Today we are fortunate enough to have a guest post from Desiree Villena. Hope you all enjoy these useful tips and tricks to maximize your writing output!
5 Tricks to Write More Every Writing Session
Is there anything more daunting than sitting down at your laptop to write, weighed down by the knowledge that you must churn out a certain number of words? Concrete word count goals may be a cornerstone of writerly productivity, but there’s no denying that striving to hit them is the bane of almost every writer’s existence.
Yet in my experience, the only way to escape the pressure of writing hundreds (or even thousands!) of words per session — without simply giving up — is to embrace the task. The more I’ve pushed myself to increase my output, the less stress I’ve felt over my word count, because now I tend to exceed my goals far more often than not.
I’d like to share some of my best tips with you in this post, with the hope that the next time you find yourself staring desolately at the only sentence you’ve written today, you’ll try something new before succumbing to writer’s block! Without further ado, here they are: five tried-and-true tricks to help you write more during your writing sessions.
1. Font hacks
We’ll start with a simple-but-elegant favorite of mine: font hacks. You may have heard of the Comic Sans Hack, the infuriatingly effective writing technique that shook the Twittersphere last fall. But I’ve found that the effect isn’t limited to Comic Sans — switching to any unusual font while writing removes a significant mental block, or at least it does for me.
There are many theories as to why “font hacking” works so well, several of which are explored through case studies in the article linked above. But its author, Kaila Hale-Stern, cuts right to the heart of it: “If Comic Sans does work for me, is there really some inherent psychological magic in the font, or will it be a sort of placebo effect? The honest truth is that I don’t care, if I can banish this particular block.”
I’d similarly argue that there’s no wrong way to get your writing done, even if it is in a 24-point font that might seem better suited to a first-grade spelling worksheet or a children’s book. My personal favorites are Arial (which is comfortingly informal compared to Times New Roman), American Typewriter, and Courier New. I tend to shy away from script fonts that make my writing more difficult to read, but for writers who fret over phrasing, that may be a plus. Go with whatever works for you!
One caveat: the obvious danger with this trick is becoming so enthralled with switching between fonts that you spend more time on that than actually writing. So if you do try font hacking, hold yourself to a hard limit of 1-2 changes per session.
2. Self-editing limits
Speaking of fretting over phrasing, I used to be the guiltiest person I knew when it came to the cardinal sin of drafting: editing as you write. I’ve realized over the years that I can’t completely curb my editing instincts while writing, nor do I really want to — it’s ultimately better for my process to edit a bit as I go, rather than leaving my work unexamined for long stretches.
The key words here are “a bit.” If I allowed myself to edit to my perfectionist heart’s desire, I’d only spend about 5% of each writing session actually writing and the other 95% tweaking said writing. Needless to say, this is not conducive to getting more writing done each session, so I try to strike a balance: I allow myself a quick scan-and-correct roughly every 250 words, then force myself to keep going. And about every 1,000 words, I go back and look at all that I’ve written thus far that session to make sure it flows.
Perhaps it’s controversial to suggest any amount of editing while writing, but I just think it’s unrealistic to ask most writers not to self-edit while writing at all! The important thing, again, is to figure out the iteration of this tip that works for you.
If you genuinely feel no qualms about writing in multi-thousand-word stretches and only editing once your session is complete, more power to you, and I am jealous. But if you’re like me and have to restrain your inner editor at all times, have firm editing limits in place before your next writing session — otherwise you’ll keep agonizing over adjectives for hours when you should be meaningfully progressing your work.
3. Ruthless site-blocking
I’m humble enough to admit that some days, I have the self-control of a three-year-old. (And other days it’s more like a five-year-old, but I digress.) When I find myself spiraling into endless Twitter refreshes and YouTube rabbit holes, I know what I have to do: block distracting sites on all devices for the remainder of my writing session, sometimes even for the rest of the day.
Writers who have never site-blocked before may be skeptical that this can make a real difference, or even reluctant to shut out the Internet, given that they might need it “for research.” To which I say: try it for a day and see what happens. Even if you’re not quite the procrastination pundit I am, you’re probably wasting hours of valuable momentum without even meaning to! You’ll be amazed how much more you can write in the total absence of virtual distraction.
For context, on a good day, I can write around 500 words per hour. On a bad day, pre-blocking years, I might have squandered an entire planned writing session of 3-4 hours. That’s a whole short story or essay lost to the sands of social media! It is no exaggeration to say that blocking distracting sites has profoundly affected my perspective and work ethic when it comes to writing.
And for those looking for a specific app, I recommend Freedom. It’s user-friendly, fairly inexpensive, and most importantly, you can put it in Locked mode to prevent yourself from flip-flopping when your willpower weakens.
4. Buddy-writing in real time
Another tactic I’ve found incredibly helpful is to conduct each writing session in the company of someone who is also writing, or at least working on a serious project of their own. The social distancing necessities of our current era make this a slight challenge, but honestly, co-writing with a friend over video chat is just as good as IRL working — if not better in some ways, as you can’t take long restaurant lunches, or start drinking together in the early afternoon.
What you want to avoid is a writing buddy who will theoretically keep you accountable, but with whom you never actually write. Yes, writing asynchronously and sending pieces back and forth for feedback canwork, but not quite as well as writing together. It’s the immediate presence of another person that compels you to buckle down rather than prevaricating because you know there’s no one around to judge you.
If you don’t currently have a project underway and you want to take this trick to the next level, you could even try working on a shared project with your writing buddy! You might write a dual-perspective piece, or simply outline something together and divvy up the parts so you can still work simultaneously (which, again, is crucial for this approach). When I did this with a friend, we both wrote more efficiently knowing that the other person was counting on us, even in a low-stakes capacity — plus it’s a fun way to shake up your usual writing routine.
5. Do whatever else you need to do
On that note, my final tip rounds back on simple-yet-elegant territory: if you want to write more during your writing sessions, the sessions themselves have to be at least somewhat tolerable! I know I’ve just advocated for site-blocking and Comic Sans, both of which might sound like torture to certain writers, but you don’t actually haveto use them if they don’t work for you.
By far the most important thing is that your writing sessions not feel like a dreaded chore, or at least that most of your sessions don’t. There will always be off days, but generally looking forward to the act of writing will provide the intrinsic motivation you need to achieve prolificacy every session!
To that end, and to quote the inimitable meme, do what you need to do to cope. If you find yourself losing interest in a certain section or scene of your writing and it’s putting you in a rut, I give you permission to skip to another part. If you’re just sick of everything about your book and don’t want to write a single word of it right now, you can still work on something else useful — for example, use your next session to draft a query letter so you can find a literary agent, or try a writing prompt to re-inspire you!
Again, the important thing here is to maintain a positive attitude and just keep writing. The more frequently you write, the more well-oiled this whole process will become — and soon you won’t even be worrying about word counts in your sessions, unless it’s because your fingers are cramping from writing too much. Best of luck!
Desiree Villena is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing authors with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. In her spare time, Desiree enjoys reading contemporary fiction, writing short stories, and giving (mostly) solicited advice to fellow writers. Needless to say, she’s a big fan of all these writing hacks, and typically uses them to write at least an hour each day!
