How to Write Faster

The secret is not to try to be perfect. If you try to be perfect, you procrastinate, you go over and over what you wrote, you make no forward motion. Trying to be perfect doesn't produce masterpieces, only agony and slow writing.

I'm not writing to be remembered fifty years from now,, I'm writing to entertain myself. You have to work with the engine you were given. I get up at 4:30 and exercise for thirty minutes. By 6:00 AM., I'm at my desk. I reread the previous one to four chapters and make pencil edits to get back into my characters' heads. I write on an IBM Selectric because of dyslexia. I try to write a chapter a day in two five-page slugs.

Everything I write is carefully plotted out. For a screenplay, I write a forty page treatment. For a book, I write a seventy-page synopsis. All the hard plotting and thinking comes first. Some writers say their characters ran away with the story. That's the result of an undisciplined process.

If you're not getting anywhere, it's probably because you are writing something emotionally dishonest.

I write seven days a week. I don't have to write to pay my bills. I like the regularity. My wife-we've been married thirty eight years-she can't quite see it. She thinks it's a little compulsive.

Never write for money. You're going to be underpaid at the beginning of your career. When you're old and senile; they'll pay you half a million for a script.

From ESQUIRE February 2003 How to Write Faster By Stephen J Cannell, creator of 40 TV shows (The Rockford Files, The A-Team, The Commish) and author of 350 movie scripts and eleven novels. (His seventh, The Viking Funeral, is in stores now.)