Unstoppable Writing: 3 Easy Hacks to Unleash Your Creative Writing Flow
Step-by-step tutorial with screenshots
Do you want to increase your writing speed? Then one easy way is to unleash your creative writing flow.
I have written 500+ articles on my French productivity blog since 2007. And over the years, I’ve been searching for a solution to this problem.
Here are three easy hacks that helped me tremendously on this quest.
Separating content generation from editing time
If you want to increase your writing speed, there’s a crucial rule well-known among writers. You must separate content generation from editing time. Write down that first draft, then edit it ruthlessly. But this is easier said than done, as the inner critic invites himself without asking for permission.
Many well-known writers have come to great lengths to numb this torturing voice, such as consuming alcohol, drugs, and various psychotics. This is more common than you might think. For example, Lewis Hyde notes in his essay “Alcohol and Poetry” that four of the six Americans who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature were alcoholics.
But today, I will help you unleash your creative writing flow while staying sober. It just involves a simple tool.
The tool that had the most impact on my writing speed
As I said, I’ve written 500+ articles on my French blog over at ceclair.fr. But for years, I’ve struggled to separate content generation from editing.
While generating content, I would constantly re-read what I have written from the beginning, then edit when I noticed a flaw, then come back to the end to generate more content, then re-read from the beginning, then edit more, …
Finishing my articles was taking me endless hours. I knew this was bad practice. And sometimes, I made a resolution to write without stopping. But I would fall back again and again into my old habits of editing myself while I was generating content.
Then I made a breakthrough while using a simple outlining tool.
Outlining tools are marvelous
The tool I’m talking about is Dynalist. And it makes outlining so simple! For example, here’s a screenshot of this article outline as I’m writing it :
As you can see, everything you write is a bullet point is this tool. And it makes it so convenient to write your main points and sub-sections of your thinking using this tool!
Dynalist is not the only tool that has this capability. In fact, it was inspired by Workflowy (paid option) if I’m not mistaken. Another tool that I’ve started to use is Logseq, which is open-source and free.
Here’s how the outline of this article looks like in Logseq as I’m writing this:
Also notice you can copy-paste images inside the text, how convenient!
So I would recommend you install one of these tools. Once you get it, you’ll be able to apply the three following hacks.
Collapsing titles
The first hack is simple, and you might have understood it from the screenshots I’ve given you above.
I already told you it is best to separate content generation from editing. But it’s very tempting to edit the last parts of the article you have written if you can see them. At least for me, it was impossible not to give in.
What I do now is to collapse the previous parts of the article I’ve already written. I only show the part that I’m currently writing.
This screenshot shows you what I mean:
Look how I’ve collapsed the three previous parts of the article in the red square. I told you it was simple!
Now a slightly more advanced technique is to focus the view on the part you are working on. This is simple in Logseq, you simply click on the bullet point. In Dynalist, you can do it by clicking on the magnifying glass icon.
When you do this, it will show you only this part of the article. Here’s the result:
As you can see, now we can only see the current part of the article we are working on.
Placeholders
Now let’s see the placeholder hack. That hack, I got it from legendary writer Neil Strauss who wrote many New York Times Best Seller books.
Now you know his name. But let’s say you write about Neil Strauss and you forgot his name. You would probably be tempted to google it right away. This is highly dangerous as it would probably ruin your creative writing flow. Instead, you can leave placeholders along your article, and fill them later.
The best way to do this is to leave a placeholder, then highlight it, as shown in the diagram below:
Now for anything that requires more research, you simply leave a placeholder and continue writing your article unstopped.
Indent to discard
Now let’s see the 3rd hack. I use this hack more in the editing phase of writing. But I sometimes also use it during content generation, as it helps put obstacles out of the way.
If you are like me, you must hesitate sometimes to cut different parts of your writing. Maybe you struggled to find the right formulation, and you don’t want to admit it needs to be discarded. Or you might think you can reuse it later, so you don’t want to delete it.
For me, this was a big struggle because many times I would not have the courage to edit my text boldly. Because of this, the quality of my articles suffered as some parts of my articles were too redundant, and some other parts were off-topic. What I do now is to put them out of my way by indenting them. My codename for these discarded parts is the word “bin” (obviously because of the allusion to a dust bin).
Here’s an example:
Have you seen how I’ve indented the text part that I want to cut from the article?
The next step is to collapse its content:
That way, I can ignore it while moving on to other parts of my writing. The advantage here is that I can still check it out later if I feel this part was helpful after all. In practice, it rarely happens.
In the end, doing this will leave you with several “bin” text snippets that you will have to discard when publishing the final version of your article. But I think it’s worth it, as it makes your articles more concise and to the point.
Takeaways
- Don’t mix content generation and editing time, or your inner critic might kill your inspiration.
- It’s difficult to get disciplined to do that, even the greatest writers struggle on this.
- However, you can create the right writing environment to do it with an outlining text editor like Dynalist or Logseq.
- In order to avoid the temptation of editing the parts that you’ve already written while generating content, collapse them or focus your editor on the current part you’re writing.
- You can also place placeholders along your text to set aside some points that require more research.
- If you’re not sure about removing a part of the text, place it in a subsection with the codename “bin” and collapse it right away.
As you can see, outlining tools like Dynalist, Logseq, and many others are now our best allies to unleash our creative writing flow.
These 3 hacks are very personal, I haven’t shared them with that many people. So I will appreciate your feedback in the comments.
You just read another exciting post from the Book Mechanic: the source for writers and creators who want to make more work that sells and sell more work they make.
If you’d like to read more stories just like this one tap here to visit
