Here I go again, repeating myself, but I have another take on rapid/fast/swift writing.

A lot of people are hesitant to write because they feel that every word has to be perfect the first time out, that whatever they write is like taking a test in school. In short, they think writing is a chore. This is a fallacy.

I say a person would love to write if he or she feels free and loose and could write down anything that comes to mind. This is called stream of consciousness writing, writing as fast as you can without holding any thoughts or feelings back.

Get it all down, as swiftly as you can. Don’t fret and mope, feel free and loose. If you want to make something out of what you’ve written, then start revising and shaping your work. That’s how to write and love doing it at the same time. It’ll be a fun thing to do instead of a chore.

Some writers never send their stories or articles to magazines, nor do they query agents or editors about their book manuscripts. Why? They’re afraid of rejection. They keep their creations to themselves instead of taking a chance on getting published.

I surely don’t like rejections, but I’ve received close to 1800 of them for all the stories, articles, books and query letters I’ve sent out by snail mail and e-mail over the years. (It’s always a good idea to keep a record of who, where and when you send your work to.) At the beginning of my career, I took rejections personally and became despondent. It didn’t take me long to start treating them like junk mail or spam. Today I throw all snail mail rejections into our recycling box and quickly delete all e-mail rejections. I sit up straight at my desk, lift my head up high and get back in the race again.

Whenever a rejection comes my way, I always keep Isaac Asimov’s quote in mind: “You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success—but only if you persist.”

To prove Asimov’s point, I quote the up-and-coming writer Steve Almond: “I’m thinking of a story that I sent out for seven or eight years called ‘The Darkness Together.’ I knew it was a good story, and I sent it to forty places, and finally, finally, I think it was the second time I sent it to the Southern Review, they finally took it. And it won a Pushcart Prize, and I thought, ‘I have a list of forty magazines that had said no to it,’ some of them very small magazines. And it’s not like I rewrote the thing. I knew it was a solid story. So what do you do with that? You just have to develop calluses.”

If you want to hold a real, physical book written by Joseph Sutton, you can order from this website or you can walk into or call any bookstore in the United States and order from them.

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I’ve written over and over again (it seems I can’t say it enough) that the best way to write is to write as swiftly as you can without looking back. I’m not the only writer who believes in writing as fast as you can go. Read what the following writers have said on this subject:

“Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.” —John Steinbeck

“The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.” —Bernard Malamud

“I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.” —Georges Simenon

“Don’t get it right, just get it written.” —James Thurber

Write as swiftly as you can without looking back until you’ve finished your essay, poem, story, chapter, letter, journal entry or article.  If you haven’t tried writing like that—try it, you might like it.