[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.