10 Tips to Increase your Writing Speed

A longer, honest look at what actually makes writers faster.

Writing is a craft, but writing fast is more of a habit stack. The fastest writers aren't necessarily the most talented — they've just removed the friction the rest of us live with. These ten tips cover the friction that matters: mindset, planning, environment, tools and process.

1. Treat writing like a daily skill, not an occasional one

Every writer has a process, and every writer who writes fast has done it often enough that the process is automatic. The biggest predictor of writing speed isn't typing speed or vocabulary — it's how recently you last wrote. A writer who writes a little every day finds the first sentence faster, the second one faster still, and rarely has to "warm up" at all.

You don't need to write a great deal each day. A single paragraph counts. The point is the streak, not the volume.

2. Plan before you write

The romantic idea of writing — sitting down and letting the words flow — produces some great work and a great deal of staring at the screen. Almost every fast writer plans first, whether that's a one-line outline or a detailed structure. An outline isn't a constraint, it's a runway: once you know roughly where the piece is going, the prose is much easier to produce.

For most articles, two minutes of bullet points are enough. Headlines for each section. One sentence on the argument. Then write.

3. Capture ideas as they happen

Writing speed isn't only about how fast you type while seated. It's also about how much thinking you've already done before you sit down. Carry a notebook or use a notes app on your phone, and capture ideas, opening lines, arguments and interesting facts as you come across them.

When you sit down to write, you're not starting from zero — you're assembling notes you already made. That's much faster than thinking and writing simultaneously, which is what most slow writers are actually doing.

4. Read more, talk more, write better

Writing speed has a hidden floor: vocabulary and pattern recognition. If you don't have the right word ready when you need it, you stop and search for it. Reading widely — especially in the genre you write — trains the part of your brain that supplies the next word.

The same is true of conversation. Writers who talk regularly about what they're working on hit fewer dead ends in the prose, because they've already articulated the idea in some form.

5. Understand — and respect — writer's block

Writer's block is real, but it's not mystical. Most of it falls into three categories:

• Unclear thinking. You don't actually know what you want to say yet. Fix: stop writing, go for a walk, plan again.
• Wrong start. You're trying to write the introduction first. Fix: start somewhere else in the piece. Introductions are usually easier to write last.
• Performance anxiety. You're judging the prose as you write it. Fix: write deliberately bad first drafts. Editing is a different job.

The pattern that connects them: the block is a signal, not an enemy. Find out what it's telling you.

6. Stay focused — structurally, not just by willpower

Willpower is a finite resource. The faster writers don't have more of it; they've arranged their environment so they need less of it. Specifically:

• A dedicated writing spot — the same desk, ideally not where you also reply to emails.
• Phone in another room. Not face-down, not on silent — in another room.
• One browser tab. Maybe two, if you genuinely need a reference open.
• Full-screen the writing tool so the dock and notifications disappear.

This isn't about being a monk. It's about making the path of least resistance lead to writing, not to Twitter.

7. Use writing tools that help, sparingly

There is no shortage of writing software, but most of it adds friction rather than removing it. The tools that actually help are the ones that get out of the way:

• A clean editor (iA Writer, Bear, Obsidian, or even plain markdown in any text editor).
• Grammar checkers (Grammarly, LanguageTool) — used during the editing pass only, never the drafting pass.
• A focus app (Freedom, Cold Turkey) that blocks distractions during writing sessions if willpower isn't enough.

Skip the AI ghostwriters. They produce passable prose at the cost of your own voice, and they don't make you faster — they make you slower in the long run, because the editing pass becomes harder.

8. Write on a schedule, not when inspired

Waiting for inspiration is a slow writer's habit. Fast writers have a slot in the day for writing and they show up to it whether they feel like it or not. Morning is best for most people — the brain is fresh, the day hasn't intruded yet, and you've used no decision-making capacity.

The slot doesn't have to be long. Thirty minutes a day, every weekday, will produce more finished writing in a year than three hours every other weekend.

9. Consider drafting longhand

Counter-intuitively, drafting by hand can make you faster overall. Handwriting is slower per word, but it forces you to commit to sentences instead of endlessly tweaking them, and the slight friction of pen on paper turns out to keep many writers more focused than a screen does.

You don't have to write the whole piece longhand. Just the difficult opening or a problematic section. Then transcribe it — transcription is fast, and you can edit lightly as you go. Many writers find this combination produces faster, cleaner drafts than typing alone.

10. Enjoy the work

Writing speed is downstream of whether you actually want to be writing. Writers who resent the process are slower than writers who enjoy it — not because the resentful ones lack skill, but because they keep stalling, getting up to make coffee, checking the phone, finding small reasons not to write. The fastest writers have made some peace with the work itself.

If you don't enjoy your current writing project, that's a useful signal too. Sometimes the answer is a different project, not a faster process.

Conclusion

None of these tips are magic, and none of them work in isolation. But picked up steadily — one habit at a time, over a few months — they add up to a meaningfully faster writer. The underlying skill, raw typing speed, is worth measuring too. Take our 5-minute typing test and see where you stand.

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