Writing fast and writing well.

You've been dying to know, so I'll tell you how it's done.

I do not usually dole out writing advice, as this is a substack where I share my original fiction or updates about my fiction. However, I thought I would share a bit of my own writing process as a lot of my readers are also writers themselves. Feel free to ignore if it’s not relevant: I’ll be back with more fiction in the next post.

I write speculative fiction, mostly hovering around horror and sci-fi, but hopefully there’s something here that will help you get more out of your own writing. I’ve sold over 500 books in my 18 months as a published author, and I wanted to share my insights into how I can write so much, some of it not needing much of an edit.

Essential background information:

When I decided to start writing fiction properly ie running the risk of letting complete strangers read it and judge it, I had a six month old baby at home, and was the default caregiver for a 3 and 5 year old, too. My youngest is 2 and a half now, and she doesn’t like to nap like she did in infancy. I was already self-employed running a craft business at home, but the joy was wearing off, and it became very expensive to run with many external aggressors chopping its limbs off. That’s where I was at when I wrote my first book.

I wrote because it made me feel happy. I enjoyed putting words down, no matter whether I had 15 minutes to do it or an hour. That’s what I chose to do most evenings instead of watching a Netflix series for example. I wanted it.

Fiction is not something you can fast-track, or maximise earnings on in a matter of months. There are several books (and software) out there claiming to be able to make you more productive and more creative, but for the most part, you just need to write.

I also have ADHD and hyperphantasia. I will explain more on that later.

The less time you have, the more you want it.

Knowing that there wasn’t going to be a clear block of writing made me want it more, and then when I did have time at the computer, I’d smash it out. No checking phones, emails or social media. I was hyper-focused on the work.

I can work through noise. You might want to try and do the same, then you’ll be unstoppable, I swear.

I scribbled stories down in secondary school. Every single project was abandoned at some point. I wrote some fiction for my English GCSE, but I was a prolific reader and a wannabe actor more than anything. I did English Lang/Lit at A level, an English Literature BA and then a Popular Literatures MA before becoming an English teacher. That’s my background.

It was things like MSN messenger and teaching that got me typing at a million miles an hour. As for writing, I’ll show you what got me writing stories quickly and well:

Microfiction and flash fiction. Where good stories are made, or abandoned at low-cost.

You’ll come across a plethora of opinions on this form of writing. Many of them quite negative. What I will say about micro and flash is that they helped me become the writer I am today. If you’ve read any of my books, you’d see that this means they were incredibly useful.

Microfiction and flash fiction are where you tell a complete story with a very limited word count. It’s hard. A lot of it will be rubbish, but if you don’t practice or read any of it, you won’t get better. There have been times when I’ve written something and it’s just silly, or it’s a bit too vague. That doesn’t matter. It was practice.

Flash fiction was actually what helped me feel like writing was achievable. I read a few educational resources featuring examples of flash fiction and I was hooked. I knew that traditional fairy tales are flash fiction but I wanted to see some modern examples. I downloaded a PDF from the National Literacy Trust (no longer there I’m afraid) but most education resource sites for English teaching will have something.

At the bottom of this post, I’ll include some examples of flash fiction that I started out with, and some more recent pieces.

How flash fiction and micro fiction make you a more efficient writer.

‘Efficient’ can have terrible connotations, especially when it comes to fiction, but I’m not saying cut out anything that isn’t 100% functional. That would be bleak.

I wanted to focus on what Clifford Stumme said here about ‘crisp and direct’. This is something I had to learn to do. It’s so tempting to fall in love with your own pretty sentences and write swathes of purple prose, but if you want to get a story down, you need to stick to what’s important. It’s tempting to use as many big, obscure words as possible but for me as a reader, that just screams insecurity. It tells me you want everybody to know how clever you are. It’s distracting me from the story.

The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.- Ray Bradbury

Writers who use flash and micro as writing exercises get a lot of practice in. While I completely agree with Ray Bradbury’s advice on starting short, you can go shorter, especially those of us who are juggling a million other things while trying to write.

