This is one question that I get all the time, especially when I start talking about how productive I can get. What’s really going on here, as any productive author will tell you, is that I’m getting into a flow state where I can write for a long period of time and just pour my words onto the page without having to screech to a halt and think about it.

In my opinion, it’s really what writers ought to be trying to train themselves to do. So here are some details, at least in my case.

I’ve written before that I get up early to write before I have to get off to my regular work. I’m up by 5am Monday-Friday and writing as soon as my fingers hit the keyboard. Now I find it pretty simple because I have already heavily outlined the story and I know what I’ll be writing, but within a couple of minutes of sitting down, I’m in the flow and writing strong. It’s how I get 5k+ words done in about 3.5 hours.

I find that once I’m in it, it’s actually difficult to get out of it. If I get up to get a drink or use the bathroom, my mind keeps writing. It’s not just thinking about the story, I’m actually pumping out prose in my head whether I’m sitting at the keyboard or not. I have to purposely put it on pause until I’m back at the keyboard or I’m going to forget what I’ve come up with. So long as I’m not gone for more than a couple of minutes, I can just turn it back on and get right back to work.

I’ve talked to other authors who do this and it seems to be prevalent of those with a high word output. It’s how I get an average of 2000 words an hour. I will pause every 15 minutes, usually when I hit some multiple of 500 words and record my progress, mostly as a means of letting my brain catch its breath, but otherwise, it is writing and my fingers are only recording the output. Luckily, I am a very fast typist.

I’ve also gotten better over the years at putting down good words the first time through. You’ll see amateurs saying that their first drafts are complete garbage and while I agree that mine used to be, once upon a time, it is rare today that I have to go through and do major rewrites in revision because I knew the story up front and I’m good at telling the story in a coherent way. Most recently, I’ve taken to cutting out repetitive words, both in recognizing where there is a problem and in changing the monotonous word choices as I’m going so that I don’t have to pick all of them out in an editing pass. My routine constantly changes as I come up with new ways to improve the flow. I don’t think I’ve written two books in exactly the same way in the past five years. It’s a constant state of improvement and  increased productivity. Where, three years ago, I needed 6-8 weeks to write a book and a year ago, it took me 20 writing days to hit 100k words, now I can regularly pump out 120-130k words in the same span. It’s purely a matter of practice and repetition and that takes time.

Unfortunately, most people just aren’t patient these days. They want immediate results and that never happens. People don’t go out to play baseball and immediately become professional players. Nothing worthwhile works that way. Yet I see so many who don’t even want to try to write unless they are guaranteed up front that they’ll become rich. These are not writers. These are conniving opportunists.  You have to write because you love to write, not because you’re looking for a paycheck. That’s a sure way to disappointment. It’s why I try to help people by showing them the actual reality, not the fantasy that they have in their heads.

So get out there and write something. Write it for the love of writing it. Challenge yourself constantly. Learn how stories are told and learn how to tell them better. There’s a steep learning curve and, like it or not, it takes years. Your first book will be crap. Your  first half-dozen books will be too. Heck, you probably won’t even finish the first dozen times you try. You need to persevere and eventually, if you try hard enough and care enough, you’ll get somewhere. You might not become a bestselling author, virtually no one does, but so long as  you keep working hard, you might come up with something to be proud of.

Nothing else really matters but that.