of paper, you type down numerous notes regarding the editing process, including:

Examine the characteristics that distinguish alpine strawberries from their more common relatives.

Determine why you can only make strawberry tea with fresh strawberry tops or ones that have been completely dried up.

Adjust the chapter order such that the "how to" part appears first and the detailed examples appear later.

One difficulty that writers have is that as soon as they begin editing, even if it's only a minor alteration, they realize that a great deal more modifications need to be made, which, in turn, affects the amount of effort that you are currently exerting.

Have an editing page where you make a note of the modification that needs to be made, and then continue working as if the change has been made in order to maintain your momentum and stay on track with what you plan to achieve during this writing session. This will allow you to continue working as though the modification has been implemented!

Why is this strategy so effective? Because you are able to muffle the critical voice that keeps showing up in your mind and yelling, you are able to mute it "Hey! You! If you don't fix this, the remainder of your writing will be awful!"

However, if you are able to react with anything along the lines of "Don't worry, I've taken a note of it, and I'll fix it during the next edit, that would be excellent.

Your Internal Editor must be obedient, remain silent, and grant you permission to continue writing! You can then return to your work without more internal distractions! Do you not consider this to be nothing short of a miracle?

If you can learn to control and then muzzle your internal editor, and if you can learn to produce without judgment or concurrent editing, then your writing sessions will once again be enjoyable. You will remember why you used to enjoy writing so much in the past!

Don't forget this...

What you produce during a freewriting exercise, even if it is a supervised freewriting activity, will not be a polished piece of writing. Before you can "publish" your work in whatever form you choose, it must first be edited, polished, then edited again.

Remember that a piece of paper that is entirely blank cannot be changed...

Because to these techniques, you will no longer have to stare at a blank page of paper.