You have to finish the first draft of your book as fast as you can.
The challenge to finishing fast is that you can get stuck on something you need to come back to and research or rewrite.
When you are racing to “The End,” you want to finish fast. Stopping to shift from “writing mode” into other forms of work like research or synthesis or editing can really slow you down and interrupt the flow of writing.
A simple trick that journalists and book authors have learned and shared is the abbreviation “TK.”
“TK” stands for “to come.”
Yes, it really should be TC, but here is why TK is better:
Very few words (none?) in the English language have a T and then a K in them so when going back to search your manuscript (Ctrl + F or Command + F), you can easily find those places where you need to go back in an add something.
Writing “to come” as in “research to come” or “definition to come” or “character name to come” will be more difficult to find later because searching for “to come” will bring up many other results.
Rather than shift gears while writing, just type “TK” in your manuscript and come back to it later.
Here is where I learned about using TK in writing:
The 2013 Tim Ferriss and Neil Strauss Interview on Creative Live:
And more recently I recall Steven Pressfield writing about it on his blog: The Magic of TK.
(Also interesting: Medium.com has a TK shortcut built into their post editor. Type TK and a little reminder will pop up in the margins to flag the part you need to come back to and edit later.)
