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Author: Tim Peters

Writing: When Do You Just Start Over?

Posted on by Tim Peters

Step #1 to writing better: Chuck your first draft.

Step #2 to writing better: Start over.

The next time you write something, at that exact moment when give yourself a figurative pat on the back for “finishing” a first draft, close the document, drag it to the trash bin, and empty the trash.

Seriously.

Then take a much-deserved break and forget about that piece of writing for awhile.

When you’re ready to try again, open a new document with its proverbial clean slate. And start anew: rewrite from scratch.

You will soon notice this reality: You won’t be rewriting from scratch. The document may be empty, but the slate is anything but clean. You’re not struggling with what to write – surely one of the most intense cognitive loads – the content is in your head. You don’t have to create the storyline – you have already created a workable structure, even if it was loosely organized or badly conceived. You’re not articulating (which is hard); you’re re-articulating (which is comparatively easy). As you have surely experienced in conversation, the second time you say anything, it comes out more easily, more elegantly, and more powerfully.

The fact is that rewriting is fundamentally easier than writing, which is why you should be willing to trash your first draft. Now you can focus less on what you want or need to say and more on how to say it with grace and power – and on the critical challenge of making your piece “on brand.”

Perhaps most important, your familiarity with the material will be dramatically higher – you’ll be writing smarter, which is always a recipe for success. This phenomenon is something we all experienced in high school or college.

Think back to any math or science class you might have taken. You probably recall a day when the textbook made no sense, when the lecture was difficult to follow, and when the problem set was challenging if not impossible. But the next day, the material seems crystal-clear; the problem set is infinitely more manageable. What happened?

Your subconscious is what happened. It was churning away at the difficult material, creating new neural pathways to connect the dots, to generate the aha! moment, to give you the insight and understanding that means you’ve incorporated new knowledge and strategies into your brain. Seemingly by magic, the opaque and the difficult have become transparent and easy.

The same phenomenon happens when you are writing. You wrestle your way to a first draft. You fight less hard on the next first draft. And that draft will be better. (Note that this requires the active work of that first draft; you can’t just sleep on a project and expect it to solve itself.)

There is one caveat to the draft/trash/rewrite method: Rewriting is not retyping. You must be open to new possibilities – in terms of content, structure, and style – as you write your “new” first draft. But by letting go of your true first draft and letting your unconscious mind do some of the heavy lifting – you should find the writing process easier and more effective.

Will you have to trash your first draft every time? Of course not. There will be plenty of projects in which you can easily treat the first draft like, well, a first draft (i.e., revise, edit, proofread, done). But for challenging new content – like when you’re called upon to write about an innovative technology or articulate a new market opportunity or strategy – or when you’re given projects that don’t have a readily identifiable template or genre, the trash-and-rewrite approach can pay huge dividends. A bonus: Every time you use it, you will build your confidence in your capabilities as a writer.

So if you’re learning to write or if you’re just flat out stuck on something, start over. I guarantee you will surprise yourself at how effective it can be to trash your first draft.

Everyone’s a Writing Critic: Dealing with Writing Feedback

Posted on by Tim Peters

Everyone’s a Writing Critic: Dealing with Comments and Corrections when Receiving Writing Feedback

Writing a solid first draft of something is genuinely difficult. It’s a herculean triumph of creativity and endurance over self-doubt (and procrastination – though the strategies I set forth in the first two posts in this series can make it easier to start writing and plow through to the first draft).

Unfortunately, “a solid first draft” is not the same as a finished, publishable piece. You have bosses, reviewers, and editors to deal with before your ultimate audience reads your deathless prose. These folks are going to read your “solid first draft” and give you comments.

Most comments are valuable and easy to fix: You wrote “millions” when you meant to write “billions.” It’s the “Wealth Management division,” not the “Wealth Management department.” Maybe you missed a subject/verb agreement or failed to catch a dangling modifier. Of course you welcome these comments; you’re glad to have the extra set of eyes on your work before it makes it way into the world.

And at least some of the comments you receive will be compliments: “Nice work” is manna from heaven for any writer. (Note to reviewers: No matter how much you hate a draft, find something to praise in it, or at least thank the writer for his or her efforts.)

