<story><title>How to be a faster writer</title><url>http://www.slate.com/id/2301243/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alanfalcon</author><text>This is the perfect place to mention one of my favorite websites: &lt;a href=&quot;http://750words.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://750words.com/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;750 words is really fantastic if you want to practice writing every day, especially if you want to practice writing quickly. The site keeps a live word count and pushes you to write 750 words (roughly three pages) every day by tracking your streaks and awarding badges for hitting certain milestones. On top of that, the site tracks how many interruptions you have while writing your 750 words and how long it takes you each day to write.&lt;p&gt;I had a 149 day streak broken when I lost track of time and forgot to write until after midnight one day, but I&apos;m back up to a new 40 day streak. I was shocked to learn that I&apos;m usually able to write 750 words in under 15 minutes, and on some days I like to push myself to try to write as quickly as possible (I&apos;ve gotten as low as 8 minutes one time). Of course, writing quickly sometimes means writing somewhat lower quality, so I don&apos;t always &quot;race the clock&quot;.&lt;p&gt;If you have any interest in improving your writing skills, I can&apos;t recommend 750words.com enough. I started less than a year ago, and I&apos;ve written a total of 185,022 words that I probably never would have written otherwise! Of course, by writing so quickly I&apos;ve spent only 56 hours writing on the site, so I have a long way to go before I reach the 10,000 hour mark.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to be a faster writer</title><url>http://www.slate.com/id/2301243/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jonnathanson</author><text>I hesitate to prescribe speed-writing to everyone. Similarly, I am leery of such a teleological view of the evolution of a writer&apos;s &quot;10,000 hours,&quot; i.e., the claim that &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; writers mature into speed writers after a certain amount of practice. Some certainly do. Others seem not to, and I do not think less of them for it.&lt;p&gt;The thing is, different writers have different modes of writing. Some are wholly capable of producing, in spans of 15 to 20 minutes, perfectly serviceable content on any topic imaginable. Others pore over every word, agonizing for possibly days on end. Nabokov, for instance, fell into that latter category; he was notoriously slow and picky about his construction, and his daily bursts sometimes yielded a sentence or two at most. Yet I doubt there&apos;s a credible critic around who would assail the beauty of Nabokov&apos;s results, or claim that he wanted for practice.</text></comment>