Writing Fast Without Writing Sloppily

By John Hardy
January 9, 2026 | Series: genesis

Writing quickly matters to this project because without it I'd slow down and publish less. The pace drives the experiment because ideas form in real time and I make decisions under pressure, so the value is in capturing them while they're still alive. That creates tension: speed pulls me toward shortcuts and familiar phrasing that drain the work of voice.

It's easy to slide into that as certain phrases arrive fully formed and sentences drift into explanation while leaving description behind. Paragraphs climb into commentary about the writing. Language has grooves, so when I'm moving fast I let the wheels fall into them.

Automation helps here, even though it's awkward. I don't believe there's a reliable way to algorithmically judge good writing, and I'm not trying to invent one. What I do think is possible is to detect laziness. I watch for repetition and familiar scaffolding, then for verbal tics that appear when attention drops or when a phrase announces an idea before it arrives because those patterns show up quickly.

The prose-lint script most often catches short scene‑setting lines that do no work. It also flags contrast framing that drifts into meta narration. It flags tidy lists of three that flatten nuance. Those are the signals that my attention slipped and the prose started to coast.

One example I keep seeing is a scene-setting line that gestures at the topic and then stalls. Draft: "This section is about speed and quality in writing." I rewrite it into a concrete decision. A revision like "I write fast to capture decisions while they are fresh, then slow down to keep the voice intact" turns an announcement into an argument.

This project will involve writing local scripts that scan prose and score it for those habits. The scripts are friction: no rewrites, no house style, just a mirror. If a draft trips too many signals, that's my cue to slow down and look again because the tooling doesn't decide what's good.

There's something slightly perverse about using code to guard against formulaic writing, but it fits the larger theme here. Staying awake is the point, so fast writing only helps when it still sounds like someone thinking without the shape-filling feel of a system. A bit of automation that keeps me alert while I move quickly feels like a fair trade.

In case it wasn't obvious, yes of course I will be employing AI to help me write and help me review my text content. Learning how to do this in a timely manner without producing soulless slop is one of the big challenges of this project and one of the design goals is to help me as the writer use the assistance of AI without ever putting it in the driver's seat.

Steve Jobs once said "the computer is like a bicycle for the mind". The way I've been thinking about it lately, AI is like an e-bike for mine. Let's hope it doesn't drive me into a ditch!

Tags: writing, automation