But if all the comments you get fall into the categories of easy to fix or compliments, you are either a phenomenally gifted writer or no one cares enough to tell you the truth. The reality is that a serious writing project will probably come back to you in the form of a Word document peppered with tracked changes. It will be riddled with marginal notes. It will be accompanied by another set of ideas in the covering email that could just be boiled down to one two-word phrase: “Needs work.”

As the original writer, you will feel that all is lost, that your hard work has been for naught, perhaps even that your decision to become a writer was doomed from the get-go. There are dozens of things that can sap a writer’s confidence, but Word’s “Track Changes” feature may be among the worst.

Take a deep breath. All is not lost. Take comfort from the fact that you have a strategy for working through comments and rewriting your piece.

Step 1: Look at the Macro Comments First

Before you dive into the details, you want the 30,000-foot view – just as you do when you’re editing yourself. Read through the editor’s covering email and the marked-up copy to see if wholesale rewriting or restructuring is required. I like to recast the macro-level changes in notes to myself; it puts them top of mind and makes them easy to access. If a macro-change in tone is called for (“Make this more conversational…”), you’re going to have rework this line by line. But if a reviewer says something like “Perhaps the order of these sections could be improved,” then move paragraphs and sections around without rewriting (yet). The objective is to begin rewriting from a position of structural soundness.

Step 2: The Low-Hanging Fruit

This is a bit counterintuitive, but the next things to fix are the truly trivial ones: the missing commas or other minor grammatical issues, missing words, word choices, incorrect nomenclature, and errors of fact. For these, “Accept and move to next” (the next tracked change) is invaluable. But if a change requires any substantial thought or rewriting, don’t address it on this pass. Your real goal here is to start getting the document into shape for editing and rewriting.

Step 3: Clarifying the Opaque

After the first two editing steps, you should have a reasonably sound structure and a lot of the small things repaired, perhaps even most of them. Now you have to deal with the hard stuff: the most difficult and most opaque comments:

??? [with no clarification!]

Not sure about this…

Can you say this better? 

When I was a young writer, I hated these kind of comments with a vengeance. I wanted more transparency, more explicitness, more specificity. I wanted editors and reviewers to tell me what to fix and how to fix it.

I wanted, in other words, for them to do my job for me.

A writer should be so lucky. When your editor/boss/client says “???”, he or she is really saying, “I’m not wild about this word or sentence or paragraph, but I have no good idea about why, nor do I have any good suggestions about how to fix it.”

And that is perfectly fine. Their job is to tell you their reaction. Your job is to decipher that reaction and fix it.

So how do you do that?

First, accept the notion that your crystalline prose might be a bit opaque, or overwritten, or tone deaf, or just plain wrong. You’ve lived with the prose and the ideas behind it for hours, probably days, and perhaps weeks. You’re used to it, comfortable with it, invested in it. Which means you are no longer objective about your own writing. The reactions of other can be invaluable. Welcome them.

Second, don’t fix. Rewrite. Fixing is harder than rewriting. You don’t need to understand exactly why someone comments “???”. All you need to know is that something’s wrong in the prose: the rhythm or flow is off, the tone is out of sync from the rest of the piece, or this chunk feels out of place. (Let’s face it: If the change was trivial and factual – “the beta will be out in Q2, not Q3” – then your reviewer would just say that.)

Here’s how I rewrite at this stage:

  • I leave the original text in place (with the comments visible for reference).
  • I skip a line and start writing the paragraph again. Maybe I’ll frame it differently. Move thoughts or sentences around. Recast clauses. Strike an idea or passage entirely. I will sometimes parse every sentence in a paragraph (make that every clause) and see what the logical flow of the information should be, and start anew. My goal is simple: Make it different; make it clearer; make it better.
  • Then I strike-through the original text (with the strike-through formatting button, not the “delete” command) and leave both in place for further perusal. That’s my visual reminder to look at the old versus the new.

Generally, making something different will make it better. You always want specific feedback and pointed comments, but you won’t always get them. Rewriting will make your work better, stronger, more supple, and more communicative.

