If you think that you don’t have time to write a book, time compression is possible. Think of it like de-fragging your hard drive or consolidating all of the ketchup bottles.

With an embarrassingly-slow typing speed of 25 words per minute, you’d think that it would take me an eternity to write a book. The fact: it took me a grand total of 55 hours to finish a 138-page book, and I didn’t even break a sweat. How I know this: I tracked my time throughout the project. I included all of the time that I spent brainstorming, outlining, writing, editing, and doing miscellaneous stuff. I used a simple Excel spreadsheet to do my time tracking.

Part of why this went so well: I scheduled 2 hour blocks of time to shut out the world. The cell phone got turned off, and I didn’t even let myself entertain the thought of checking e-mail, checking my Facebook page, or indulging in any other such mind-numbing time-wasters. If I even got up to take a bathroom break, I noted this in my spreadsheet.

The lesson I took away from this: we tend to egregiously overestimate the amount of time things take. Take that into account when deciding whether or not you have time for something.

Are you willing to shift gears in your business? What about in your writing? It’s a fine line to walk. Every now and then, it’s necessary to re-evaluate your strategy. However, it can be tricky. At some point, you have to ask yourself if you’re throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Confession: this blog post was prompted by a recent decision to shift gears on my part. I decided that I’ve lost the original focus of this blog. Okay; maybe I didn’t lose the focus entirely, but I certainly compromised it when I decided to constrain the scope to writing. When I started writing this blog in late 2007, my intent was simple. I basically just needed to rant and vent about my frustrations with the extravert-dominated sales world and its continual resistance to change. There came  a point, though, when I realized that I needed to grow past this.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to return to the core fundamental purpose of this blog. Instead of getting up on my soapbox about how to become better at writing (I’ll continue to do that at EzineArticles), I’m going to be sharing about my experiences as an Introverted Entrepreneur. I hope this doesn’t bother you.

There’s a fundamental truth at the core of all writing that I wish I’d discovered a long time ago. As I do it longer, I get deeper into the creative flow, and my output of quality writing increases. I never figured this out for a long time, and as a result, I’d end up doing all of my writing in short little pieces, whenever time permitted. The advent of Twitter and Facebook status updates hasn’t helped this. Society has conditioned us to do things on the run in small bites, and this isn’t a good thing. The problem compounds when it comes to activities like writing, just because they aren’t urgent, and it takes an extra amount of discipline to set aside time for them regularly.

Now, I’ve moved past looking at this as a limitation; I can get my creativity flowing on the drop of a dime. It took me awhile to get to this point, though, and I have to admit that it’s still no substitute for a good prolonged writing session. I’ve found that when I immerse myself fully into my writing, there comes a point when I get in the zone. That’s when I start to surprise myself with the words that fly off of my keyboard. That’s when I have the most profound insights that give me weeks worth of material to draw on.

I’ve made it a priority to set aside larger blocks of writing time. I’ve decided that having reguarly epiphanies and creative breakthroughs is something I can no longer afford to live without. You might want to consider doing the same.

I hate to admit this, but I’m not a particularly fast typist. People tend to give me credit for being one, just because of the quantity of writing I can output in a short period of time. But here’s a little-known secret: typing skill and speed have nothing to do with writing throughput.

I typed my senior high school research paper on a mechanical typewriter. Most people would probably assume that I’m too young to even remember that such a thing ever existed. I remember how you couldn’t strike two keys too close together, and that if you did, the hammers would smack into each other and you’ve have to unstick them. I remember having to push extra hard on the “backspace button,” and sometimes having trouble fitting my pencil eraser into the little window where the letters were. I remember how my papers always had smudge marks all over them, and how easy it was to tell how much of a hurry I’d been in to finish an assignment the night before it was due.

I eventually graduated to a laptop after moving past the daisy-wheel printer days, and I have to say that I never get over what a relief it is that I only have to type any given thing once. If I had to compete with heavy-hitting old school writers from the pre-computer era, I’d be dead meat.

How can I say that typing skills don’t matter? I won’t say they don’t matter at all; I did take a basic typing class, and I do know the home positions on the keyboard. I do know how to type without looking at my fingers. That much is important, but that part’s easy and doesn’t take more than a month to learn with consistent practice. This isn’t like playing a musical instrument; your mistakes are invisible and inaudible. A misstep is easy to hide.

