Post Your Drafts
“You start with an idea, you write a draft, and there is no step three.”
Writing is hard. It requires focus and a willingness to be embarrassed. Everyone agrees that both are becoming less common. You should be an exception to this trend. You can do this by posting your drafts.
I’ll explain. Let’s start with my process.
I have a handful of folders with different notes in them. The scraps folder is full of fragments of ideas. I’m constantly adding to this folder. The drafts folder is full of more thought-out ideas, usually scraps that have graduated from sketchy fragment to sketchy fragment with some additional sentences. Sometimes I’ll write a draft from scratch but usually I’ll start with something I’ve already worked on.
The draft is the real starting point. It’s the wall that I’ll be banging my head against for however long it takes to write and publish something that won’t make me die of embarrassment. That’s the bar it will need to clear.
Whenever I start working with a draft I create a note with two sections, “notes” and “draft”. The notes section is an unformatted list where I dump everything I want to think about while I’m writing the post. This includes sentences and links from sources I’m working with and snippets of sentences that occur to me as I do research. I’ll also usually create an outline of the points I plan on making which I’ll then ignore. The draft section is where I write the sentences that will become the post.
Some people advocate for nonstop writing, for keeping your fingers moving the entire time you’re writing. I don’t work like this. I’ll write some sentences and decide if they look good or not. I’ll read them aloud to myself. I’ll keep some of them, move others to the notes section if I think I’ll want to use them later, and delete others.
On good days the actual writing part takes about an hour. Weirdly, this is roughly true of posts which are more substantial and require more research and posts which are less substantial riffs on something I’ve been thinking about or something I’ve read or heard. So far those have been the two primary modes of writing I’ve been doing.
Then I’ll revise the post. The revision process is really calibrated to the language I’ve used in the post, not its structure or message. Have I made any glaring spelling or grammar mistakes? Does a sentence read or sound ugly? I’ll correct those.
Then I’ll post the draft. I know some people who will go through multiple drafts and have friends, relatives, and even hired editors review their work before publishing. I’m not telling you not to do this. But I am tell you that you should, at an early stage, be focused on output and speed. Multiple drafts will hurt your output and speed. Getting comfortable with the tools and the process has been helpful for me to unstick myself because I can lean into those things when the words won’t come as easily.
The way I think about writing at an early stage is this: it’s a three-step process. You start with an idea, you write a draft, and there is no step three. You post the draft.
Later on, in many weeks or months, you’ll be a better writer and you’ll define your step three for yourself. That’s when you can revisit and rewrite your posted drafts. By then you’ll be a completely different technician of the written word, equipped with tools you wouldn’t have been able to handle at that early stage.
But to get to that point you have to practice. Posting your drafts is that practice.