Step 4: Edit for Flow and Copyedit for Perfection

By now, you’ve made the structural changes, fixed the minor comments, and rewritten the difficult or obtuse sections. Now’s the time to make your copy beautiful just as you did in the latter stages of editing your first draft: make it flow and make it perfect.

This falls into the category of tinkering. It requires thought and care, but the work isn’t difficult (and if it is difficult, it means you probably still have major work to do). A great strategy, especially as you’re learning to edit and rewrite, is to read the document aloud and use your phone to record your voice, then listen to the playback. Your voice and your ear will detect problems of flow, of clarity, of structure. Whenever you hear a too-long pause or you lose the audible flow, there’s probably an issue with the prose. If it’s awkward aurally, it will be awkward on paper too.

Your last stage is copyediting. Now you want to accept changes left and right until they are done and the document is as clean as a whistle. Then print it and review it line by line and word by word and make it perfect.

Dealing with the Unreasonable

Sometimes, you’ll get comments that are (a) wrong or ill-advised in terms of grammar or usage or (b) monumentally stupid with respect to the material or the goals of the piece. These comments will test your mettle as a writer – and as a diplomat.

As an example of the former: A client wants to use the word “actionable” to mean “capable of being acted on,” as in “the meeting generated several actionable ideas.” This meaning does have currency, but the true meaning of the word is its legal one: “giving a reason to bring an action or a lawsuit against someone.”

I’m old school on this one and won’t use the word in its more contemporary parlance. But I won’t categorically overrule someone for this. I’ll either recast the sentence to avoid the word entirely or explain that “actionable” is primarily a word with negative connotations: You don’t want a reader to think that “the meeting generated several ideas that could lead to lawsuits.”

Much more serious is the second category of bad comments, when a reviewer makes a suggestion that is just plain dumb. Examples might include inserting a really bad or inappropriate or reference. Sometimes, a non-writer will recommend using a cliché or a cheesy call to action that will make the person or company look bad. It’s your job to explain why something is inappropriate or unwise.

It helps if you have defined things like voice and tone (“our firm will always sound confident but never sound arrogant”). Then you can easily demonstrate why a suggestion is at odds with that voice and tone. But if not, you must convincingly (and diplomatically) push back:

This is at odds with the spirit and purpose of this project.

I worry that our clients would feel we’re being condescending here.

This whitepaper is overly promotional; this isn’t the vehicle for a hard sell.

You earn your salary by writing well; you earn stature and respect by thinking and behaving as a strategist.

Ultimately, learning to deal with comments and criticism is an issue of mindset. Learn to enthusiastically embrace editing and rewriting as key components of the writing/approval/publishing process. You want the best possible product, and good reviewers can very much help you get there. In fact, they will help you get there faster than you could on your own.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Editing Your First Draft: How To

Posted on by Tim Peters

Time For Editing

In an earlier post, I wrote about the anxiety that can accompany writing and how you can overcome it with some simple steps designed to jump start your drafting. In this post, I’ll tell you how to get from the first draft to the finish line. The key to this: editing.

So you’ve got a first draft. Congratulations. A first draft, no matter how rough, is cause for a minor celebration (coffee, maybe, not Cristal). A break helps you make the mental transition from writing mode to editing mode.

Editing is how you get your rough draft to the finish line. Your mileage will vary here, but I’d say a typical first draft is somewhere between 40 percent and 50 percent of the total effort required to make something publication-ready, blog-worthy, or boss-approved.

Editing does not mean using the spell check or grammar check functions in Word. Proper editing involves restructuring, rethinking, rewriting, and reworking – all of which require critical taste and judgment – followed by some rigorous copy-editing. It’s intellectually challenging and creatively stimulating, but comfort yourself with this thought: The heavy lifting of your first draft is done.

Step 1: Climb the Mountain

Editing does not begin with polishing words. It begins with structure. You want to climb the mountain and get the big picture view. So start by reading through the piece as a whole without making any changes whatsoever.

