If you’ve been hanging around the internet marketing world for a long time, you’ve come across people selling speedy-typing based writing systems. They often make fantastic claims like Write your instruction book in 24 hours or less. Wow, that’s the name of my book. I am sorry. Actually, the big difference is that they claim their system works no matter what kind of book you’re writing. Therefore, the titles are usually along the lines of Write Any Book in 24 Hours or Less.
But what is speed typing and where does it come from? What are your advantages and disadvantages?
Speed writing started from a journalistic stunt. Journalists write short pieces that follow a very specific template or pattern. They need to write quickly and produce a large amount of writing in a very short period of time. There’s no room for writer’s block. Speed writing is a technique that focuses on those topics.
I apologize to my speed typing competitors, but here’s a ten second quick course on speed typing. Start by writing three words that describe your article. Two of them must be descriptive. For example, for this article you might have written “good bad write speed”. That there are four words, I know. This is its title and theme. Now, as fast as you can, start typing. don’t edit. Don’t correct mistakes. don’t stop. Just write. In five minutes, you will have written a page or two. Write as much as you can on that subject until the five minutes are up. Then it stops. That’s fast typing. The number of words in the sentence will vary from three to five. And the time will vary from two minutes to fifteen minutes. But you’re always typing as fast as you can and you don’t edit, even misspellings are left.
Give it a try. If you occasionally get writer’s block when trying to write your how-to book, you’ll find it a very useful tool. It’s a great way to start your writing day and get over writer’s block.
That is probably the biggest advantage of Speed Writing. It will help you overcome writer’s block, which is really just the fear of starting to write. Starting the day with a writing exercise gets the artisan juices flowing. The writing itself doesn’t matter, so whether it’s good or bad doesn’t matter. The point is to just start writing.
The second advantage that Speed Writing has is that it helps us focus on a good habit for your writing. When writing a how-to book, it’s good practice to focus only on the writing initially. Just write the words on the paper. The next day, before you start writing, reread what you wrote the day before. At that point, you can edit the spelling, grammar, and rough edges. The result is that you can finish much faster since you won’t be tempted to overload your writing.
However, speed typing has a number of disadvantages when writing an instruction book. Instruction books must have a very strong structure. And writing any long paper requires that you pre-structure it to be successful. Unfortunately, fast typing relies on typing without a net. The structure is not part of the technique. That causes several major disadvantages when writing how-to books and other long-form writing.
Because speed writing is a technique that focuses on writing without thinking or structuring, it can result in going off into unfamiliar parts. When writing a how-to book, you can’t afford to write for the sake of writing. Everything on the page should be focused on furthering the purpose of the book. That means fast typing will often produce pages and pages of writing that are unsuitable and unusable when writing an instruction book.
That also means that structural editing is required for a how-to book written in fast writing. Structural editing is the most expensive editing you can do, as the editor must rewrite entire sections of your book to improve comprehension and/or style. The cost of structural editing is often three times that of a simple stylistic or copy editing.
Finally, because speed typing is unstructured, it doesn’t really help you write. Yes, it is focused on producing fast. Yes, it helps to focus your writing on the topic represented by the three word phrase. However, paragraph by paragraph it does not help you to know what you want to say for each paragraph, on each page and in each chapter.
