You vs. Empty Page: How to write productively

Writing is easy!

When I teach writing classes I usually start with a simple exercise: Take five minutes and just write down everything that comes to your mind. Assume nobody will ever read it, not even yourself. Eliminate all distractions and just put onto the page whatever crosses your mind. Don’t think. Don’t correct. Just write!

The result might look like this:

Now I am supposed to write down everything that comes to my mind, not even correcting the typos. What should I actually write about. I don’t really know. Well I am in a room, I type on a computer. That was a comma splice, but I am not supposed to go back. Well. Nobody will read it anyway so it hardly matters what I write…

One purpose of this exercise is to discover how fast you can write. Most people who had some exposure to writing and got used to the mechanics will write 300 to 400 words in those five minutes. Let’s just stick with the lower end: 300 words in five minutes means 3,600 words per hour, or 32,400 in a nine-hour working day. At this rate you can write a paperback novel in three days, you could finish writing Lord of the Rings in two weeks, and writing the entirety of the Harry Potter Saga would take you just a little over a month.

The message: You write incredibly fast. So, what’s taking you so long?

Writing is hard!

You have this great idea, vivid scenes play out in your mind, characters talk in distinctive voices, revealing intricate inner lives, and you feel a burning need to share it all with others, giving them those images, those same strong emotions. Your only problem is that you have to do it all by writing. This is crazy: You basically want to control your readers’ minds, not with some futuristic gadget or a magic spell, but simply by making marks on a piece of paper or a computer screen.

Writing is art because words carry more than their literal meaning. Good writing can create a deep connection between you and the reader that allows to communicate complex experiences: the feeling of leaving home, the trepidation before a battle, the immense relief when a crisis is overcome. If you are here you have felt these moments.

But what marks should you make on your page to activate this connection to your reader? What letters will activate it? Given the enormity of this challenge it is no wonder that your writing is slow.

Plotter vs. Pantser: Diagnosing what’s holding you back.

To discover how to write productively let’s first discuss two ways in which we can approach writing: The plotter is a writer who makes meticulous plans for everything they are going to write. The pantser is a writer who goes with the flow making decisions by the ‘seat of their pants.’ Of course we now have to ask which strategy is better?

A stereotypical plotter is Brandon Sanderson; he writes long books with convoluted plotlines that come together in dramatic showdowns. He has excellent plot twists and fantastic pacing. Compare this to Stephen King, a pantser. His plots are much simpler: Weird girl gets bullied in school, sending her onto a killing spree. You wouldn’t read that for the plot, but you might have read it to feel the deep psychological connection, experience the awakening of her powers, and understand why in the end she even turns them against those who tried to help her.

If you are a plotter, the empty page can be your Kryptonite. You make endless plans that never take off. Sometimes you spend hours in front of a screen writing only a few sentences. And if you finally reach the climax of your story it can feel hollow, mechanical as if characters are just acting out a script.

If you are a pantser, the middle of your piece can be your Kryptonite. You find it easy to start, but as the excitement of the beginning wanes, your writing just peters out. You start to doubt if anybody would actually want to read all this text. When you start to make revisions, you find your text unsalvageable and end up rewriting entire chapters. Even if you eventually make it to the end it’s hard to bring the plot back together (I am looking at you J.R.R. Martin).

Finding the flow

The truth is you need to be both plotter and pantser, but not at the same time. The only way to get your pacing right and keep your readers turning pages is to plot a little. The only way to create believable characters and connect deeply to the reader is to pants a little.

If you actually did my exercise from the beginning you probably experienced the state known as ‘the Flow,’ the state where the conscious part of your brain is mostly off and you become completely absorbed in a task. Once we are in the flow words pour onto the page effortlessly, at their natural pace—300 words in five minutes! The flow can be a spiritual and highly addictive experience.

The single most important ingredient to productive writing is being able to find this flow and maintain it as long as possible. With some practice you can learn to switch the flow on whenever you need it. The first step toward this goal is to know what helps and hinders your flow:

• The right environment? Find it. Clean your desk. Go to a cafe. Close your door. Do whatever it takes.
• Annoying people? Shout at them till they leave you alone.
• Fixing that typo? You can always do it later. It’s more important to stay in the flow.
• Having spell check on? You don’t want that thing looking over your shoulder and disrupting your flow.
• Input? The brain has different modes for absorbing and producing information. After you absorb information, say from a TV, your phone, etc., it will be very difficult to get into the flow for about ten minutes.
• Plotting? Drifting into rational problem-solving will kill your writing flow.
• Tired? Tough luck. It will be hard to get into the flow. But there are many other things you can still do to make sure that when you are ready to write, everything else will be in place.

We could go on but I am sure you got the idea: Find out what helps you get into the flow and what disrupts it. Then do whatever it takes to maximize the time you spend in glorious writing flow.

Writing productively

A powerful way to increase your writing productivity is to think of writing as three separate tasks: Plotting, Drafting and Revising. The more you separate them, the more productive you will be:

You want to get this out of the way as much as possible before you even start writing. But you don’t need a keyboard for plotting, which means you can plot no matter where you are. Every free minute can be used for plotting.

What plotting needs is creativity, so know your brain: you are more creative just after waking up, you are more creative in lively environments, you are more creative when you are hungry, and most importantly you are more creative when you start to get bored. So these are good times to plot. Stuck in a boring lecture? Sitting around in an airline lounge? Waiting for an appointment? Perfect, leave your phone in your pocket, wait till you feel the boredom coming, then dive into your plot. As an author you can never truly be bored, since there is always the option to hang out with your characters and refine your plot.

There are also some tricks to make your plotting more effective, but this is a topic for a future article.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King calls this the closed-door phase of writing. This is the part where you want to get into the flow and pour words onto the page. If you did your homework, your plotting has advanced to the point where you know roughly what will happen in your story. Now it’s time to unleash your inner pantser. Find the time and space that helps you enter the flow then use it to maximal effect. Resist the temptation to revise, your flow time is too valuable to break it by drifting into revision.

The text you produce while in the flow will not always be great. Yes, some of it will have the intensity that opens up the deep connection to your reader, but it will still be riddled with typos, bumpy sentences, and awkward constructions. But if your plot was ready when you pantsed, your text should be easily revisable.

You still have to do all the revisions, but the good news is you can revise even when you are tired or a little distracted. This is King’s open-door phase of writing. All the time when you can’t go into the deep flow that allows you to fill empty pages with a flood of words is well spent on revision.

It is hard to revise directly after you wrote. You will still see what was on your mind, not what is on the page, so it is best to give the text some time to rest before you revise it properly.

While revising you will frequently experience micro-flows, short flow experiences that allow you to fix individual problems. Neuroscience research has shown that it is actually these micro-flows that train the brain to enter flow states more easily in the long run. These micro-flows also help you enter the deep writing flow. So when it is drafting time and you struggle to get into the flow, try revising the previous section you wrote, it will likely still be too fresh for a proper revision, but it will get you going.