The last time I typed, which would have been last Friday, I was happy with my results. I averaged 36 words per minute and was able to get in right around 3,000 words in two hours.
I was thoroughly happy with the result.
Today I didn’t have any intention of typing much faster than that since I’ve never really been able to type much faster than that regularly anyway.
This morning, however, I was having a difficult time typing anything, at least when I started. It was early in the morning, and for whatever reason, I couldn’t bring my brain to start typing anything.
So, I took a slightly different approach. I decided to start planning out my story.
For those of you who know my writing style, I am an outliner. While I don’t have a huge outline that details every single detail in my books, I do like to start off knowing where my books are going.
So, I’ll generally map out 50 chapters, meaning I’ll give a sentence or two describing of the chapters, but no more. I’ll map out the important scenes, like the crisis and climax for each act, the inciting incidents, and maybe even some of the important plot points throughout the book.
Then, I’ll start fleshing things out.
When I write each chapter, I use 7 bullet points for each one:
Then I’ll put a sentence of a phrase next to each point so I know the major beats in each scene/chapter.
Once that bit is planned out, I start my writing sprints. (If you don’t know what writing sprints are, go here.)
This morning I was all ready to go. I had my outline for the chapter, and I even tried walking for a few minutes to get my blood going. It just wouldn’t come out.
So, I decided to take a step back and just look at where this chapter was going, and why I had decided to include it in the first place. When I figured out where I was going, I decided to map out the next four chapters. It took me about 15 minutes to get the 7 bullets for each chapter. Once I had them down, I tried to do my writing sprints again.
This time, I was able to crank out a bunch of words, and they were good ones too. Check out my handy little table:
My first attempt was 41 words per minute. I ended up having a killer run of writing sprints today, averaging over 43 words per minute. I couldn’t believe it, especially since I’ve never consistently been that fast. This was over 100 minutes too! Talk about awesome.
I’m not going to pretend that I expect my results to continue to climb, but I’m going to take 43 words per minute over 36 any day.
The only thing I can think of that improved my results was the fact that I knew exactly where I was going because I planned out the next four scenes. My brain was focused, and things just hummed.
You can bet that I’m going to do the same thing tomorrow and hope for even better results.
Here were my goals for the day:
Goals:
Words Typed: 3000
Time Typed: 100 Minutes
Average WPM: 36
Chapters Completed: 2
Results:
Words Typed: 4199
Time Typed: 98 minutes
Avg. WPM: 43
Chapters completed: 2
Thanks for following me along on this journey with me. If you want to check out my library of fiction books (a total of 1 …) go here. If you want to see my official author website, go here.
Don’t forget that I also have a free cheat sheet on writing killer chapters you can get if you go here!
If anything in this post helped or inspired you, or you just hated it, let me know in the comments.
Also, let me know if you want me to start putting snippets of my chapters on the blog so you can see what I’m writing about!
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