One Draft Writing And Correcting Mistakes
I’ve written about one draft writing before.
I want to clear up a misconception that some people might have about one draft writing. There is a tendency to assume that one draft writing means you deliver something sloppy, and you never correct anything.
This definitely is a misconception.
So I’m going to quickly correct that misconception in this article.
I do something that I call cycling. It might be familiar to some people as something else, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else write about it or talk about it. That’s not surprising seeing as very few people do one draft writing anyway.
So let’s get into it.
What Is The Point Of One-Draft Writing?
The point of one draft writing isn’t to do something as quickly and sloppily as possible. It is to turn out a finished document within one draft.
That one draft can take you three years. It can take you 10 minutes. It doesn’t matter, and it will play into your strengths and characteristics as a writer.
But with one draft writing you only have one draft to make it count. That means no rewrites. It means once you save the document, hit the publish button, or upload it into PDF format so that you can release a book, that work is done.
You don’t let it sit in a corner for three years. You don’t file it away to check and edit. And you don’t worry about it continuously and that it needs to be rewritten at some later point in the future.
The point of doing this is to actually finish work as opposed to create a bunch of half-finished documents that never see the light of day.
Now let’s talk about how to ensure that your finished document is as good as it can be.
When You’re Writing
A big part of my approach writing is to do it as quickly as possible. This isn’t because I like to maximize my word count, although I do, but it is because writing is a process that involves being in a particular creative space and time.
For instance, I am writing this article now. If I were to stop, then my train of thought would be interrupted and I probably wouldn’t say the things that I plan to say.
And so I write quickly. If anything stops me, then I just make a note of it and come back to it. If I don’t know how to do anything, say, think of an example of the top of my head, then I will just write, “insert example here,” and go back to it later.
I do this so that my flow state is preserved and that I get to the end of the document.
Here is my experience with writing and editing in this fashion.
I find that if you preserve the flow state, then coming back things and going through them, and continuing on is a natural behaviour.
So, I might write that an example is to be included. I will then move on, and as I do, the thought pattern that I’m following will often give me an example, or the example will become clearer.
When You Finish
Once you have written a paragraph, it is natural to go and read back. This is when the editing occurs. It’s at this point where you realize that there is a typo, or you realize that the grammar is clunky.
Once you have finished writing your chapter, section, or explanation, you can then go back and read it. Again, this is when it will become clear to you if there are major issues with the work.
And so you fix them.
But then you move on to the next chapter, section, or article. You do not think about the thing that you have just completed because it is completed. You have done your best.
Fears And Doubts
The biggest reason that people don’t follow this model isn’t because it’s a poor model. It isn’t because they can’t do it. It is because they worry that they will miss something.
The good news is that you don’t have to worry. If you do a good job of writing one draft well, then you will get most of the mistakes and it will be fine.
The bad news is that you will inevitably make mistakes. They will be left in the finished manuscript. That is inevitable. Sometimes I see books that have hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on marketing campaigns, editors, proofreaders, so on and so forth. I see books that are in their 10th edition and 40th year of print runs. They still have mistakes.
When you’re talking about a huge volume of words, mistakes are inevitable. The average book has 50,000 to 100,000 words. If you find 10 mistakes in a book, that is far less than even 1% of the word count.
Providing your work isn’t littered with typos or otherwise incomprehensible, people won’t mind. And in almost every case, the negative feedback you get from making a simple mistake is worth less than sending something through weeks of drafts and edits.
In other words, you can spend one day writing an article, put it up and publish it. Then somebody tells you that you have a typo.
Or you can spend one day writing an article, one day editing the article, and one day worrying about whether you missed anything.
Almost universally you are better off doing the former and getting on with the next project.
Final Thoughts
I have two final thoughts.
Firstly, the market decides. Many writers and business people in general do not allow themselves the luxury of ever finding out whether their ideas are good or not. They are too scared to take action. They are too scared to put their work out in front of people.
If you do this, then you will never know whether you are good or not and you will always worry about this.
If you put something out there, then you will know. May be people will tell you that your work is dreadful. If that is the case, then you can take the work away and start again.
In a lot of cases, the work won’t be as bad as you think.
One draft writing is the same. People think it will be terrible. People think that that they can’t do it. But most of the time they do it, and it turns out it wasn’t as bad as they think.
The second thought is that you can always go back to things. For instance, most of my blog posts on the site are one draft, never think about ever again type affairs.
That doesn’t mean I don’t edit them. It doesn’t mean I can’t change them in the future. If I release a product, then I will go back and add links to that in my blog posts. If I want to reference something, then I will often go back and edit it so that it contains links to other articles.
Same with my books. If I want to edit something in a book, or a reader points out an error, or I want to update the back matter, then I can do that.
It’s just not a part of the regular process, and doesn’t have to be.
You can reserve the right to edit without making it the thing that takes the most of your time up.