The key to being a fast writer: write what you don’t know. If that doesn’t make sense, there’s no explanation I can give that will make any more sense. Just try it out. I didn’t know how I was going to write this article, for instance. I just knew that I am a fast writer despite my poor typing skills, and I didn’t particularly know why.  I knew that this would be a fun concept to explore, so I hammered out a blog title and got started.

You’ll notice, above, that I gave you a couple of stories to drive home the point about my lack of typing skills. The reason I did this: to get the usual suspects, or ordinary ideas, out of the way. That is a key component of any brainstorming process. As I wrote that brief story (which you just read), I realized that no skill really matters. It’s not about skills at all. How did I come to that conclusion? I don’t know. It just popped into my head as I wrote.

So, in case you’re waiting for me to tell you how this works, I can’t. Sorry to disappoint you. All I can do is give you an alternate point of view to consider, and a story to show how it looked for me. I can’t tell you how it’s going to work for you. The process is intuitive, and it’s not a formula. That’s why skills don’t matter. Skills come in handy when you’re copying someone else’s formula. Since we’re not dealing with a formula here, the only thing you need is ignorance. The less you know, the better this will work.

Does that make sense? If so, you’re not getting it.

It’s not a hard thing to do, really. Getting into the flow used to take me half an hour, or sometimes over an hour. It used to frustrate me when I had to stop after “getting on a roll.” In my view, it had taken me enormous effort to get into the zone, and then I had to  go do something else. But my assumption was wrong. I’d just spent the majority of my time unwilling to open my mind, only opening it just at the last second. It was almost on purpose. I really wanted to be right about the fact that I didn’t have time to do the writing I wanted to do.

But that’s just my story. What’s yours? What do you tell yourself about why you can’t write? I don’t know, and I won’t attempt to explore it here, but consider that any time the creative juices won’t flow, consider that you don’t really want them to.

I had to confront this when my schedule started to fill up with meetings, client projects, and conference calls. The time blocks for pure, just-for-fun writing started to shrink down to tiny little nuggets. I would have five minutes here, ten minutes there, or even two minutes here and there. I had told myself before that I couldn’t do any writing in less than twenty minutes. When the luxury of twenty-minute uninterrupted time blocks all but disappeared, I asked myself to consider that getting into the zone doesn’t take any time at all. Actually, as it turned out, my relationship to time was the problem.

Confession: I just wrote this in about four minutes, and I don’t have time to write any more. To be continued.

Your writing has a symbiotic relationship with your speaking. If you’re looking for something new to write about, or if you’d otherwise like to impact your writing in a positive way, the words that you speak are a good place to look. I could write an entire blog on this subject alone. Here’s one specific example of where speaking impacts writing: withholding communication.

This past weekend, I was working with a group of people on a couple of back-to-back long days. People tend to get impatient at times when energy levels are low. I was cranky and irritable at one point, and one person really got on my nerves. I felt my chest tightening and my pulse rising. I looked the person dead in the eye and said, “You’re really pissing me off. It looks to me like you’re picking a fight with me.” This was not usual for me. My ordinary way of handling these things: cover it up with a smile, then walk away fuming. In this case, though, it felt like a weight off my chest.

I notice that even now, several days later, I feel a lightness in my fingers as I type out these words. I’ve also noticed that my writing flows freely while my mind is free from distractions and concerns. When I’m worried, preoccupied, or angry about something that happened the day before, my writing slows to a crawl. I’ve now gotten in the habit of dealing directly with the things that slow down my writing, rather than simply engaging in superficial brainstorming techniques like I used to.

The reason why I started this off by mentioning speaking is simple. When you’re withholding something, there is a specific thing you’re avoiding saying, and a specific person you’re avoiding saying it to. If you see yourself doing this, take a look at specifically what you’re withholding and why. What are you afraid of? In my case, I noticed that I’ve been avoiding telling people when they annoy me, for fear that they might get offended. These sorts of things tend to add up.

What are you avoiding saying? The next time you see yourself stopped at the keyboard, ask yourself this question.

A common hang-up I see with other writers: reluctance to share their stories about sensitive things. I won’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t include in your final release of a book, but I’ll make one simple point today. Just write it all down. Don’t worry about whether you’ll actually be publishing it or not.

During the process of writing my recent book, Pied Piper Entrepreneurship, only about half of the content I wrote survived to the final revision. I think this is probably normal. However, the tendency among beginning writers is to edit everything as they’re writing it. It’s typical to sit at the keyboard as if somebody were watching everything you typed, or as if every keystroke of your rough draft were to be indelibly burned into the memory of the universe as soon as it leaves your fingers.  This is the kind of thinking that will have you sitting in your den after an eight-hour writing session, wondering why you only got through one page.

