This simple technique will cut your first draft completion time in HALF and transform the way you write forever. Many professional writers, from authors to journalists, use this (or some variation of it.) Best part? It's HIGHLY adaptable and customisable to your needs and applications.

Sometimes, your progress just doesn’t add up. No matter what you try it feels like you’ve made little to no progress. We need to uncover the way to make you work smarter, not harder.

There’s another issue facing writers too.
Speed.
We all want to get our ideas down as fast as we can, knowing they might be fleeting thoughts that will never return should we be dismissive of them or slow to act. So when we run into a word, a sentence, or a descriptive section that throws a wrench into our flow it can feel like a barrier between you and a successful writing session.

I’ve got a technique for you today which will help transform your productivity.
A technique used by some of the most successful bloggers, journalists, authors, and script writers out there.

Say you’re writing a YA (young adult) fiction novel, like me, which conventionally hits the 90k word mark, or even an epic fantasy at 120200k words. That’s a lot of detail to include. It’s entirely possible that your A, B, and C storylines can be summed up in just 50,000 words and the rest is world building, location setting, environment, and detail that can come later.

Introducing: the TK method! TK means ‘To Kome’, and it’s going to be a placeholder that can be searched for once your current draft is up for revision. How are we Finding it? Various methods across the different word processing softwares but the easiest way to search is to press control+F, or Command +F. Think ‘F = Find,’ to remember it. That way you can search the term ‘TK’ and it will reveal each instance of those letters.

‘But Ben, To Come doesn’t start with the letter K’ no, it doesn’t, but the letters T and C appear together much more in the English language than the letters T and K do. Think about it: If you search for TC you’re going to include words like:

Catcher
Nutcracker
snatch
clutch

When you type TK you’re much less likely to run into these words. You might find the occasional rooTKit or pockeTKnife but how often are we really using these?

What we’re doing is purposely introducing a misspelling that can be recognized by both author and editor.
This isn’t an uncommon practice either.

So, creatives and authors, how does this make you more efficient? It eliminates the snagging points. In fact, I even used it when I was scripting this video. Remember earlier when I listed the words that come up for TC and TK? I place held these lists by writing bulletpointsTK.

Another thing is if you’re questioning whether you need a scene or a chapter in its entirety. Sack it off, put Chapter2TK, and come back after with more clarity and understanding on what’s ahead. That way, if you decide to leave the scene or chapter out entirely you’ve saved yourself from wasting time on writing thousands of words that you would have later removed. This also gives you a great opportunity to embed some foreshadowing when you revisit chapter 2 because you now know what’s coming next.

This is just a small sample of uses for it. Think titles, chapter headings, interviewee transcripts, character descriptions, magazine copy, action scenes and so much more that can be saved for later through placing a TK editing mark in their place.

It could be used on your coursework for in text references like this or even adapted to cover location description in screenplays.

So how do you plan to use it? Let me know below if you’ve got some interesting ideas and, as always, thank you so much for watching.

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Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:10 Problem 1
0:41 Problem 2
0:30 Case Study / Example
2:17 The Technique
2:30 Shortcuts
3:48 Application Examples
4:30 Detained Application
5:45 Conclusion
6:36 Yapping