There is a moment in the middle of a draft when the sentence stops mid-air and refuses to land. The writer stares at it, crosses it out, rewrites it, crosses it out again. The paragraph goes nowhere. The page grows thin with erasures. What is happening in that moment is not writer’s block, exactly. It is something more specific: a confusion of modes. The difference between writing and editing is not a matter of sequence, as in write first, fix later. It is a distinction between two entirely different mental states, and when they collapse into each other, both suffer.
Continue reading “The Difference Between Writing and Editing”Category: On Writing
The discipline, the decisions, and the reality of writing as a practice — what the craft demands and what it quietly teaches.
The First Draft You Don’t Show Anyone
The first draft you don’t show anyone is different in kind from every draft that follows it. It is written without an audience, without the internal editor that activates the moment writing becomes performance, without the self-consciousness that comes from knowing someone else will read what you have produced. It is, in the fullest sense, private — and that privacy is not incidental to its value. It is the source of it.
Most writers do not protect this stage. They begin writing with an audience already in mind — a reader, an editor, a comment section — and the awareness of that audience shapes the writing from the first sentence. The result is a draft that is polished before it is honest, careful before it is complete, and aimed at reception before it has worked out what it actually wants to say.
Continue reading “The First Draft You Don’t Show Anyone”How I Decide When a Draft Is Done
Knowing when a draft is done is one of the harder practical questions in writing, and one of the least discussed. There is a great deal of advice about how to start writing and a reasonable amount about how to revise, but very little about how to stop — how to recognise the moment when further work is no longer improving the piece and the draft should be called finished.
This matters more than it might seem. A draft revised past its best is not the same as a draft that was never revised at all, but it has its own set of problems: the over-explained argument, the sentence that was once natural and is now laboured, the piece that has been smoothed into something careful but flat. Knowing when to stop is part of the craft.
Continue reading “How I Decide When a Draft Is Done”The Reader You Are Writing For
The reader you are writing for is one of the most consequential decisions a writer makes — and one of the least often made consciously. Most writers have a reader in mind — a reader they are writing for — but rarely stop to examine who that reader is, where they came from, or whether writing for that particular reader is actually serving the work.
There are, broadly, three kinds of readers a writer might be writing for. Each produces a different kind of piece. Each has its uses and its traps.
Continue reading “The Reader You Are Writing For”The Writer Who Rewrites
Rewriting in writing is different from revision, and the difference matters. Revision works on what exists — it improves, clarifies, tightens, cuts. Rewriting starts again — it produces a new version of the piece from a different angle, with a different structure, or from a place in the argument that the first draft had not yet reached. A writer who revises is improving a draft. A writer who rewrites is writing the piece again, having learned from the first attempt what the piece actually needs to be.
The distinction matters because the decision of when to revise and when to rewrite is one of the more consequential decisions in the writing process. A draft that is revised when it should be rewritten tends to produce a piece that is better in its parts and still wrong in its whole — technically improved but fundamentally unchanged from a version that was not working. A draft that is rewritten when revision would have been sufficient wastes time and risks losing what the first draft had found.
Continue reading “The Writer Who Rewrites”Writing and Repetition
Writing and repetition are usually discussed as a problem. The repeated word, the idea that comes around again, the subject that has been covered before — these are treated as failures of variety, signs that the writer has run out of things to say or has not noticed that they have said them already. This understanding of repetition as failure is not wrong in every case, but it is incomplete. Repetition in writing is also a feature of a developed practice, and understanding the difference between the two kinds is more useful than treating all repetition as something to be avoided.
The distinction that matters is between repetition that is accidental and repetition that is deliberate — between saying the same thing again because the writer did not notice they had said it, and returning to the same territory because it has not yet been fully understood.
Continue reading “Writing and Repetition”The Writer Who Compares
Comparing your writing to others is one of the most common experiences in a writing life and one of the least examined. The comparison happens in many forms: the essay that makes a writer feel their own work is thin, the writer whose voice makes a writer feel they have no voice, the body of work that makes a writer feel their own accumulation is slow and small. The experience is so common that it has become a cliché — writers comparing themselves to other writers is treated as a known hazard, something to be aware of and manage.
What is less often examined is what the comparison is actually doing. Not its emotional effect, which is usually obvious, but its cognitive content — what the comparison is telling the writer, whether that information is accurate, and whether acting on it would improve or damage the work.
Continue reading “The Writer Who Compares”Writing and Attention
Concentration and attention get used interchangeably in most writing advice, and the confusion costs something. Concentration is the ability to stay on a task despite distraction — it’s a muscle, and it fatigues the way muscles do. Attention, in the sense that matters for writing, is different: it’s the quality of contact between a writer and the sentence in front of them. A writer can concentrate for four hours and produce nothing worth keeping. A writer can attend to a single paragraph for twenty minutes and get somewhere true. Writing and attention are related, but treating them as synonyms is where a lot of productivity advice goes wrong.
Continue reading “Writing and Attention”The Writer Who Finishes Too Quickly
Finishing writing too quickly is a less discussed problem than not finishing at all, but it is a real one. The writer who cannot finish — who circles the piece indefinitely, who holds the draft in permanent revision, who never presses publish — receives a lot of attention in writing advice. The writer who finishes too quickly receives very little, perhaps because finishing looks like productivity and the problems it produces are less visible than the problem of the unfinished piece.
But finishing too quickly has its own costs, and they show up in the work. The piece that was published before it was ready, the argument that needed one more pass to become fully coherent, the essay that arrived at its ending before the thinking had been completed — these are the products of finishing too quickly, and they are recognisable to readers even when they cannot name exactly what is wrong.
Continue reading “The Writer Who Finishes Too Quickly”What It Means to Have a Position
Having a position in writing means committing to a claim that can be disagreed with. This sounds straightforward, but in practice it is one of the things writers most consistently avoid. The pull towards balance, towards acknowledging all perspectives, towards presenting multiple views without taking one — this pull is powerful and, in certain writing contexts, appropriate. In essay writing, in personal writing, in any form of writing that is meant to say something rather than simply to survey what has been said, it is a form of evasion.
A writer without having a position in writing is one who has not yet decided what they think. The writing that results is not balanced — it is incomplete. Balance implies that equal weight has been given to competing views by a writer who has considered them. What most position-less writing actually offers is the impression of balance produced by the avoidance of commitment.
Continue reading “What It Means to Have a Position”