I got better at writing because I was writing as often as possible. I also decided to serialise a novel. We had a situation where I was reliably publishing 1 short story and 1 chapter of Oceanus every week for months! The time-pressure was something I found really useful. I know that’s not the case for everyone, but a bit of accountability can’t hurt.

Push yourself. Write stuff that is challenging.

Micro and flash are low-cost. You don’t have to tear something up that you spent weeks on. They’re a safe, controlled environment to experiment in, and you can draft them multiple times.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Duds count as much as hits.

Why are they useful? Why should you take the time to write such short pieces? The’re not going to become a profitable book!

They make you a better writer. That’s my experience.

Something people get horribly wrong with micro and flash fiction is what they think it’s for. I’ve read so many that are just a description. You’re going to find yourself in a situation where you have 50 words. Don’t waste them. The best microfiction gives you enough to go on, leaving you with vividly painted gaps for you to look at between the lines. It can have dialogue, misdirection, vivid imagery and twists bringing it to life.

Microfiction: Why it makes you a better writer.

Microfiction is the perfect opportunity to practice cutting out what’s not important. If the story still lands without certain words, shave them off. You need to tell the whole story, sometimes in as little as a few words. In this piece titled ‘Ten horror stories in under 300 words’ I was focusing on 2 sentence horror stories. They’re fun.

You should be having fun at least some of the time.

The Goodbye

Mourners threw flowers and some dirt onto the surface of the coffin as it was lowered into the hole. They couldn’t hear the screams or the knocking.

What’s happened here? Oh, this person has been buried alive. You can use your imagination for the rest. I didn’t waste time on similes and metaphors because I didn’t have the space. We didn’t need to hover around abstract descriptions or themes. We need to just tell the story, and leave the reader with something to chew on.

It’s a simple story: What’s happening? Something has to happen.

Down Boy

The dog jumped onto the bed and started licking my face. When I rolled over, I saw that my actual dog was whining and backing into a corner.

Again, I’m just telling you what happened. You as the reader can fill the rest in. People will complain that this is ‘lazy writing’ but it’s microfiction. That’s the whole point. Sure, if I’d written an entire novel that required the reader to do everything, they’d have a point. That is not the case here though.

Tip: Always let the reader imagine the monster, the battle, the room etc... As tempting as it is to describe everything blow by blow, the best descriptions are the ones that use only a few breadcrumbs, leaving the reader to imagine the rest. When I first drafted Oceanus, I’d fully described a monster attacking Anthony. It was boring. It didn’t require any input from the reader. When you leave out most of the details and focus on the primal imagery of teeth, or eyes, or claws for example, the reader’s imagination kicks in and that is far more effective than any monster you can describe. Look at Stephen King’s It, for example.

I was writing microfiction daily when I was starting out with my writing career (2024). I either used prompts from Miguel S. | The Fiction Dealer Microdosing or I made them up. Either way, if I just needed to untangle my mind or flex my writing muscles, this is where I came to.

It’s something you can do when you have a lot of time constraints, and you will still feel like you’ve achieved something.

Flash fiction

Another form that people can scoff at or struggle to get down. This is an entire story in under 1500 words. Again, it can be treated like a writing exercise where you learn to cut out what’s not important. You’re shaving the excess off. Beautifully written, long-winded sentences can be really lovely and add a vivid description but they’re really not necessary when you’re learning to write efficiently.

The fairy tale is an excellent example of flash fiction. It’s a whole story: A beginning, a middle and an end in fewer than 1500 words. I wrote a lot of flash fiction when I was starting out. It taught me so much about what’s important. In my fantasy story, The Court Of The Phoenix King, I immediately went to the action. I didn’t have space for long-winded, vivid descriptions you might find in a novel or a longer short story.

The wax seal confirmed it. The Phoenix King had summoned a bride.

You can create the same imagery with fewer words.

