Every wanna-be novelist I know is planning on writing 500 words a day in 2009.

On an average day, I write around 5,000 words.

I’m the first to admit that I’m not writing the Great American Novel here. But to make a good living writing for the web, 500 words just isn’t going to cut it. That’s why I was so pleased to read Alisa Bowman’s guest post on ProBlogger yesterday. She covered the basics of how she writes quickly, focusing on blogging.

Not all of my online writing is blogging, of course. My process looks a little different from Alisa. Even so, there are a lot of similarities. She recommends that you sit down and start typing — even if you aren’t sure what you want to write yet. It’s the absolute truth. Think back to those college and high school essays: even if you had a really good introductory paragraph, it probably had a lot more criticism from your teacher than the rest of the essay. That’s not because your teacher got bored with your essay after the first paragraph. It’s because you had a much better idea of where you were going after you had been typing for a while.

I’ve got a few tips to add to Alisa’s how-to:

• Quotations are absolutely your friend. Even if you’ve only got some random website you dug up to quote from, go for it. Paraphrasing and linking is also a great option — but either way, you can up your word count in a hurry. Always cite and link, of course. We don’t shamelessly steal around here.
• Shamelessly steal from the best. Then again, maybe we do shamelessly steal around here. But I’m not talking about committing plagiarism — that is absolutely wrong. Instead, I’m talking about paying attention to how other writers put words in a row. I have pages and pages of articles, copy and blog posts I’ve saved over the years. I pull out relevant pieces in order to help me plan the structure of a given project. There’s nothing wrong in treating a great piece of writing as a model, as long as the project you turn in is your own.
• Do your research at the same time. I know journalists who will spend weeks researching an article. Whether or not that level of research is actually a possibility for an online project, I’m a big advocate of doing your research as close to the time you actually write as possible. I know I forget details, no matter how great my notes are — but if I’m still in the moment, those details will make it into my project. Even if we’re talking about a big project that takes weeks of research, I try to write the relevant sections of the project immediately after finishing a particular part of research. It also cuts the time I spend referring to my notes, verifying my facts or re-looking up details to almost nothing.

What about you? How do you speed up your writing process?