It’s pretty easy to get something on the page. You sit down, and you start typing. By the time you hit the bottom of the first page, you’ve probably put down a few sentences. Maybe you’ve even gotten your thesis or big idea into the first paragraph. That’s great, but it’s not the hard part. The hard part is when you’ve typed for 10 or 15 minutes and what’s on the page looks bad. The sentences aren’t smooth, the paragraph isn’t quite cohesive, and you’ve already said something that’s just plain stupid. When this happens to novice writers, they often take it as a sign of failure. But it’s not a sign of failure, it’s a sign that you’re actually writing something. The first draft of almost anything is always bad. But bad in a very informative way. It’s bad in the way that shows you where you need to put more detail and where you need to be more precise. Don’t evaluate your first draft as a whole; treat it as source material and aim to write just one thing, a paragraph, a section, a page, with a single purpose.
Finishing something in one sitting is the best way to ensure progress in your writing. So when you start your writing session, commit to writing something short. That could be a product description, an opinion paragraph, a book note, or an explanation of something technical. Before you start typing, decide what you want it to accomplish. Is its job to inform, to persuade, to describe, or to entice? Once you make that decision, it should dictate the kind of language you’ll use. If your paragraph is meant to inform, then it should be concrete and its structure should be calm. If your paragraph is meant to persuade, then it should stress difference, advantage, and clarity.
One of the most common mistakes novice writers make is trying to achieve several goals at once, they write a paragraph that tries to describe and persuade and entertain and dramatize. That paragraph is likely to feel fragmented and probably weak. So the solution is pretty simple: have one goal in mind when you’re drafting and excise any sentence that accomplishes a different goal. A 15-minute writing session can be far more valuable than a long, undirected one. In that session, you might spend three minutes coming up with a very small topic and a one-sentence goal. You might spend seven minutes drafting a paragraph without worrying too much about editing every sentence.
And you might spend five minutes editing the paragraph, but for only one issue, like repetition or lame openings or vague verbs. That’s because one of the things many novice writers try to do is edit for structure, for rhythm, for grammar, and for tone. And that’s usually a frustrating and unproductive exercise. Instead, if you narrow your editing to a single task, you can develop your ability to recognize patterns, and after several such sessions, you’ll find you can spot those patterns before they infect the rest of the paragraph.
Take small aim. If you’re having trouble with the sentence you’re typing, don’t sit and wait for a better one to come to you. Instead, ask yourself a question: What is this sentence meant to say? What do I want the reader to get here? What example would help the reader understand the point? Sometimes the problem is not with the language at all but with the lack of thought. If the sentence seems flat, replace a vague noun with a more specific noun. If you say that the book was “good,” what do you mean? Was it precise? Vivid? Calm? Persuasive? Accessible? That’s the way to make your writing stronger, by moving away from vague praise or vague criticism and toward specific, observable, decisions on the page.
Small aim applies to feedback too. “Nice job,” isn’t very useful. Neither is “This is unclear.” What is useful? “I started to lose interest in the third paragraph.” “I found the fourth sentence confusing.” You can even provide that kind of feedback for yourself. Read your writing out loud and mark the places where you hesitate. Those are probably places where the language is awkward or where a sentence is structured wrong. Here’s another valuable exercise: Write the same paragraph twice, once in a flat, just-the-facts way and once in a more lyrical way. Editing the two versions will teach you more about tone than a lot of fussing with a single paragraph. The best way to learn control is to practice control. Progress as a writer is incremental.
One day you might notice that you’re getting to the point a little faster in your opening. The next day you might notice that you cut five weak lines from your first draft without much angst. The day after that, you might find that your paragraph holds together better from top to bottom. That’s progress. Don’t be discouraged by your first draft. It’s just information, information about what you still need to learn, what you still need to practice, what you still need to patient about. Messy first drafts don’t mean you’re not talented. They mean you’re still in the process of learning how to turn your thoughts into words. That process can only be perfected with practice, editing, and coming back to the page one more time with fresh eyes.
