Impulse

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• January 27th, 2008
  by Dave Schappell

  1

  Was that tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion, or cre­ative? You say that it’s pro­ce­dural, but it makes me won­der what the gig entailed (broadly). In any case, that’s a lot of hourly writing!

• January 27th, 2008
  by Rob

  2

  In this case, it was tech­ni­cal: I was brain dump­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion describ­ing the work I did at my last startup (www.lilipip.com). The fact that it was a brain dump was the advan­tage here. I wrote the out­line and then just needed to fill in the blanks. I’ve found that with tech­ni­cal writ­ing, if I’m not able to write fast, it’s because either 1) I don’t know the mate­r­ial well enough yet, so go back and learn, or 2) I don’t have a solid out­line.
  Creatively, I’ve writ­ten at about 500 words/h when it’s really good and it feels like I’m just tak­ing dic­ta­tion for the story that’s whis­per­ing itself in my ear. I’ve also spent three hours on one sen­tence (I’ve yet to learn when to give up).

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