#fast first draft

I have a huge problem with turning off my inner editor while writing a first draft, which leads to painful, slow first drafts. While writing the opening scene for my new WIP, Marked by the Gods, I got frustrated at how slowly I was writing, despite knowing exactly what I wanted to happen.

So I tried changing my font color to white (the same color as my document background) and I could finally type nonstop, no editing! Bonus: I turn off spell check too because red squiggly lines make me want to stop & fix the typo.

It helps because you can’t edit what you can’t see. 

To demonstrate how much this helped me, here are the numbers for my opening scene (now I’m glad I keep a writing log lol):

Typing in black: 464 words in 60 minutes 

average of 80 words per 10 minutes

for you NaNo folks, this means I used to take ~3.5 hours to write 1,667 words.

Typing in white: 1021 words in 30 minutes 

average of 340 words per 10 minutes

NaNo folks: now I take ~50 minutes to write 1,667 words.

After I finish the scene, I change the font back to black, turn spell check back on and take like 5 minutes to fix any glaring typos and make notes of what I want to add or change in the next draft (but I don’t actually edit it). Something about having it already written prevents me from editing furiously, so this has been a life saver for me.