This is harder than it sounds. I usually can’t resist the temptation to rework something on this first editing pass, but it’s better when you don’t. Your soul goal now is to determine if your piece is structurally sound – with the right flow and level of detail – before you dive into the details and polishing. Are the pieces you’ve assembled in roughly the right order? Are there obvious holes in terms of content or transition? Does the piece mirror your expectations in terms of content and length?

It’s useful to remind yourself of the broad-brush goals you outlined before you started on Draft 1:

What am I trying to do with this piece?

What do I want the reader to do or feel?

What’s the best vehicle for accomplishing this?

If you’re lucky, you’ll still feel that your original answers are largely correct. But even the last question, about the structure or genre of your project, may need revising in light of what you’ve written.

Think of your piece as a series of steppingstones that can take a reader across a river without getting wet. The reader can get from A to B to C, but not from from A to C in one jump. So you make decisions, informed by the whole of the piece:

This paragraph doesn’t go here.

This section needs to be higher in the document.

This chunk really isn’t that relevant to this project.

So you move things around to get the structure right. There’s no need yet to make the transitions fluid. When this step is completed, you’ll have a new rough draft – and it’s possibly even rougher now than when you completed your first draft.

This is not a sign of failure.

Au contraire: A better, rougher draft is the definition of progress. And now you can edit to make those rough edges smooth; to make it flow.

Step 2: Make it Flow

What is the essence of writing? One word leading to the next. One sentence leading to another. One paragraph leading to another paragraph and so on.

Writing is about flow that creates the illusion of connectedness.

When you edit for structure – when you are moving ideas, paragraphs, or whole sections – you are changing the flow of your piece. When you edit for style – when you edit line by line and word by word – you are improving the flow.

You must start at the beginning of your document to “make it flow.” Your lead is, by definition, steppingstone #1, and it’s essential to establish a firm launching point to ensure your reader can get from the first stone to the second in the journey across the river. Too big a gap, and the reader could lose your train of thought. Too small a gap, and the reader could get bored.

You improve flow by bridging thoughts and ideas with the connective tissue that will enable the reader to discern your meaning. This means adding sentences (or subtracting ones), or linking clauses with “ands” or “buts” or punctuation (the colon is your friend).

Make it clearer. Simplicity and clarity are always worth pursuing when it comes to writing. You can get away with being difficult if you’re writing a novel; you can’t if you’re writing for a company or an institution or your own blog.

Here’s where rewriting is such a critical component of editing: If you encounter a difficult, opaque sentence or paragraph in your draft, your very first response should be to rewrite it. Don’t even bother trying to fix it, because most problem sentences are doomed. Start anew.

It’s easier to rewrite something than to fix it. Your thinking during the rewriting phase will be more refined. And writing something a second, third, or fourth time almost always makes it more fluid, more clear, and more succinct.

I rewrite like this: I skip a line and just start retyping the sentence or paragraph again. If the problem is density and opacity, I’ll unpack the ideas into their simplest components, making each idea into its own sentence. Then I rewrite. It feels like alchemy sometimes. All I’ve done is rewrite something, often without much more thought than “this needs clarity.” But it works. Don’t fix. Just do it again.

In fact, if you really want to be a writer, try this sometime: Write the first draft of whatever you need to write and trash the document. Start over completely. Your new first draft will take far less time than your actual first draft, and the product will be substantially better.

Make it more powerful: When you are in this stage of editing, you should always be looking to mine the rhetorical power of your prose. Ask yourself:

Is this expressed strongly enough?

Will the reader grasp its importance?

Have I missed an opportunity to strengthen or add insight?

The search for power is always helped by rewriting. Try saying the same exact thought in a different way, with a different structure or using a different example. You’ll nearly always have a sense of which is better. Rewriting for power is a mental muscle that responds well to exercise, and you’ll also discover that your original drafts get more powerful as you gain experience.

You might need to “rinse and repeat” with this stage of editing one or more times. If you get stuck, just take a break and start at the top. Progress begets progress. Engagement generates benefits. Writing is iterative.

