Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

Broad strokes to micro strokes
Attach your lightning rod
Focus

First, you’ll pull out the Preview you created in the last chapter. You’ll look at your idea’s shape. Then you’ll stretch that shape out across the grid.

And then you’ll zoom in to each block of the grid, and plan what goes there.

In simpler terms (and without the metaphor), you’re going to create a very rough sketch of what goes on every page of your writing. Not the detail of those pages, but the plan for those pages.

I call this the Focus Plan.

And with it, you’ll race through your writing.

So how does it work? It’s pretty simple, really.

Start with the broad strokes. First, take your Preview, and determine roughly where each element will go in the final project. Then, zoom in on the detail, and elaborate each point, and sketch out your Plan. And then, finally, magnify it right down to the page level, and sprinkle your ideas onto each page.

Let’s use this book as an example, since you’ve got it in your hands.

My Preview for this book was a one-page overview that basically outlined the FAST System. I wanted to show “how to write anything with lightning speed” by breaking down the FAST System into its component parts.

The first thing I did was decide on the end result. It would be a book, it would be 192 pages long, with 18 ten-page chapters.

Then I went to the micro level. I broke each chapter into ten segments. They’re the little bold headings you see. And then (and this is the real power of this system), I listed two to five things I’d cover in each section.

I mapped out the broad strokes by putting the idea’s major movements (in my case, the six sections) into their own defined space. And then I zoomed in to break it down even further.

The whole thing took about six hours, over two days. When it was done, I had a sharply focused Plan for writing this book.

Which enabled me to write it FAST.