[nickjj]

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 progress to the next chunk of an article until the prior section is 95% edited because what I write next depends on what was previously written.

Does anyone else work like that?

[john-radio]

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.

[tyre]

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.

[rhino369]

>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.

[nickjj]

My blog posts and course scripts aren't just documenting code.

I very rarely know what I'm going to write until I start writing. I don't even outline anything. I just start writing and relentlessly edit as I go.

I do the same thing for 1,000 word blog posts as I do with 400,000+ word course scripts.

If anything editing is more important for the larger pieces of work because in order to cleanly flow to the next lesson or section of a course the prior stuff has to be pretty much in its final form.

[derefr]

That's not what the parent comments are saying. The difference with technical writing isn't that you have a plan for what you're going to write. It's that you already have the domain knowledge that you're going to compile into prose. It's a communication process, rather than an invention process.

A good way to think of creative writing, if you're a technical writer, is to imagine attempting to write a textbook when you don't know the subject at all, and the "demand" from each new paragraph causes you to do the research necessary to acquire the knowledge necessary to write it.

How would you even structure a thing like that, in advance?

How would it ever attain a sensible shape if done a paragraph at a time, when something you learned while doing the research necessary to write paragraph 100 invalidates everything you wrote before it, or causes a complete restructuring of your mental model such that you realize the topic should be presented in an entirely different order? (And then you realize that again, and again, and again...)

A similar thing occurs in investigative journalism. How would you know how to present a story—know what story you're telling, really—before you know all the key facts? In est, before you've completed your investigation? You could certainly write notes about what you might write, but those have little to do with drafting the final story.

[gowld]

In short, how do you write a research paper? Do you write and perfect the abstract before you do the experiment?

[ghaff]

I agree with all that. If something really isn't working and you just keep flinging words and other content onto the page, that's a pretty good recipe for having a lot of throwaway work. I don't usually polish drafts as I'm writing them unless I do so for something to do while I'm mulling where to take the piece.

I'm not really a big outline person either for either writing or presentations. I almost always have some idea where I'm going though it's not unusual for that to diverge.

[Broken_Hippo]

Yet... it does go like this. Art is similar: You cannot simply change a watercolor that much in the middle of painting, for example, so if I have some surrealist scene in my head, I need to at least have the concept laid out before starting to paint. I can do this with acrylic to a point and to a lesser point, oils.

Same thing with writing. Yes, you are literally making things up and inventing new things, but that doesn't mean that one is writing freely and not needing to edit along the way. Outlines give framework, and editing gives time to reflect and plan things that might not have been planned in the beginning. I'm not saying that no one works this way - just sits and writes, or does freehand paintings (I do this last one, even with watercolor, and accept a certain failure rate) - but how one works doesn't really reflect on their creativity nor how their creativity works.

[imagin8or]

I would quote Frank O'Hara at this point, his poem "Why I Am Not A Painter" is a brilliant discussion of stimulus and revision across art forms.

[skissane]

What about writing (say) a masters or PhD thesis?

For many disciplines, the actual research involves field work, performing experiments, etc., and the thesis is primarily about reporting on that process and connecting it to the pre-existing body of research. For other disciplines (for example, philosophy), the text of the thesis is all there is to the research. Maybe the later is more like creative writing and the former more like technical writing??

(My uncle did a PhD in creative writing, his PhD thesis was a novel.)

[SubiculumCode]

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.

[13415]

It is not very good advice for creative writing either, though. The general advice given by agencies and professional authors is to write "to the final version" and roughly edit after every writing session or before the next one. (I'm also talking from personal experience, have written eight novels in German and didn't follow this advice in the beginning.)

[PakG1]

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.

[john-radio]

Yeah, Rowling is famous for how much she planned her novels in advance. The advice that I am passing on isn't "Don't plan your writing in advance"; it's "While you are in the drafting stage, do not pause to go back and do editing work."

[chipotle_coyote]

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.

[grawprog]

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.

