The Fox and the Tortoise, or How Working in Writing Sprints Made My Writing Faster But Not Better

Photo of a brown and yellow tortoise crawling in grass with trees and a mountain in the background
(Photo by David Boyle on Unsplash )

Have you ever read a great page-turner that, in the end, just wasn’t for you?

Chris Fox is a developer-turned-author with more than 20 novels and an 8-book nonfiction series for writers to his name, to say nothing of his YouTube channel for writers with more than 40,000 subscribers. A few months ago, I read 5,000 Words Per Hour, the first book in his Write Faster, Write Smarter series. Unfortunately, after giving Fox’s main technique a try in my writing, I’ve decided that it’s not one I will apply in the future.

5,000 words per hour

5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter is a highly readable and quick-moving ebook that teaches several techniques for writing a great deal of content in a short amount of time. At the time of writing, Fox had gotten his daily word count up 5,000 words/hour on his best days, an amount that initially staggered me. Although I have always been good at writing, never in my life have I hit such a large a word count in such a small amount of time.

This rang especially true when I read the book. I had recently written several blog posts and published a couple of more in-depth articles, and while I was writing them, I noticed that writing seemed harder than it used to. I was able to do it, but it felt like the process took more out of me now.

Enter Chris Fox.

Fast like a Fox

Confession: I have owned a copy of 5,000 Words Per Hour for several years–so long that I don’t remember when I bought it, though I do recall doing so at the recommendation of a couple of good friends who are also writers. But this is the first time I’ve ever read it, and once I started, I sped through, finishing the book in two days. The chapters are short and engaging, contributing to the page-turning flow established by Fox. He also includes exercises and resources to encourage the reader to begin putting his techniques into practice immediately, which Fox insists is necessary for fully achieving the ultimate goal of writing smarter and faster.

I finished the book on our recent vacation to the North Carolina coast. During that time, we took a day-trip to Bald Head Island, a barrier island that prohibits cars. While on the island, I had the idea to write about the car-free trip and decided to try out some of the strategies laid out in 5,000 Words. The result was “Car-Free and Carefree: A Visit to Bald Head Island.” As it turned out, however, I managed to write it more despite Fox’s advice than because of it.

What worked for me: the tortoise enclosure

To be clear, there were some strategies that did work well for me. The technique that I found most useful was the tortoise enclosure, which Fox describes as “a sacred space where your mind is primed to enter a state of creative flow.”

What exactly does this mean?

Your tortoise enclosure is…a time and place your mind must associate with writing. When you’re there, you write. It’s that simple.

The tortoise enclosure requires you to pick a specific place and time to write, then write there at that time every day so that you will associate that time and place with writing. It’s important that you do not do anything else in that space at that time–no social media, no doomscrolling, no texting. Otherwise, your mind won’t associate it with writing, which will make it more difficult to focus on writing. You’re building a habit of focusing on one thing at a time, and as Kevin Horsley describes, “changing the channel of your mind” interrupts the building and focusing processes. Cal Newport puts it another way: “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t simultaneously wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.”

Photo of a hand holding a pen and creating a to-do list in a notebook of graph paper
(Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash )

Fox got the idea of the tortoise enclosure from a talk that John Cleese gave on creativity in which the actor describes the impossibility of coming up with any creative ideas in our frenzied worlds in which all of our energy is directed toward checking items off our never-ending to-do lists. Cleese says:

Basically the way I put it is that you need to create a tortoise enclosure so that your little tortoise mind, a little nervous creature, can just look around and then think, “Yes, it’s safe to come out.” And to do this you have to create a kind of oasis in your life in the middle of the stressed “Oh, I’ve got to do this, I’ve forgotten to do that, I have to be there by 11.” In the middle of all of that you have to create an oasis, a tortoise enclosure where your tortoise mind can come out to play.

Cleese goes on to explain how to create the enclosure: create boundaries of space and time that prevent interruptions to the creative process. This may look different for everyone, especially those with large households, little space to themselves, etc. It is key to figure out a way if you want the creativity that is your tortoise to emerge.

What didn’t work for me: the writing sprint

And now, the strategy that didn’t work well for me: the writing sprint.

Fox defines a writing sprint as “a pre-defined length of time where you will do nothing but write.” Writing sprints are not a bad idea and work well with tortoise enclosures. In fact, I already practice part of this strategy by using the Pomodoro Technique to break up my work day into pre-defined periods of work and periods of short breaks, a cadence that works well for me.

What didn’t work for me was doing nothing but writing during that time. Yes, I did produce a higher number of words during the sprint, but that wasn’t my only goal. My goal was, and is, to write detailed, well-researched pieces that create food for thought and change. Doing nothing but writing not only meant leaving spelling and grammatical errors to be fixed in a later editing sprint–which also left the errors always looming in the back of my mind and distracting me ever so slightly–it also meant that I couldn’t research as I wrote, which is part of my usual process. Doing nothing but writing meant either just hoping I would remember where I needed to insert a link or cite a source or actually writing out a reminder to do so.

In addition, doing nothing but writing disconnected me from my work in an odd way, leaving me feeling like a machine churning out words. It was a very disconcerting and off-putting sensation–so much so that I ended up starting over from scratch with a new file and writing my piece using my usual process. Even then I felt as if I were wading through some sort of invisible current or mud, struggling to reach the shore. It was as if my brain was having to slowly–painfully slowly–reboot. It was not enjoyable to struggle so much with something that had always come so easily, so inherently, to me.

For me, writing isn’t solely a way to get my existing thoughts and ideas out; it’s a way to take those thoughts and ideas and refine them, work with them, form and reform them, expand on some, change others. The writing sprints didn’t leave me with the space or time to do this–I could only write, write, write. But my writing requires thought, and there was no room for thought during sprints, only the creation of content, and I am not a content creator. I’m a writer.

Who writing sprints will work for

None of this is to blame Fox or to claim that writing sprints won’t work for anyone. Actually, I think they can be very useful for the right type of task. For example, I think content creators and fiction writers could benefit from sprints, as could anyone in need of an exercise to break up writers’ block or to just get started and put something on the page. There is definitely a place for writing sprints.

It’s just not in my writing.


Originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium on November 14, 2024