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”Tag: writing process
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”What I Do Between Drafts
The time between drafts is not empty time. It is, in many cases, the most productive part of the writing process — but it is productive in ways that do not look like productivity, which is why it is often misunderstood and undervalued. A writer who has finished a draft and set it aside is not resting from writing. They are doing a different kind of work, and understanding what that work is makes it possible to do it more deliberately.
Between drafts, the thinking that the draft has started continues without the draft present. The argument that was only partially formed in the writing develops in the background. The problem that was visible but not yet solvable in the draft becomes, in the days away from it, a problem with a shape that revision can address. The piece is absent; the thinking about the piece is not.
Continue reading “What I Do Between Drafts”How I Plan a Series of Posts
Planning a series of posts is a different activity from planning individual posts, and treating it as simply more of the same tends to produce a different kind of failure. A site that publishes individual posts without thinking about how they relate to each other tends to produce a body of work that is competent post by post and incoherent as a whole — a collection of pieces that cover similar territory from similar angles without building anything cumulatively.
Continue reading “How I Plan a Series of Posts”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”How I Build an Argument
Building an argument in writing is not the same as having one. A writer can have a clear position — a view they hold, a claim they want to make — without knowing how to move a reader from the opening to that position through writing that earns it. The argument that exists in the writer’s mind arrives there through intuition, experience, and accumulated thinking. The argument that appears on the page has to be constructed, step by step, in a form that the reader can follow.
This construction is a learnable skill, and it has a sequence. Not a rigid sequence that every piece must follow exactly, but a working sequence of moves that a writer can apply, adjust, and depart from when the piece requires it.
Continue reading “How I Build an Argument”Writing the Middle
The middle of a piece is where most writing fails. Not the opening, which receives the most deliberate attention, and not the ending, which is brief enough to be controlled. The middle — everything between the opening that earns attention and the ending that releases the reader — is where the piece either delivers what it promised or quietly stops doing so.
Writing the middle is the hardest part to write well, and the hardest to diagnose when it goes wrong. A weak opening is usually visible. A weak ending announces itself. A weak middle tends to be felt rather than identified — the reader’s attention drifts, the piece loses its forward momentum, and neither the reader nor sometimes the writer can say exactly where it happened.
Continue reading “Writing the Middle”