Katerina Writes

In the last twenty days I learned something about writing, especially about novel writing. You have to write fast. Write the messiest prose. Do a lot of telling, and forget about showing or trying to find the right word. Get the skeleton of the scene written. Don’t worry about the dialogue tags. Write said and an adverb. Use the word felt, saw, looked. It will be bad. Really bad.

But I discovered it is the only way to keep moving. You outrun the critic, laughing in its face as it sneers at you for using felt for the hundredth time. 

Resist the urge to edit. Don’t revise, don’t hunt down the right word. If you need, do light research, enough to get you started. Don’t bog yourself down with research. 

Research is procrastination. It is the black hole you will get lost in and never surface from. Research is the voice of the critic who wants to pull you back from the momentum. Once you slip out of the momentum of writing you’re cooked. 

Twenty days ago I began writing and not caring about the prose. I had the idea, the scenes of the story arrived, and I just wrote. 

Now at twenty days I have passed the 45,000 word count. This is significant because it took me five months to get to that word count a while ago.

Just write fast and skip the lengthy research. Use words like felt, looked, saw, -ly words. Skip the thesaurus. 

Make it messy and sticky. 

The prose, the line edits and the research will come into play in the second and beyond drafts. I don’t believe there is any writer out there who wrote a perfect first draft. 

So write fast my friends.