Do you write better with more or less time?

I’m short of time to write this morning. Whilst normally I would have a good 90 minutes to write, today I have about 45 minutes at a stretch.

That, and the cat is needlessly meowing too. He’ll be at my elbow soon, nudging me to move and give him his breakfast, or try to wedge himself between me and the laptop keyboard.

So, it got me thinking this morning, do I write better with more or less time? To what extent does the pressure of a shorter deadline than usual improve or reduce the quality of my writing?

Certainly, if I look back over the years, overall, I write better with more time. But that’s not the whole story. Quite often, some of the best bits were written in a small amount of time; that’s to say they didn’t need too much rejigging or rewording. It just stayed as it was.

But do I need a decent writing stretch buffered around this to produce these little juicy bits, or is it possible to crank out something of a higher quality in a shorter, more isolated period of time?

I wonder that this morning as I urge my fingers to type faster to keep up with my brain. I often find working out what I need to write is the hardest bit. This morning the idea came out naturally, so we’re all good. I find it helps to have an ongoing list of thoughts and ideas of things to write about. I can consult it if I’m a bit stumped for ideas. Usually one jumps out the page at me and I can go ahead and start writing.

Another factor is how much focus the writing needs. I can write on general terms much faster than specifics. If I’m working on a very specific argument that requires very specific fact snippets, then it takes much longer. If it’s more general ramblings, like this article, it’s much much quicker. If I’m short for time, the writing will more likely end up as a bulleted list. This is not always a bad thing, especially if you’re editing later anyway. Quite often writers will start out with a bulleted draft to begin with, making sure all the major points and ideas have been met.

I also have to consider whether I am interested in what I’m writing and will I feel accomplished afterwards? If the subject is interesting and the ideas are flowing, then it’s much easier to write faster and in a shorter time. After a long and dreary paragraph that’s difficult to write, it can seem tiring to keep on going afterwards. My writing speed would definitely suffer after that one and I suspect this would be reflected in the quality. Probably best to take a break.

And that brings us onto the time of day. If it’s early morning, I can write better and faster than later in the day. If it’s post lunch, about 2pm, it will probably be the most painful thing in the world. Best go for a siesta instead.

But of course, these don’t answer my original question; do I write better if I have less time? Up until now that I’ve been going with the assumption that if I write faster I write better. This would assume that if I have less time, I would write faster, and therefore better?

Well, yes and no, and it all comes down to stress level. If it is a self-imposed deadline of time, kind of like this morning, then I’m going to write better than if someone slammed a deadline on my desk and said ‘this needs to be done yesterday’! I mean I don’t have to publish a blog this morning so the pressure on me is low, I just want to publish this morning. And that makes a big difference. If I want to write and I enjoy what I’m writing then I will write better and I will write faster. But if I’m stressed in less time, the writing will likely suffer.

In fact it’s more likely that my editing will suffer; things will be jumbled up, paragraphs may not flow properly and there will be word and spelling errors. It might not be the writing per se that’s bad, it’s just the lack of time spent editing afterwards.

That also makes me wonder if the key to writing better, quicker is to (and here come the bullet points):

• write with less errors; the obvious ones like spelling and punctuation to reduce the editing time OR
• write with more errors so the structure is there but you spend more time focused on editing…?

I’m not sure of the answer to that one. I do find it easier to write when I have flow of thought. Whilst I don’t want to spend too much time on the editing as I go to prevent this flow of thought, I can’t seem to bring myself to write so fast that punctuation, spelling and words become a complete mess. I feel like I’m doing future me a favour by maintaining a minimum standard. I don’t usually find that the minor editing modifications as I go make much of a difference on the flow of the writing.

What does take the time, and breaks my flow, is when I stop after a paragraph, then go back and check what I’ve written to make sure it makes sense, before then diving back in. That, I find, is incredibly inefficient. I only have to go back and read something and I’ve wasted precious time trying to get back into the chain of thought of what I was trying to say.

Sometimes I get natural concentration breaks, where I’ll go back and read over the last bit to make sure it makes sense, but it still takes me a minute to dive in where I left off. Therefore if I want to write more efficiently, I need to limit this task switching. Most of the time, when I’m in the flow, nothing would annoy me more than task switching, but when I’m trying to write something more challenging, it almost becomes a procrastination tool, and I’m constantly switching between trying to write and trying to edit. And that my friends is a recipe for unfruitful writing!

So now I want to conclude, as one does at the end! Does one write better with less time? I would argue that yes I can write better with less time but there are a few things that need to be in place for this to be the case. I guess the trick is learning to optimise these to optimise writing efficiency.

And that’s why I started this blog; to learn to write better and to learn to write faster!