You finally got your shit together, carved out a block of time, quieted the anxiety, and put your butt in the chair.
But there it is staring back at you.
What happens at this point? Maybe your mind goes stubbornly blank. Or the ideas jam up in your head so fast you can’t even get them out.
Or you push out a few sentences, but can immediately see that they are total dreck. If you were a cartoon character, you’d rip the paper out of the typewriter, crumple it, and lob it into the circular file.
The bigger problem, though, is probably not what’s going on on the screen. It’s what’s going on in your head. At this point, you may be thinking, “what was I thinking starting that newsletter? I’m no writer. The proof is staring me right in the face.”
But here’s the thing.
That crap you have written? It’s not the problem. It’s the solution. But I’ll get to that in a minute.
Every piece of writing has to start somewhere, and yet, as a business process analyst said to me recently, getting “from zero to something is the hardest part of writing.”
A writing process this is not
The first step in creating a better writing process is actually recognizing that the First Pass is actually a discrete stage in a larger writing pipeline. If you’re looking at your First Pass and concluding that you should just hang up your pen now before you hurt anyone’s eyeballs, there’s a good chance that your concept of the writing pipeline looks something like this.
Have you heard the phrase “don’t judge your insides by other people’s outsides”? Judging your First Pass by the standards of a finished product is the writing equivalent.
It sets you up for a cycle of self-judgment, avoidance, and quite possibly, paralysis.
I wish I could say I’d come up with this idea (damn you, every writing teacher ever) but here’s the deal: there is no good writing except through bad writing. That’s the secret. There is no other path. You’re just going to have to get good at bad writing.
[Brushes hands, squints into the distance] My work here is complete. Godspeed.
Step away from the document
So, with that in mind, what exactly should happen during the First Pass stage? Basically, a brain dump.
Your job at this stage is to get your ideas out without censoring or editing.
That’s it.
Once you have done this, pencils down. Step away from the document. If it were up to me you’d be banned from opening it for at least 24 hours.
The harder job is to learn to live with the discomfort of imperfect writing. It means walking away while your writing is still crappy and unfinished, your ideas still half-baked.
It means walking away from perfectionism and, if you’re a procrastinator, from the adrenaline-drenched frenzy you rely on to force your ideas into the light of day (or possibly the dark of night).
Two things you need to know:
99% of writing is editing.
Important parts of the writing process happen when you’re not writing. Your brain is working out ideas even when you’re not. You may find ideas for your project percolating up while you’re in a meeting, lifting weights, in the shower. Capture them to bring to the table when you return to the project. Or add them to your Writing Backlog.
Writing doesn’t have to start with writing
Here are a bunch of excellent strategies to use in the First Pass stage. If writing isn’t the best way for you to get your ideas out of your head, visual and verbal strategies work too.
Freewriting: writing without deleting, stopping, or editing—often for a set amount of time. My rule is: the more stuck you are, the shorter your freewriting increment should be. Try starting with 5 minutes.
Mind Mapping or Outlining: for visual thinkers, it can help to start with a visual representation of ideas and their relationship to each other. Use this as a jumping off point for writing.
Talk-to-text: For many people, starting with words on the screen solves blank screen freeze. If I asked you about your ideas, there’s a good chance that they would just flow out of your mouth without the same anxiety that attaches to writing. In fact, you have the technology for this. It’s called [wait for it] conversation. Record yourself, or better yet, have a friend ask you questions about the thing you want to write about. Capture your verbal brain dump using something like Otter.ai to create an instant transcript.
The point here is to experiment, but most of all to give yourself permission to do what writers do at the First Pass stage, which is to say, not all that much.
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