How to Write Fast (While Writing Well)

Rating:
Summary: Useful tool
Review: Despite some drawbacks, "How to write fast while writing well" is a useful tool. I first read it at my leisure, making notes in the margins as I read. After a while, I forgot about the book until I was racing to meet my weekly deadline for one of the publications I write for and was stumped, unorganized and directionless. I took a quick look at the notes I had made in the margin of the text and found help. Particularly helpful was the advice on writing well via an outline. Not that I am a novice or never graduated from the high school/college requirements of using an outline to write, but actually using an outline for a feature article -- at least at times - does speed the writing process. Other chapters are also helpful.
Considering this, I am somewhat surprised at the lack of reviews for this book. No matter -- it is a useful tool that sits on my desk that I use --particularly-- in a pinch.

Rating:
Summary: Would Timing Your Writing Sessions Help?
Review: This paperback edition of a 1992 guide suggests that writing more quickly requires you to be organized, solve problems early on, and cultivate your creativity. In support of the laudable -- but somewhat impractical -- goal of writing everything quickly, the author provides examples throughout his book of well-known writers and their working styles. He suggests that you need to (and can) figure out exactly what you're going to write before you sit down to write, so that you won't have to revise or edit your own work (at all!). For writers like Fryxell, who must be firing on all cylinders at once, crossing that finish line can't happen quickly enough. Although the rest of us may aspire to achieve his level of productivity, we often have to just plod along instead. Still, implementing some of his suggestions, such as becoming more self-disciplined and avoiding time wasters like over-researching and endless interviewing, might speed up even the slowest (i.e., the most meticulous and perfectionistic) of writers. At the very least, it cannot hurt us to try to set and work toward our own such standards.