The question is some form of: should you throw down a crappy first draft or should you edit as you write? Every day, I see writers praising the crappy first draft and encouraging new writers to just get it all onto the page. You can fix a mess later, they say. You can’t fix a blank page.
Or so they say.
I hold the unpopular opinion that it’s fine to edit as you go.
Each time I sit down to write, I begin with editing and end with editing.
When the chapter isn’t working, I usually delete it and start over. There is no point in forcing it to get words down. If it doesn’t flow, something is wrong with it and I want to know now.
If the popular opinion works for you, use it. If not, don’t.
I have a lot of unpopular writing opinions. Probably because I never had any training in writing until graduate school. I went to graduate school thinking this was a huge problem and left certain that it wasn’t.
My experience coaching writers so far is that many of them are holding themselves back because they believe they are doing it wrong. They want to edit constantly and they think they shouldn’t because other writers told to just get words on the page. Or…
They take editing as they go to a place of perfectionism that is destructive to their flow. Either way, they aren’t producing what they want to produce and THAT is a problem for them.
A friend once described the process of drafting a novel, just getting it down so she could play with the words on the page after, and at the end realizing it was soooo awful that she could not bear to rewrite it.
This could have been prevented if she had just given herself permission to mindfully edited as she went. Which was what she had wanted to do. Key word is *mindfully.”
My first drafts have often been commented on that they are super “clean” and that’s because I edit continuously. I don’t move on until I feel solid about where a chapter is at. I’m not kidding myself that my “drafts” are superior because I know how much work went into them.
I’m not criticizing anyone else’s writing process here. If you love the drop & run draft, if you’re skilled at that, then you have something to teach writers who travel that path. But please don’t advise someone whose process is like the one I described that they’re wrong.
They need to work with someone who can help them tease out their own process. And they can’t do that if we’re telling them to stop editing as they go.
If YOU are editing as you go, my advice is don’t stop! But also don’t let perfectionism hijack your momentum. You can absolutely go back and polish sentences later. You CAN do multiple drafts. But you can ALSO do a continuous draft (which is really just overlapping drafts).
Deal with your perfectionism. Perfectionism isn’t the same thing as having high standards. Perfection is in the eye of the beholder. It’s subjective. So what’s perfect to you will not be to someone else. Or may be OVER THE MOON to someone else. You never know.
Perfection was the source of my anxiety for many years. It’s a prison of your own making. Having high standards is 100% objective. You set the standards and you hit them or you don’t. You can make a game out of missing and trying again. Challenging yourself is exciting.
Perfectionism is:
Self-punishing if you perceive that you’re missing.
Self-righteous if you perceive that you’re winning.
It’s binary. On/off. Win/Lose. Success/Failure.
And that shuts down creativity for a lot of sensitive people.
If your continuous editing has turned into perfectionism, you know it right now. And you can deal with that.
(This post copied, lightly edited, from Twitter thread.)