Step 3: Get Into the Weeds

At some point, either because you believe fervently your draft is ready, or because someone is very eager to see it, or because you can’t bear to spend one more second with it, your work is still not quite done. You need to copy edit and proofread your project. This is getting into the weeds, but it is essential for anyone who wants to be taken seriously as a writer.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have a copy editor and perhaps even a proofreader to help you with this step. But even so, that doesn’t preclude your needing to understand how to perform these tasks. Done well, copy editing and proofreading add professionalism to any document, and reflect well on the creator of that document.

If you doubt this for more than a second, wait until you give a boss or (worse) a client a 10-page document that you’ve slaved on for a week only to hear, “You misspelled ‘its’ on page three.” Ten solid pages, a couple of thousand well-chosen words, and many hours of your working life have just been reduced to a missing apostrophe. You will make mistakes in writing, of course, as in life, but avoiding these kind of trivial mistakes should be a no-brainer, particularly when the stakes are even the least bit high.

It’s beyond the scope of this piece to provide a complete guide to copy editing, but you are looking for:

The right words (particularly the ones spellcheck won’t flag)

Correct punctuation

Proper references to titles, company names, and organizational nomenclature

Thoughtful attention to language that might be offensive to some readers

Of course, you may not be a natural copy editor, especially if your writing experience is limited. So start making yourself one (this skill is always welcome in any setting). If you are the least bit unsure of something, flag it and look it up. If you make mistakes repeatedly, keep a file that contains them so you will know to look for them and you’ll start learning how not to make them. (If it’s v. its is your personal bugaboo, then search your document for both before submitting it to your boss or client.) Better yet, start your own personal style guide.

But all this effort is worth it because – at last! – you have a first draft. Off it goes, and then, about 9:30 p.m., you get pinged:

This is perfect. I wouldn’t change a thing.

This. Never. Happens.

But that’s OK. If you hear back, “Good first draft. We can work with this,” you’ve nailed it. Next we’ll talk about how to deal with comments, criticism, and changes.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.

Breaking Through Writing Anxiety

Posted on by Tim Peters

Writing Anxiety

Unless your name is Stephen King or Karl Ove Knausgård or Aaron Sorkin, writing anxiety can feel like an integral component of the writing process – and a hugely toxic, paralyzing one at that.

I know I feel it. Most new writing projects come with a sense of challenge, the promise of reward – and an unhealthy dose of torment. Which is, frankly, a little weird. I’ve been writing professionally since I graduated from college in the early 1980s. You might think I’d be well past feeling even a hint of anxiety in facing the brutal starkness of the blank page – that I could stare down the barrel of a new assignment with the steely aim of a seasoned pro, a veteran who has seen it all and written it all down, eagerly anticipating the next test of my expositional gifts.

You might think that. But you would be wrong. It would be a lie to say that I have embraced anxiety, but I have worked hard to make dealing with the blank page more manageable and get on with the work at hand. And I’m confident my four-step approach will work for you.

Step 1: Never start writing without a plan.

Process is to the writer what meditation is to the Buddhist: a source of dharmic bliss. So stage one is to never start writing without a plan.

Note, that this does not mean create an outline. An outline is decidedly not a plan. (In fact, unless your boss or client demands one, forget about outlining in general. It is a waste of effort better spent on writing itself.) My plan is simply handwritten answers to three simple questions:

  1. What am I trying to say?

This is the most high level articulation of your content: 

“This piece will introduce a new product (or idea or company).”

“I want to reassure worried employees or consumers.”

“I need to convince investors that the future is bright.”

“Increase sales of our app.”

  1. What do I want the reader to feel (or do)?

This is the most high level articulation of your objective:

“I want to make the reader more confident (in themselves or in us).”

“I want to drive the reader to our website (or to our physical location).”

“Let’s get potential recruits to think about us in their job search.”

“This piece should help people buy our product.”

  1. What’s the best vehicle to reach my goal?

This is the most high level articulation of your approach.

“A short blog post for LinkedIn (or Medium or our corporate blog or Facebook).”

“Prospective customers want an educational and comprehensive white paper on this topic.”

“A direct response email will generate hits to the website and drive sales.”

