Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

FAST means Fast
The FAST system in the real world
The payoff

If there is one rule I don’t want you to break, however, it’s that FAST means fast. I didn’t just pull an arbitrary acronym out of thin air. I know everyone’s a little acronym-crazy these days. But FAST fits. It works beautifully.

Because the faster you write, the faster you’ll write.

The speed of your writing feeds on itself. And that goes both ways — fast or slow!

Have you ever sat down to write, looked at a blank page, and couldn’t come up with anything? You feel blocked. Your confidence goes straight down the tubes. And prying each word out is like wringing water from a potato with your bare hands.

It takes you half an hour to get three sentences you like. And because you re-read them constantly, it will take another half hour to get the next three, too.

Forget all that. Write fast. You can always change it later. You can always fix it later. You can always improve it later!

I don’t mean to sound like a broken record. But it’s not enough to just “get” this. You’ve got to feel it in your bones. It took me so long to grasp this, I want to force it to stick in your mind: You can always, always, always change it later!

Pour crap onto the page. Write fast!

To plug into what you’re really trying to say — to harness the power of that Idea Factory — you’ve got to open the doors. It’s always easier to fix it, than to put it on the page in the first place.

So, please. Go fast. Through every step of this process. Through the Focus phase, the Apply phase, the Strengthen phase, and even the Tweak phase. Go as fast as you can.

If you truly apply each phase — if you really put the effort into doing it — the speed will push you through.