A lot about choosing the keys for your own custom chords is intuitive, so we won’t spend too much time here. l’ll just list them out.

• Use the easiest letter combinations for the words you use most often
• Choose letters that have a strong connection to the word so they will be easy to remember
• Be wary of creating chords of 5+ letters unless there are large groups of letters all moving in the same direction (e.g. oetns for “stone” is easy because it is five keys all down at once)

As you build your personal library there are a few principles that will help you expand from a few hundred chords to over a thousand without as much effort.

1) Be consistent across similar words.

Try to adopt similar chord structures for similar words:

• should = shou
• would = wou
• could = cou
• shouldn’t = shoun
• wouldn’t = woun
• couldn’t = coun

This will force you to make some tough decisions sometimes. What about “wound”? Wouldn’t woun make a great chord for that? This leads me to my next point.

2) Be realistic about how often you use a word.

…as well as how much speed you gain when chording it.

How often does “wound” really come up? Even for a fantasy writer like myself, it’s not very common. For me, the word “wouldn’t” is far more common, so it’s not worth sacrificing the pattern for.

You can search Google for “word frequency counter” and find various tools to test your own writing samples.

3) Add multiple chords for the same words.

If you want a chord for a word but think you might forget it, you can also create more than one. This is especially helpful for tricky words that have conflicting fingers: