Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

Daily pages
How to reach lightning speed
The payoff

Here’s a “secret” every professional writer knows.

You can’t wait for the Muse to strike. You can’t wait for inspiration.

Some days will be better than others. And, yes, inspiration is important. But you won’t get anything on the page if you’re not accustomed to writing.

So every day (including weekends and holidays), you must write something. Anything.

Call it your Daily Pages.

They can be pages from your book, or pages from a diary. They can be emails. Or web pages. Or newsletters.

And it’s perfectly okay if they’re the most awful, rancid, worthless piles of horse-pucky the world has ever known. Doesn’t matter. As long as you write every single day.

Set a target for yourself. Start with one or two pages. But work your way up to ten or more. Aim to write fast!

And if you’re working on a project (in the Apply phase or parts of the Strengthen phase), go ahead and count your pages.

Writers write.

Good writers write often.

I know you’ve heard all this stuff before. I’d heard it, too! But I never took it to heart. In fact, even when I was teaching this stuff, I didn’t do it myself.

I do now. And it makes all the difference in the world.

It’s one thing to know the FAST System. But until you write, it’s all in your head. And that’s not writing. That’s thinking.

Write every single day.

As simple as it seems, if you only followed one piece of advice from this whole book, this is the tip I’d suggest.