I’ve mentioned Rachel Aaron‘s 2K to 10K method on the blog before, but the method truthfully deserves its own post. You can read about Rachel HERE, but like she says the internet mostly knows her for writing fast. Her book, 2K to 10K, has changed the way some writers write. Of course, for a person who is interested in writing and habits, I want to take a look a little more in-depth at the process, and perhaps more specifically, how I’ve used it. So here’s how you write faster with the 2K to 10K method.
The 3 Components of the Process
Rachel touts her success in evolving her writing process to the fact she took three things and optimized them for her. Those three things were: Knowledge, Time, and Enthusiasm. She presents them as a triangle with each of these concepts as a point. Each of them is capable of changing your writing; however, all of them together can make you, in her words, “a word machine”.
Write From 2K to 10K with Knowledge
As Rachel said, this particular thought process is head-slappingly obvious: know what you’re going to write before you write it. However, many of us think on the macro-level when we’re considering this advice. We have synopsis and character profiles, but we don’t consider from day to day what we’re going to write about. Rachel, in her quest to improve her writing days from their 2K base, she realized she needed to get down on the micro-level and deal with the work of the present day. She took her writing notebook and did a quick (5 minutes or more) sketch of what she would be writing that day. It brought her the first win of her system when she was able to unstick a stuck scene with just using that time to get it back on track.
Understanding Your Time
You might remember I talked about turning yourself into your personal lab rat? (Don’t remember? Check out 4 Steps to Killing It Writing.) In that article, I brought up Rachel and her choice to look after herself as an example. Here is where she did the work to find out what she did best.
I have a question: Do you know your own process? As Rachel points out in her book, she didn’t know her own process prior to starting to experiment with it. So first, she had to get some baseline data on what her word counts were before she could begin to tweak this properly. This is where a spreadsheet comes in handy, though just some jotted notes in your writing notebook could serve the same purpose. You do need to know a few simple things: Where, When, How Long, and How Much, if you want to recreate Rachel’s experiment on yourself.
Write Faster with Enthusiasm
I love the term “candy bar scenes”. You can call them whatever you want, but for this part, we are talking about the scenes that get you fired up to write. Rachel made a simple discovery as she tracked herself; days when she really wanted to write a particular scene went even faster than her now fast word counts.
So she did two things. First, she began using her Knowledge time (the five minutes with her writing journal) to get herself excited about what she was going to write. Second, she axed scenes she couldn’t get excited about. Those two things together helped to skyrocket her the rest of the way to having 10K days on a regular basis.
All together, those three things helped her to get to 10K a day on a consistent basis. So consistent she wrote an almost 75K novel in 12 days after spending three days prepping. She credits her system with the win, which is quite a win.
Here’s How I Write Faster with the 2K to 10K Method
I’ve used Rachel’s process several different times over the years, but I never seem to be able to quite get the Time section to work for me. I’m terrible at remembering to keep track of myself, which is a failing on my part. However, the other two axes, I’ve used with effectiveness whenever I’m falling behind on a project. My largest take-away from the book was that one’s writing process didn’t need to be haphazard. The myth of the muse pervades in spite of knowledge to the contrary. I’ve always sort of thought that creativity came and went rather like a capricious cat, it would not come when called but only when it desired something. 2K to 10K was one of the first books I read which challenged that erroneous assumption for me. I look forward to using her techniques more in the future.
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