“A letter from the CEO to our customers posted publicly.”

You can complete this kind of plan in five minutes – perhaps ten if you really need to think about it. But look at what you’ve got once you’ve written this out:

  • A testable hypothesis of what you are going to write. You can share it with colleagues and see if there’s a better idea that you didn’t think of (“this might work better as a Q&A”).
  • A prose “sketch” of what your final product could look like.
  • And, most important, you’ve got your brain fully engaged with the writing process – in part because writing by hand activates lots more neural connections than typing or speaking.

In just a few minutes, you’ve gone from facing an anxiety-producing assignment to setting off on the writing journey with a pretty decent roadmap. There is a world of difference between wandering in the desert and walking towards an oasis. When you have a goal, even if’s a shimmering chimera, you make faster, better decisions about what’s important and what’s not.

Step 2: Never start writing with a blank page.

It is helpful to handwrite your plans for content, objective, and approach, but now’s the time to move into the real writing arena: the white block of nothingness that is a new Word document. Jump-start your writing by typing your handwritten preliminary thoughts on the top of your page one. (I put them in red ink, both to remind myself to take them out later and to separate my preliminary thoughts from actual copy.) If you revise them in doing so, that’s great. That’s another sign your brain is fully engaged in the process.

You’ve just overcome the biggest hurdle any writer will ever face: getting started. You can’t wait around for inspiration, whether you’re writing the great American novel or composing a somewhat clever tweet. As the American painter Chuck Close once said:

“Inspiration is for amateurs – the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will – through work – bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art [idea].”

Step 3: Forget Linearity and Focus on Assembling the Pieces

In Step 1, you charted a course. In Step 2, you got going and overcame your natural inertia. In Step 3, let go of the idea of linearity and write whatever you can write.

We read in a linear way, one word at a time. (Yes, sometimes we read groups of words, but we read groups of words that have one chunk of meaning at a time.) We take in written information in an essentially linear way. Not surprisingly, we are biased to write in a purely linear way. We begin at the beginning, we construct the middle, and we finish at the end.

If you know your argument cold, then this is a reasonable (but boring) approach to writing. But most of the time you won’t know the argument cold. You may not even have an argument to hang your hat on.

Say you’re assigned a speech to rally the troops. It’s not a rational argument; it’s morale-boosting rhetoric, an emotional plea. You’ll wonder if point A goes before point B, or if this fact goes better at the beginning of the piece or at the end. You’ll be on tentative ground – even if you have a decent map, thanks to step 1.

So let go of linearity and write whatever you can think of next. For example: you know that in your new product announcement you’ll have a comment on timing, market availability, and suggested pricing. Start there if you have to, even though you also know it will be the very last chunk in your press release. You also know there will be a beta-user quote, so get that on the page (even if you plan to interview the user, make a quote up now; it will help make your draft more effective and help you elicit the best quote possible). Make the separation between unlinked copy blocks pronounced by typing comments to yourself:

Here’s a thought, but I don’t know where to put it…

This goes somewhere…

Or, my favorite:

I don’t know how to get from the previous paragraph to this one…

When I go back and rewrite, one of two things happens: A) I know exactly how to make that transition; or B) I know that there’s thinking to be done here. Either way, I know there’s work to be done, which makes editing and rewriting much easier.

Writing in this manner is like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle:

Here’s the bottom edge…

All these red pieces with lines go with this barn in the upper left-hand corner…

This blue is the lake in front of the barn…

You group similar pieces and you assemble what you can. You’re not done, but you’ve made progress. And the more pieces you group appropriately, the faster you start to connect the dots, fill in the background, and complete the picture.

Chuck Close’s words “Inspiration is for amateurs,” are my touchstone: You can wait all you want for the muse to land on your shoulder, but the much more effective strategy is to write – as far as you can, as fast as you can, as carelessly as you can stomach. My inspiration comes from putting words on paper – and the freedom from anxiety that it entails.

Of course, putting words on paper isn’t the endgame; the finished piece is the endgame, and “finishing” is just another word for “editing” (and “editing” is just another word for rewriting) – the subject of my next post.