[dangero]

For me this edit while writing habit developed in school because I didn't enjoy using a pencil and multiple drafts meant hand writing the entire paper over and over.

For this reason I trained myself to make the first draft the final draft. Now with computers this is no longer relevant as I'm not hand writing multiple drafts on paper.

There are other factors, but I think this one is major for a lot of people.

[tajd]

Me too. I find that I use the writing process to identify what I'm really trying to communicate. I see that it is important to get the text on the page, but I can't seem to move on until I can't reduce the writing before losing meaning.

A book people might find interesting is Joe Moran’s "First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life". He examines writing from the ground up. I found it a really wonderful book to read. Each sentence in it is great.

[paulddraper]

This conversation is simply the English-equivalent of TDD conversations.

* Conventional development = writing, then editing

* Test-driven development = writing and editing simultaneously

The preferences are endless and neither removes the most difficult part which is the conceptual architecture.

Personally, I like to splatter a whole bunch of ideas down first and then later go back and commit.

[whlr]

There are some parallels, but I don't know if the writing:editing::programming:testing analogy is very strong. I think editing is more like refactoring than anything else, but I hesitate to make parallels between code and prose in general.

[kccqzy]

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.

[signal11]

Among professional authors, John Scalzi has said many times that he edits as he goes along[1].

For shorter academic and work pieces (and back when I blogged) I’ve done this as well, but I do an outline for longer papers first, and then edit as I go. Of course I wasn’t anywhere near nickjj’s level of output.

[1] https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/science-fiction-and-fanta...

[m463]

After Old Man's war I read everything Scalzi wrote and he wrote a lot of short stories and no novels. Maybe that explains it?

[bonestamp2]

I'm pretty similar once I actually start writing (100+ technical blogs, 900+ non-technical blogs). But, before I "write", I start with a really rough point form outline -- sometimes it's only a few points that I know I need to make and sometimes it's a dozen points I want to include (some of which may get cut). This high level view helps me create a better story and I find that narrative useful, albeit to a lesser extent, in my technical blogs too.

I also start writing in a fairly basic text editor, not a word processor, which makes it easy for me to reorder that point form outline with my keyboard and get the flow of the major points down before I start the actual writing.

The text editor also prevents me from spending too much time on that 5% of improvements until the very end. But, I do edit major grammar issues and color as I go since, like you, I feel like I can't move on until it sounds right, and the way I say something often shapes what comes next. Still, having an outline helps me get into those weeds a little bit in the moment and not lose sight on where I'm going next.

I can't stress the outline enough. I wish I did it in the early days, but I wasn't able to "see" the whole story from the beginning back then. Now, I find it is the thing that helps me see what is important to the topic. Sometimes I feel like I need to talk about a point up front but after roughing it out I realize it's actually more interesting and easier to understand if I hold it back until the end. Conversely, there are some really interesting things that can't be explained until the end but I can tease them up front to build excitement and then explain them after the foundation is laid.

[amilein7minutes]

I completely agree with you. When it comes to academic writing, the content transforms itself into a more coherent entity as I write. Oftentimes the big picture seems laughably inadequate and even inaccurate when I look at the final product, so much so that writing itself seems like research and thinking beforehand, almost redundant.

Hamming agrees in his famous speech (see the Q&A section on this page - https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html) that 50% of the time is just spent writing/presenting research.

[gerdesj]

I write in one way, I type in another and I also speak in another way. My thoughts are weird.

The words, style and delivery of my intentions through a pen/pencil/crayon differ from my spoken word and typed thoughts.

Trite "avoid ..." theses are often ... trite.

[Baeocystin]

What you describe is how I write as well.

I've tried the 'never edit your first pass' approach before, and I found that my ideas flowed like sandpaper instead of silk. It was awful. I simply do not think in that manner.

[mortivore]

Yeah, I work like that. I don't like writing, and haven't done a lot of it professionally, but this has always been my process when I've had to write.

[pier25]

I work like that too for small stuff but I guess the advice of not editing while drafting is more geared towards longer forms (books, scripts, etc).