Top Highlights

• Specifically, I ask that my scenes do three things: Advance the story Reveal new information Pull the reader forward
• book is my number one priority. After I've got my start point and my end point, I fill in whatever twists/scenes/climaxes I've already thought up. I don't worry about how these scenes link together yet, or even if the events are in the right order. I’m just getting down the general thrust of things. This is also the point where I determine if this ...
• I ended up creating a metric, a triangle with three core requirements: Knowledge, Time, and Enthusiasm. Any one of these can noticeably boost your daily output, but all three together can turn you into a word machine.
• Then, instead of trying to write the scene in the novel as I had been, I started scribbling a very short, truncated version of the scene on paper. I didn't describe anything, I didn't do transitions or dialog. I wasn't writing, I was simply noting down what I would write when the time came.
• If you want to write faster, the first step is to know what you're writing before you write it. I'm not even talking about macro plot stuff— I mean working out the back and forth exchanges of an argument between characters, blocking out fights, jotting down fast descriptions.