If you’re writing a book for the first time, and you’re not sure what you want to talk about, just start by writing it all down in no particular order. If you’re writing about a series of events in your life, there may be some particular events that you already know you don’t want to share with the world. It can be helpful to write these down anyway. Something about the process of articulating your stories onto the computer helps you to clarify things in your own mind.

Write first, edit later. These are the words no writer should forget.

I’ve read a number of times that I should write what I know. I’ve never really found this to work all that well.

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in a bit of a turbulent and unpredictable economy right now, and we’re being confronted, for the first time, with a scad of problems that people don’t already know how to solve. If you’re an expert and you know how to solve problems that most people don’t know how to solve, great. If you already know how to apply that knowledge to the immediate problems sitting on the table for the people who are reading your writing, great. But if you don’t have that luxury, consider that the most gold to be mined doesn’t lie in what you already know. To be successful in this economy, you have to be good at doing things you haven’t done before.

So, how exactly does one go about writing something they don’t know? As far as how you’ll do it, I don’t know. But I can tell you how I’ve done it, and maybe that will help. First, I pay attention to what my audience is saying. With Twitter and Facebook, it’s pretty easy to figure out what people are saying. Patterns are emerging all over the place. I notice questions all over the place that people don’t have the answer to. For one example, “How do I sell my services as a writer?” I don’t claim to have the universal answer, and I don’t believe that there is one. Instead of claiming to have the answers, I dig deeper into the real questions and find my own hidden assumptions.

This is basically how I wrote most of my recent book. I didn’t know most of what was going to go into it. I surprised myself with the things I wrote in it. For example, I found that I have a tendency to assume that skill increases in proportion to the time spent developing it. What if that weren’t true? I don’t know. But I’m going to have fun writing about this.

Try writing about what you don’t know.  You’ll find that you have a lot more material to write about that way.

I’ve said before that I don’t believe there is any such thing as “writer’s block.” In reality, there’s not. However, if you believe that you’re blocked, you are. It’s possible to experience and be limited by imaginary things, especially when they’re intangible. By trying to fix writer’s block, you’re simply going to make matters worse. That’s like erecting a 20-foot barbwire fence to keep out the boogeyman. Anything you do to fix a non-existent problem will simply introduce more problems and constraints to deal with. But more importantly, anything you do to fix writer’s block will cause you to relate to it as absolute and real. This can reinforce self-limiting beliefs (such as “I’m not a good writer.”)

Instead of trying to fix it, make a point of understanding what’s going on. Write down the reasons why you’re blocked. Then, think back to other times when you had similar reasons to be blocked in other areas. That’s a start, but it may not be enough. To drill down further, look back at your personal history with writer’s block. Think back to the earliest time you can think of in your life where you were trying to write something, but you thought you just couldn’t. What thoughts were going through your head at the time?

Go as far back as humanly possible, and write down as many incidents as you can think of. Hint: you’re not looking for the solution to the problem. You’re not trying to diagnose where your writers’ block started. If that’s your mentality, the exercise won’t make any difference. Instead, just look for any new insights you might get. Here’s what I usually find when I do these sorts of exercises: when I’m coming up with excuses not to write, I’m very creative and articulate!

If you’ve self-published a book on Lulu.com or another print-on-demand publication web site, you’re familiar with how the process works. If you’re new to writing a book, and you’re thinking of submitting your manuscript to a traditional publisher, consider using a print-on-demand service. I just published my book on Lulu last week. I had nothing but a Microsoft Word document on Friday night. On Sunday night, the layout was complete and stored in Lulu’s system. On Thursday afternoon, a printed and bound copy of my book was sitting on my doorstep.

Another thing I’ve noticed: for some reason, there were a number of typographical errors I didn’t see when I was going through the electronic document. I would have sworn up and down that I’d caught every single one. There were sections that I’d read more than four times. I looked right at the same typo repeatedly without seeing it. But once I had the book in print, the mistakes jumped right off the page at me. I can’t explain why this happens the way it does. But the point is that printing a proof copy is a good thing. Now, I can just fix the errors in my Word document and re-submit the manuscript. A customer who orders my book from the same URL will now receive a corrected version, with no delays. However, if you publish your book at a retailer like Amazon.com, there’s a longer process involved with making changes. I’m just talking about selling my book directly from the Lulu store front.

Print-on-demand is a lot easier than I thought it would be. Give it a try!