Write first, think later

That’s my new motto: Write first, think later. I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but this makes a good motto for me. I tend to do the opposite. I think first, and push writing down the road for later. I do write. But for each hour I write, I spend nine hours thinking about writing.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of “sharpening the axe”. The quote from the quote book says if someone needs to cut down a tree, they should spend most of that time sharpening their axe. And it seems to make sense that I should sharpen my ideas before I write them down. But what does sharpening the axe really mean in this analogy?

What if chopping wood is how I sharpen the axe? What if writing sharpens my ideas? That’s a very different prospect. If that is the case, we should follow the method Peter Elbow suggests. If you have four hours to write an essay, do you spend an hour planning, write the draft, and leave yourself 30 minutes at the end to revise? That’s the usual pattern.

If on the other hand you adopt the developmental model of the writing process, you might well try to write it four times, not once, and try to help the piece evolve through these four versions. This sounds crazy and impossible because the writing process is usually so slow and tortured, but it needn’t be.
– Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers

That last part is important. This idea seems crazy because I usually make writing harder than it needs to be. I am actually cutting the tree with a dull axe. Planning feels like it shapes the idea, but nothing has actually touched the dull edge of the axe. The more I struggle over words, the more I kill the momentum of each swing.

That’s the Elbow method. Four drafts in four hours. The first three drafts sharpen the axe, and the final draft cuts down the tree.

There you go. You can see my thought process in action. It’s a bit messy, but it has started to shape an idea.