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"Many writers will disagree with me that writing can be fast."
That line sits on the front page of romance author Lindsay Lake's Hurricane Method, right under the word Warning.
She is talking about writing a full novel in a matter of weeks, and she knows plenty of writers will hate the idea.
I'm on her side.
For a lot of genre fiction, a fast first draft is the reason the book gets finished at all, and you can see why once you look at what happens to a draft that is written slowly.
"This method is controversial. Many writers will disagree with me that writing can be fast. It will depend what your goals are. Writing a 'Harry Potter' novel, takes a lot longer than a 'romance' novel, just as an example (I write those in under 14 days)..."
I like that she says this out loud. A writer building a seven-book magic world with its own maps and history needs time.
A romance, a cosy mystery or a thriller lives on pace and feeling, and those books reward a writer who gets the whole story down while it is still hot.
When you write slowly, every session starts with rereading. You look at yesterday's pages, spot the clumsy sentences, and fix them before you go on.
That sounds sensible.
But every reread gives the critic in your head another chance to say the whole thing isn't good enough, and over six months that voice gets a lot of chances.
Writing fast takes care of that, because you are moving too quickly for the critic to keep up, and by the time it catches up, you have a finished story in front of you.
Write a novel over a year and you forget things.
A character's eye colour changes, a clue from chapter four never pays off, and the energy of the opening has faded by the middle.
When the whole draft takes a few weeks, you still remember the promise you made in chapter two by the time you reach chapter twenty, so the threads tie up far more naturally.
Genre readers notice this.
They want a story that keeps pulling them forward, and a draft written in one long rush of energy carries that pull onto the page.
Fast first drafts are messy, and that is fine, because almost every good novel is made good in the rewrite.
Once the draft is done, you can see the shape of the whole book.
You can cut the slow scene, sharpen the ending, and go back to chapter one knowing exactly what it has to set up.
None of that is possible while the book is still half written.
So you don't have to choose between speed and quality. Get the story down quickly first, then make it good on the second pass, when you can see the whole book in front of you.
A few rules make a fast draft much easier to keep up:
Lindsay didn't start out fast.
Before she was a novelist she wrote in the evenings around a day job, and she says she would sit staring at a blank screen, wondering if she could ever write 120,000 words people would want to read.
Everything changed when her husband left her to raise their three children on her own.
She says that was the push she needed to find out what made successful authors tick, and the method she pieced together became the Hurricane Method.
She says her first novel took 14 days to write. Ten weeks after that, it "flew up the top seller charts," as she puts it.
Today she writes the Hideaway of Desires romance series, which includes Private Seduction, and she has also written a long list of books under other names as a contract writer.
Her own wording is "in as little as 14 days," and she is clear that the time your book needs will depend on what you are writing and what you want from it.
If you want to write romance, mystery or thrillers, and especially if you have a drawer of half-finished drafts, I'd tell you to try a fast first draft on your next book.
If your dream is a sprawling saga or a fantasy world the size of Hogwarts, expect it to take longer.
Lindsay says exactly that in her own warning.
Either way, she says the program teaches "the psychological skills behind writing a highly addictive story, without getting stuck too deeply in 'writers block'."
It is a single payment of $47, and you have 60 days to ask for your money back.
Lindsay makes her full case for fast writing, warning and all, in her own sales letter.