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Q1. How the #$%&@! do you write so fast?

Uhhh... good question?

Okay okay, I do actually have (some) answers to this. First, though, I have to drop a big, fat disclaimer that these are the things that work for me, and I am not all authors. Fun as that would be. My idea repository would be insane.

Jots down new book idea about an authorial hive-mind.

BUT ANYWAY. My short answer is: I wrote a ton, and then found the things that worked for me. This means that point #1 aside—I repeat—these strategies will not work for everyone. Even among writers who've found their peak productivity, I'm still fast. Don't kill yourself trying to be me. Please.

But without further ado, here are a handful of things I have identified with reasonable certainty as contributing factors to my writing speed:

1. Practice

This tends to be everyone's least favourite answer on this list, because there's no way around it.

I started my writing journey at a pretty normal speed. I finished one mid-length Fantasy novel a year for about six years, all of which added up to push me past a pretty significant milestone: one million words. If you haven't heard of it before, this is the writing equivalent of "ten thousand hours": the theoretical point at which you know what you're doing with a particular skill. It was the point at which I stopped thinking about how to construct a sentence, description, etc. because I already knew. I could shift my focus from "Does this paragraph sound like shit" to "Does this story structure make sense," and friends, that was a huge shift indeed.

It also (more than) doubled my writing speed. I have graphs, to nobody's surprise.

There are people who reach this point before 1M words, usually if they have a great deal of writing experience in other fields (read: life experience) already. I was not one of those, so I like to say I got to where I am by sheer force of wordcount. It's also worth mentioning that practice and writing speed are a feedback loop. I took six and a half years to hit 1M, three to hit 2M, and will break 3M in less than two. My average writing speed and short-term maximums are still increasing. You're seeing me a lot farther down this writing path than most Wattpad writers, then, so keep that in mind!

2. Hyperfocus

So how the hell did I spend six years (now many more) putting in that kind of wordcount on a singular hobby? Well, friends. This is where things get fun.

Imagine human brains as computers, born with a certain set of code. There's a lot of diversity across this code, but it by and large operates in the same general way for most people, because biology is cool like that.

Biology is also a troll who occasionally decides to spice things up a little. Every once in a while, it takes a piece of that code and rewrites it on completely different rules, leading to a brain that functions on a different variant of normal. In some instances, this can cause a lot of incompatibilities with standard codes. It can prove a poor fit for societal structures that weren't designed for it. But it may also come with perks: variant code can function better in certain situations than standard code, and can be effectively hacked by its owner in these instances.

I'm a variant code. Hi.

This is better known as neurodivergence or neurodiversity, and it is a glorious example of a double-edged sword. I could go on for hours about incompatibilities, but more applicable here is one of my custom perks: a fun little thing called special interests. I have two of them. One has been going strong since I was two years old. It is my current career. The other is writing.

Writing's special-interest status (absent any particular sensitivity to distraction) means I have a stupid amount of brainspace dedicated to it 24/7 with no extra effort required. I can write for hours, days, years, decades, without even thinking of losing interest. I can spend nine years on a single series. Store whole book plots, character charts, and boxes of fine details in my head. It's fun!