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.