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Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

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Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#81

Post by SubiculumCode »

tyre wrote: post #33
john-radio wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "never edit while drafting" advice comes from the creative writing community. It might be of limited use in cases like technical writing, where you already might have a solid idea what the final product should look like before you start. Most people find that trying to write a novel and edit it at the same time is like baking cookies one by one.

This. Technical writing is a different species entirely. You know beforehand all of the pieces, or at least reason about them. Creativity doesn't work that way. You'll literally inventing new things. It would be like saying, "let me plan out how I will innovate." Makes no sense.

Technical writing IS a different beast, and I do a lot of slow writing which involves lots of editing and reworking. That said, I sometimes feel like I should get more on the page first before doing the work to make sentences elegant and clear, or make the right nuanced point.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#82

Post by grawprog »

nickjj wrote: post #21

This might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I've written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes. I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I'll give it all a final reordering / fixing until I'm happy with it. I feel like I can't…

I work like you. Usually paragraph by paragraph, sometimes sentence by sentence. I usually won't break a chain of thought before editing, but I'll usually go back over what I just wrote when I'm done.

It's not really real editing though. You don't catch everything because you're still in the writing mindset. Plenty of times i've just gone back and completely re-written whole sections during editing. I won't usually do that while writing something. Editing and writing are two somewhat different skillsets.

Editing requires a detachment you can't quite get while something's fresh. You need a bit of time away from something before you can go and do a full real edit. It helps you look at things more objectively. Re-reading a first draft of something I wrote after usually only a couple of hours kinda makes me cringe sometimes even with some inline editing while writing.

I look at it like coding. I'll write a section, test it, fix simple mistakes, keep going until I hit a bigger complete milestone, then go back and fix all the real mistakes while I'm debugging.

ETA: Sometimes I wish the edit windows were longer on hn. There's been a few comments on here I wish I could go back and change after i've had time to.look at them more objectively. Not always downvoted ones.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#83

Post by PakG1 »

john-radio wrote: post #26
nickjj wrote: post #21

This might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I've written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes. I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I'll give it all a final reordering / fixing until I'm happy with it. I feel like I can't…

The "never edit while drafting" advice comes from the creative writing community. It might be of limited use in cases like technical writing, where you already might have a solid idea what the final product should look like before you start. Most people find that trying to write a novel and edit it at the same time is like baking cookies one by one.

I wonder what J.K. Rowling and any authors with really complicated plots would have to say about that. http://blog.paperblanks.com/2013/05/j-k-rowling-book-outline...

Not that I know how the mind of a great author works, but it seems that it would be difficult to write a great story without having some solid idea of what the final product should look like before you start. Like creating a product, maybe they pivot a lot after realizing that something doesn't work well (Margaret Atwood apparently did that for a book once, completely started from scratch after realizing that she had chosen the wrong point of view for the protagonist). BUT it's difficult for me to imagine they don't actually have a good solid idea of the story they want to tell before they start writing. If not book by book, then at least chapter by chapter. But hey, I'm not an author, maybe their minds really do work differently. It's possible.

I guess my overall point is that I don't think having a solid idea about what the final product should look like is the reason why authors have the "never edit while drafting" because I think they also pre-structure their ideas, and diverge on "editing while drafting" for some other reason. But of course I have no data or evidence to back this idea up.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#84

Post by mc3 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #75

This sounds a lot like the old Agile slogan for writing software. 1. Make It Work 2. Make It Right 3. Make It Fast (maybe)

1. Make It Work

2. Ah it doesn't work

3. Make It Right

4. Big refactor, better rewrite it. Ah no time.

5. Make it Work, but without it being Right, what is the bug level we can get away with shipping?

6. Make it Fast, scale up the VMs!

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#85

Post by daniel_iversen »

rayalez wrote: post #14

Shameless plug - my app, Writing Streak, has the "typewriter" mode (Alt+T) that prevents you from editing the text you wrote, and a "blurred" mode (Alt+B) that hides the text you type, achieving the same effect: https://writingstreak.io

Hey, cool tool! In your help/hotkey section, do note that on Mac it's not the "Alt" key (doesn't exist) but rather the "Option" that you need to use!

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#86

Post by wtmt »

daniel_iversen wrote: post #85
rayalez wrote: post #14

Shameless plug - my app, Writing Streak, has the "typewriter" mode (Alt+T) that prevents you from editing the text you wrote, and a "blurred" mode (Alt+B) that hides the text you type, achieving the same effect: https://writingstreak.io

Hey, cool tool! In your help/hotkey section, do note that on Mac it's not the "Alt" key (doesn't exist) but rather the "Option" that you need to use!

Saying Alt/Option is better, but it’s not true that there is no “Alt” key on Macs. There are many Mac models where the key has both “alt” and “option” written on it. Sometimes it also has the symbol for the Option key.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#87

Post by rhino369 »

tyre wrote: post #33
john-radio wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "never edit while drafting" advice comes from the creative writing community. It might be of limited use in cases like technical writing, where you already might have a solid idea what the final product should look like before you start. Most people find that trying to write a novel and edit it at the same time is like baking cookies one by one.

This. Technical writing is a different species entirely. You know beforehand all of the pieces, or at least reason about them. Creativity doesn't work that way. You'll literally inventing new things. It would be like saying, "let me plan out how I will innovate." Makes no sense.

>This. Technical writing is a different species entirely. You know beforehand all of the pieces, or at least reason about them.

The advice to "don't edit while you write" usually comes after the advice to "make an outline" before you write. You are supposed to figure out how the pieces fit. Then quickly write it all out. Then edit edit edit.

The general idea is that is easier to edit afterwards than to edit on the fly. Its true for me.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#89

Post by kccqzy »

nickjj wrote: post #21

This might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I've written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes. I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I'll give it all a final reordering / fixing until I'm happy with it. I feel like I can't…

I did, until I discovered that doing it is less efficient overall.

When writing my first draft, I often have very little idea how the whole thing is going to turn out. I simply don't have the big picture yet. If I spend time honing my sentences then, most of the editing time is wasted because I'd later rewrite them anyways.

Re: Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft

#90

Post by chipotle_coyote »

john-radio wrote: post #26
nickjj wrote: post #21

This might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I've written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes. I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I'll give it all a final reordering / fixing until I'm happy with it. I feel like I can't…

The "never edit while drafting" advice comes from the creative writing community. It might be of limited use in cases like technical writing, where you already might have a solid idea what the final product should look like before you start. Most people find that trying to write a novel and edit it at the same time is like baking cookies one by one.

It's good abstract advice for writing, but in practice, even when you're writing the first draft of a longer work -- a novel or novella, or even a short story that has multiple scenes -- it's not uncommon to come up with an idea in the current scene you're writing that's going to require changes to an earlier scene. This is true even if you're working from an outline (even if major beats in the story are set before you're writing, you're almost certainly going to have room for improvisation, and that might just lead to better versions the scenes you thought you already had in mind.) And I've also found that when I sit down and discover myself blocked on a story -- or, for that matter, a technical blog post or even documentation -- sometimes going back and doing minor editing what I wrote the day before will kickstart the creative process.
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