The courtiers bowed and curtsied at his feet, and melted away like snow from a pebble when he was done with them. A whip of his lace-cuffed sleeve sent the message, loud and clear. Moving on from him, they stopped to admire the droplets of dew on his bride's crown, catching the light of the hearth like diamonds.

I learned a lot from Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber is one of my favourite short story collections, and each description is so vivid without leaving you out of breath.

Writing serials: why this made me a more efficient writer.

Again, I wasn’t treating this as a ‘It’s just a little hobby, I don’t mind if no one’s reading it’. I was practising my skills, with the aim of putting together a novel at the end of it. Don’t be afraid of making some serious goals.

When your actions are intentional, you can write more efficiently.

How I write:

• I don’t sit at the computer if I don’t have a story ready to pop out. That’s not to say I don’t ever struggle to get words down when I do have a story. I simply mean that I don’t force myself to sit there and stare at a blank page.

• I don’t worry about how something sounds, or looks, or spells until I’m done. You can’t read over or edit something that doesn’t exist. Just get it down. Worry later.

• The story will often be fully brewed in my head first, with a few bits missing until I can work them out at the keyboard. Remember what I said about having hyperphantasia? The dialogue, the setting, the voice. It’s all in my head, and I transfer it to a document. It plays in my head like a film while I’m washing dishes, or walking, or doing something that is not writing.

• For most of my novels and short stories, I usually start with dialogue, and the rest of the story works around it. For me, the dialogue is the story. It brings the characters to life. I find that dialogue can often fall flat (or over explain everything) or sound incredibly unrealistic if it’s not thought through, so it gets more time to develop for me. Dialogue is something I revisit again, again and again with my imaginary machete.

• You don’t have to write every day. If you want to write every day, scribbling words down in a notebook absolutely counts.

• I like writing my novels as serials first. The serial was some gentle pressure that I thrived on. I needed to write in front of an audience. It didn’t matter what size. I needed the accountability. Knowing someone is waiting for chapter 5 makes chapter 5 happen.

How I read:

Being an active reader makes you a better writer, too.

Not only do you actively expand your vocabulary, but you are exposed to different ways of expressing things, describing things and so on.

Mention that to be a good writer, you have to read and watch the excuses roll in. “I don’t have time.” or “I need to work on my own writing.” Of course you do, but if you don’t know what good writing looks or feels like, you’re not exactly going to make a good job of interpreting or developing your own style. You can read instead of scrolling while you’re waiting for an appointment, while you’re on a lunch break, half an hour before bed… it’s achievable. Those nasty little things in our pockets zap so much of our time with the incessant notifications and dopamine hits. I have a setting on my phone that limits the amount of time I can spend on it. It helps so much.

When it comes to reading, I’m not just talking about physical books, either. Audiobooks open your mind, too. I’ve learned so much from listening to an audiobook.

All in all, you need to read widely. There’s no quicker way to go stale than:

• Only reading in your own genre. (How can you know how to make your fantasy more exciting if you’ve never read a thriller? How can you make your horror more unsettling if you don’t know what makes a good mystery? How can you write a great romantic sub-plot if you’ve never read one?) Great character inspiration, dialogue and settings can appear anywhere, but you won’t know that unless you explore. You also run the risk of mimicking, or writing only the genre’s expected NPCs (non player characters) and tropes.

• Focusing solely on your own writing, never reading anything else. I imagine this is like drinking your own urine: the nutritional value decreases each time it filters through you.

• Never letting anyone else read it. Welcome the feedback. Use it if it’s useful. Give it to someone you trust. Talk about your story to people. When you hear the ideas out loud, you might identify a couple of snags.

I have not done any creative writing courses. I do not pay anyone to teach me how to write. I read. I read a lot.

I read, and I pick out things I like. I think about how I’d like to explore those things in my own writing. This is nothing new. It’s not revolutionary. It also doesn’t need to be behind a paywall or inside an 80 page e-book. This is how writers have worked for centuries. Why would this have changed?

