Write quickly, edit lightly, prefer rewrites, publish with flaws

Over two years of consistent writing and publishing, I’ve internalized a few lessons for producing satisfying—if not necessarily “good”—work:

  1. Write quickly
  2. Edit lightly
  3. Prefer rewriting to editing
  4. Publish with flaws

I covered similar ground previously in Writing without a plan. This post builds on the same idea.

Write quickly

If I want to see the shape of the idea I’m trying to communicate in my writing, I must get it down on paper as quickly as possible. This is similar to how painters lay down underdrawings on canvas before applying paint.

I can’t judge the quality of my idea unless I finish this underdrawing. Without this basic sketch to guide me, I might end up writing the wrong thing altogether. More than once, I’ve slaved away at a long blog post for days, only to realize that my core thesis was bunk. Writing quickly allows me to see the idea in its entirety before I waste time and energy refining it.

How do I define quickly? For blog posts like this one, I try to produce a first draft in about 45 minutes. For longer pieces, I take about the same time but work in broad strokes and make heavy use of placeholders.

Edit lightly

It’s easy to edit the life and vitality out of a piece by over-editing it. I’ve done it many times. I’m prone to spending hours upon hours polishing the same few paragraphs in a work, complicating my sentences by attaching a hundred sub-clauses, burying important ideas under mountains of caveats, turning direct writing into purple prose, and inflating my word counts to planetary proportions.

Light edits to a first draft improve my writing. If I keep going, I reach a point of diminishing returns where every new edit feels like busywork. And then, if I keep going some more, I start making the writing worse rather than better.

Spending too much time editing puts me in a mental state that’s similar to semantic satiation, but at the scale of a full essay or story. The words in front of my eyes begin to lose their meaning, ideas become muddled, and I can no longer tell if anything I’ve written makes sense at all. At that point, I have no choice but to walk away from the work and come back to it another day. It’s no fun.

I try to spend a little more time editing than I do writing, but only a little. I’ve learned to recognize that if editing a draft takes me significantly longer than it took me to write it, there’s probably something wrong with the piece. If editing takes too long, it’s better to throw it away and redo from start.

Prefer rewriting to editing

If it’s taking too long to edit, rewrite.

By writing quickly, I’ve convinced my brain that rewriting something wholesale is cheap and easy. It’s profitable and practical for me to write out a single idea multiple times, exploring it from different angles, finding new insight and depth every time I take a fresh stab at it.

If writing a first draft takes 45 minutes, making multiple attempts at the same idea is no big deal. If it takes four hours, I’m more likely to go with my first attempt. Spending too much time on first drafts is a good way for me to get married to bad ideas.

I wrote this very blog post three times because I couldn’t quite capture what I wanted to say in the first two drafts. The content of the post changed entirely with every new attempt, but the core ideas remained the same.

Publish with flaws

No piece of writing is ever perfect. If I keep looking, I can find flaws in every single piece of writing I’ve ever published. I find it a waste of time to keep refining my work once it reaches the good enough stage. If I’ve communicated my ideas clearly and haven’t misrepresented any facts, I can allow a few clumsy sentences or a bad opening paragraph to slide.

Even as I publish imperfect work, I try to look back at my past writing, notice the mistakes I keep repeating, and try to do better next time. I find that publishing a lot of bad work and learning from each mistake is a better way to learn and grow compared to writing a small number of “perfect” pieces.

Write bad, have fun

By working quickly, I’ve been able to produce a lot of bad-to-mediocre writing, but I feel satisfied. As I keep saying, finding joy in the work I do is more important to me than producing something extraordinary.

I’d rather write a hundred bad essays with gleeful abandon than slave over a single perfect manuscript. There’s joy in finishing something, closing the book on it, calling it a day, and moving on. There’s joy in trying out different styles, voices, subjects, ideas, personalities. There’s joy in knowing that there will always be a next thing to write, and the next, and the next.

When I’m stuck writing something that’s not fun to work on, I find a certain consolation in knowing that I’ll be done soon. That my sloppy writing process means I’m allowed to finish my piece quickly, put it out into the world, and move on to something more enjoyable.

Now you’ve reached the end of this post, and I don’t quite know how to leave you with a solid kicker. Instead of doing a good job, I’ll end with this Ray Bradbury quote that I copied off somebody’s blog:

Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t “try” to do things. You simply “must” do things.

Perfect. I’ve never liked thinking anyway.