Don’t Edit Your Ideas Before Having Them

Editing is far easier than writing. You can usually look at a finished product and notice its flaws in a single read-through. “This section is a bit redundant”, “the tone in this passage is jarring”, “this paragraph feels overlong”. As long as you have something that’s rough but substantive, there’s plenty of low hanging fruit for the fixing.Nobody wants to create flawed work. So, it can be very tempting to try to tackle the task of identifying and fixing flaws in your own work, as you do the work. By just taking extra care, one might avoid making the mistakes they will later need to rectify in the editing process. In most cases, this is a trap that will stifle you.This is because creating something bad on the first try is vastly easier and faster than creating something good. So, by backspacing every word that doesn’t strike you as correct on a first pass, you severely curtail your ability to complete a first pass at all.Far more pleasant and effective is the practice of letting go of all standards, and just throwing words onto the page as they occur to you. Picking the best bits out of something you churned out in a few minutes is much more productive than trying to generate exclusively “best bits”. You can easily write the length of ten “perfect” drafts this way in the time it takes a backspacer to write one.How I use stream-of-consciousness to write faster and betterFirst, let go of all standards. Avoid backspacing beyond fatfingered keys. Commit to clumsy word choices. Allow convoluted sentences. As long as it is intelligible English, it stays.Start by writing bullet points on every thought you have on the subject you’re writing about, regardless of relevance, sequence, or redundancy.Then, think about the order in which these points may work, and move them into a rough sequenceThen, write subsections based on these bullet points - starting with whichever bullet point is the easiest to elaborate on.Flesh out the next bullet point based on whichever is easiest, a