Happy Wednesday, my friends! Patricia here. I hope you’re having a great week. Thank you for spending some of it with us. It’s truly my pleasure to welcome K.D. Richards back to our Chicks on the Case community. K.D. is an award-winning, best-selling author of romantic suspense and thrillers. Her stories have a lot of attitude and atmosphere that pull you right into the pages. I’m thrilled to have her visit with us. K.D., welcome to Chicks on the Case! You have the mic.

Writing Fast: Don’t Let the Blank Page Scare You

I cannot cook. This malady largely stems from the fact that I do not like to cook and have put only as much effort into learning this skill as is required to keep myself and my two young’uns alive. My cooking style would most aptly be described as ‘how fast can I cook this meal’? (Insert my mom yelling “you can’t cook everything on high.”) “Fast” is a technique that doesn’t work well when cooking but it has worked for me with respect to writing.

One question I always get whenever other authors learn that I write full time for Harlequin and that I produce two to three books per year, is “How do you write that fast?” I will admit that spending sixteen years as an attorney prior to turning to writing full-time has helped. But there are tricks and tips that you can use to increase your daily word count.

Skip the blank white page

I write my first draft in Word, but my first draft isn’t really my first draft. I write what I like to call my zero-eth draft in Notes (often on my phone while I’m waiting for one or the other kiddo to get out of sports practice). This helps me unlock the words in a whole host of ways. For one, it eliminates that stark white page staring back at me. But also, I write reminders to myself in Notes. My grocery list is there. There are no squiggly lines telling me I’ve misspelled a word, and I can’t obsess over whether a line should be in italics or small caps. Notes is not intimidating. I don’t have to stress over what I write in Notes because what I write there no one is going to see it but me. Find your Notes, the stripped down software program or maybe even go old school and pen and paper it. However you choose to do it, the goal is to make the start of your writing piece as easygoing as you can. An unstressed writer is always a better writer.

So, there may be pantsers ready to argue with me on this but wait, hear me out. I’m not necessarily arguing for outlining (although I am an outliner). What I mean is think about what you want to write before you write it. What does the scene look like? Visualize it. Visualize it like a television show or movie. Where are the characters? What’s in the room with them? How do they move? What do they say? Can they see out a window? What’s the weather outside? Before I sit down to write a scene, I’ve usually run it through in my head several times, refining and changing until I get it to a place that feels good. By the time I start typing, I know what is going on the page well and I can type without a lot of thinking. Decoupling the thinking about the scene and the writing about the scene allows more words to come faster.

Don’t edit as you go

Another controversial piece of advice but drafting fast is a forward looking adventure. If you keep going back to what you have written to make changes, you aren’t moving toward the finish line. When you realize something must change in the pages you’ve already written, make a note and keep moving. The first page of my first draft (not the zero-eth draft) is usually a to-do list of changes that I need to make. By the time I get to the end of the sixty-thousand-word book, I often realize that a change that I thought was necessary, really isn’t all that necessary. And even if I do decide to make the change, I can do so in an orderly way, making sure I change any other areas of the manuscript that need to change to remain consistent.

Question: So, those are my tips for writing fast. What tricks do you use to get more words on the page faster?

About K.D. Richards

Two-time Daphne du Maurier Award finalist and bestselling author, K.D. Richards writes pulse pounding romantic suspense and thrillers. K.D. was born and raised in the Maryland suburbs just outside of Washington, D.C. A writer since a young age, after college, she earned a law degree and worked as an attorney and legal instructor for fifteen years in D.C., but never stopped writing fiction. She currently lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons. She can be reached at www.kdrichardsbooks.com. COLD CASE COVER-UP, book 3 in her Guardians of Justice Harlequin Intrigue series, is available now.

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