Good Writing is Editing

The first draft is just thinking out loud.

It’s a place to get your ideas down on the page, to figure out what direction you want to take.

With the first draft, you don’t need to worry about grammar or punctuation or anything like that.

Purely focus on getting the backbone of whatever you’re working on sorted.

The real writing – the polished stuff – comes after.

Editing is the Good Stuff

Most people think that the writing is the hard part, but it’s really not.

As Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) once said: that’s just keyboarding. That’s the easy part.

Putting the idea down on the page is just the starting gun. The race actually begins when you go back in and start editing.

This is when you cut the sentences that are doing nothing. Tighten the ones that are almost there. Move things around until the structure actually makes sense. Replace the words you settled for with the ones you really mean.

In screenwriting, there’s the concept of the vomit draft, where you just put the idea down on the page without worrying about anything else. That’s the first draft.

Ernest Hemingway supposedly said that the first draft of anything is garbage. Whether he said it or not, the sentiment is right.

The first draft isn't supposed to be good. It's supposed to exist.

So, if you're sitting there staring at something you've written, convinced it's not working… that’s a good thing.

That feeling means you're past the first draft, and now it’s time to actually write.