#write forward

photo: Roland Lösslein

At some point while you’re writing you’ll probably go back to reread parts of your story. Maybe to refresh your memory, maybe to get ideas about where to go next.

You’ll probably find errors you’d like to fix, lines you’d like to make prettier, ideas you’d like to clear up.

Don’t do it.

Why? When you go back and edit before you’re done with drafting, you’re doing two different things, neither of which is good for your brain or your work:

1. You’re judging yourself and your work before all of the ideas are even on the page.

This makes your writing turtle very anxious, and might even make you give up on a perfectly good story. Editing too much when you’re trying to be creative and let ideas flow can cause those ideas to stop altogether, because you’re starting to judge your ideas before you’ve even had a chance to write them out.

2. You’re trapping your story into a set path that might not be the best version of the story.

The more time you spend editing while you’re trying to draft a story, the more chance you’ll end up falling for the sunk cost fallacy: that is, thinking that you have to keep going with something just because you’ve spent lots of time or money on it. The less you polish your work before you get done with the draft, the greater flexibility you have to change as new and better ideas come up.

You might end up with plot holes, by writing forward. You might end up with bits of scenes, or entire scenes, that you need to cut later on. That’s okay. The point is to get the draft finished, not perfect.

One of the hardest skills to develop, as a writer, and one of the most valuable, is separating the editing from the writing. But it’s also one of the easiest to practice.

The whole trick is to just write forward. All you have to do, when you see something you want to change within the text you’ve already written, is to make a quick note about it, and then move on.