A huge mistake writers on Substack make is dedicating all of their time to writing, and taking no or little time to actually read some fiction. Some would rather read 10 ‘how to write’ books than a novel. And yet they want people to read their novels when and if the time ever comes.

There are enough authors on here sharing fiction for free, myself included. Read them. Study them. Think about why people are reading their fiction. “But they’re rubbish.” Are they? Why? Write it down. It’s all learning. You’ll learn just as much if not more from the bad ones. This is true for any job.

Actively reading books to become a better writer.

Think of the last book you really enjoyed. Why did you enjoy it? What was so good about it? Go back into the book and find examples of what really stood out to you. Was it the narrative structure? Was it the choice of narrator? Was it the way the characters interacted? Was it the shift in tenses? Did it trigger an emotional response? Was it the way the sentences flowed? These are all important, but there’s one thing I think about any time I read a book I’m enjoying:

What made you keep turning the page?

I studied English Literature at university, but you have to bear in mind that a lot of the texts were never bestsellers in their day or even after. Some were, but not because of the ‘junk food’ level of edibility. Take Angela Carter’s The Magic Toy Shop for example. That one was never a bestseller, but her work has stood the test of time and continues to be highly regarded. Good stories have soul. I was not taught how to write a ‘killer opening line’ or ‘how to keep the reader reading’. I was not taught how to write at all. I was taught to look for what makes a story good. You learn these things by some kind of osmosis as you read.

And for the love of God, don’t solely focus on modern trad pub for good story tips. You won’t find them. The ‘bestseller’ status is on the cover because on that one weekend of its launch, it sold a certain amount of copies (the required number can vary, too… I have access to Nielsen book data). Go back a couple of hundred years or look to indie authors. I read over 50 books last year, a quarter of them indie. Who do you think was writing the more compelling stories? You don’t have to go tribal, but I do advise that you keep your options open.

Overall thoughts on writing well.

Know what you want to convey. That’s all there is to it. If you’ve done the other things listed above, this becomes more achievable.

ADHD means I have several ideas buzzing around in my head at any one time. I’m easily distracted. I’m paralysed by these distractions sometimes, or crippled with anxiety. However, writing and ADHD go hand in hand for me. Microfiction was accessible. Flash fiction was accessible. They gave me the tools to be a faster writer each time I sat down to do a standard short story, or a novel. Once I started practising, I couldn’t stop. Writing something short and writing it well gives your brain that dopamine because the task is finished. You achieved so much in so little time. Then you want to do it again, and again… It feels better than folders full of half-finished novels, trust me.

Now I can focus on one piece of work for hours, never clicking away unless it’s to Google something (and I avoid that wherever I can). I can get a book written in 3 months. I have weeks where I am dedicated to learning everything there is to learn about a certain skill or topic. This energy I have channelled into my writing. But still, the only writing book I’ve ever read was Stephen King’s On Writing.

And more dramatically, I am powered by my mortality. Every time a great actor dies, I stop and think about what I would have liked to achieve at that age. That’s what drives me. If this was my last year on earth, would I be happy with the things I’ve achieved? I would like this to be a yes as often as possible.

What about spelling, grammar and punctuation?

I was an English teacher, but I can tell you that the more exposure you have, the more you understand the rules. I have a copy of The New Oxford Style Manual, because I don’t know everything! You need something like that nearby as it’s handy for making sure you’re using the right British or American grammar or spelling, quotation marks, semicolons etc. There’s always something new to learn. I make a note of words that are tricky to spell, and I have them nearby on a ‘cheat sheet’ for example.

Having a style manual handy helps you to self-edit your work, as does reading it out loud.

That’s all for now.

I’ve had to really think about how I write well. I hope that this has been helpful and that there is at least one thing you can take from it. Note: This is what I could think of today, but if you have any further questions, I’d be happy to address them in the comments.

Resources:

The First Piece Of Flash I Ever Shared

Another early piece.

Jenny Greenteeth

Writers to check out for flash and micro:

Erica Drayton

Miguel S. | The Fiction Dealer

Sean Thomas McDonnell