Blogocentric Formulations

Writing Sprint

"30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  | May 13

Prompt ▼

Writing Sprint! Set a timer for 10 minutes and write without stopping about whatever comes to your mind. I challenge you to deny your urge to edit yourself as you write. If you must, you’re allowed to edit, but only after you finish your ten minute sprint. Ready? Set. GO!

I despise this prompt. I despise the concept of writing sprints in general. I know some people swear by them and, to be fair, they're a great way to get words on the page. The problem is, they're usually not very good words. I have a lot of friends who swear by this method, and proudly proclaim that they cranked out five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand words in a day doing writing sprints where they just sat down, hammered the words out, and didn't look back. Editing was an afterthought, structure was an afterthought, taking the time to think deliberately about what you want to write is an afterthought. And do you know what my response is to people when they most often say they wrote something using this technique? "Yeah, I can tell."

There's a certain frenzy to the words that are churned out in a writing sprint, not to mention the exponential increases in typos, poor grammar, and other technical issues like repeated words and phrases, and saying the same thing multiple different times within the body of the work. And lest you think that I'm just sitting here judging, I've tried this technique as well. And I'm doing it to the best of my ability for this entry. It just never feels right for me. It gives me too much of a mess, and I don't want to have to go back and clean up that kind of a mess later. For some people, this technique works. But they have to be super diligent about going back and fixing everything that's wrong with it.

I have a few friends who write screenplays like this. They can finish a draft of a 100 to 120-page screenplay (roughly 20,000 words) in a couple of days. They then go back and spend weeks reworking all the stuff that was a mess in that draft, and probably throw out 90% of their words before they have something that they would consider fit for reading. The problem I often see is that someone either doesn't take the time to throw out that 90% and hone and refine what's left... or they look at the whole lot of writing they just threw out and get discouraged. I'm definitely in that latter camp, where I question why I even wrote something if I'm going to throw out 90% of it.

When it comes to my own writing, I would much rather take the time to craft the words that I want to use. That doesn't mean I never go back and revise or edit, but when I go back to do those things, I want to do know that I'm looking at some semblance of the final product. I want to truly refine and edit, not throw out and redo. I know everyone's mileage will vary, but I find the gamification of writing with these "sprints" to be a really counterproductive way to write because it prioritizes the quantity of words you're generating over the quality of words you're crafting. For me, there has to be an element of art to it, an element of style where I can take the satisfaction in a clever turn of phrase, and know that the draft I'm writing won't be riddled with so many mistakes that I don't even want to look at it when I go back to revise.

And now that my time is almost up, I feel that I should point out that this blog post is exactly why I dislike writing sprints. Did I write a whole bunch of words and get them done real fast? Sure. This blog post is probably about twice as many words as one of my average 30DBC entries, and it only took me ten minutes instead of my usual twenty or thirty minutes. But did I gain anything writing twice the words in half the time? Not really. I gained a bloated blog post that, if I reread it (and I probably won't) will be meandering and have a lot of superfluous words and will, if I'm lucky, have only the merest hint of what I was hoping to achieve. It will be the kind of thing I'd look at and say, "You know, if I threw out 90% of what I wrote and started over, there might be a kernel of something interesting in there." But then I'd have to question whether it's even worth going back and exploring the topic all over again or if I should just chalk this up to a failed experiment and move on with my other more appealing writing endeavors.

If writing sprints work for you, that's great. More power to you. But they just don't work for me, and I really dislike the idea of being pressured into doing them, or into comparing the writing output they generate against what I'd be able to achieve otherwise. At the end of the day, nobody's going to read one of my books or one of my screenplays and go, "Yeah, but how quickly were you able to write it?" It doesn't matter how fast you were able to write, only that what you wrote has resonance with your audience. If you can rush resonance, more power to you. I just can't write like that.