Editing is far easier than writing. You can usually look at a finished product and notice its flaws in a single read-through. “This section is a bit redundant”, “the tone in this passage is jarring”, “this paragraph feels overlong”. As long as you have something that’s rough but substantive, there’s plenty of low hanging fruit for the fixing.
Nobody wants to create flawed work. So, it can be very tempting to try to tackle the task of identifying and fixing flaws in your own work, as you do the work. By just taking extra care, one might avoid making the mistakes they will later need to rectify in the editing process. In most cases, this is a trap that will stifle you.
This is because creating something bad on the first try is vastly easier and faster than creating something good. So, by backspacing every word that doesn’t strike you as correct on a first pass, you severely curtail your ability to complete a first pass at all.
Far more pleasant and effective is the practice of letting go of all standards, and just throwing words onto the page as they occur to you. Picking the best bits out of something you churned out in a few minutes is much more productive than trying to generate exclusively “best bits”. You can easily write the length of ten “perfect” drafts this way in the time it takes a backspacer to write one.
How I use stream-of-consciousness to write faster and better
First, let go of all standards. Avoid backspacing beyond fatfingered keys. Commit to clumsy word choices. Allow convoluted sentences. As long as it is intelligible English, it stays.
Start by writing bullet points on every thought you have on the subject you’re writing about, regardless of relevance, sequence, or redundancy.
Then, think about the order in which these points may work, and move them into a rough sequence
Then, write subsections based on these bullet points - starting with whichever bullet point is the easiest to elaborate on.
Flesh out the next bullet point based on whichever is easiest, and repeat. By the time you reach “difficult” bullet points to flesh out, you have generally developed the ideas you’re writing about to an extent that makes these sections much clearer, allowing you to complete at least a rough version of them.
Do not read back the things you have written until it is time to edit. Getting halfway through a paragraph, and re-reading it from the beginning before you’ve finished it is a fantastic way to triple the time it takes without any improvement to the finished product. Do one thing at a time - when you write, write. When you edit, edit. Reading things back is editing, not writing.
Once the first pass is complete, it’s just a matter of checking for mistakes, cutting out fluff, and fixing inelegant wording.
Surprisingly, I often find that I keep much more of the “stream of consciousness” wording in the final draft than I expect. Your brain is capable of producing prose that is quite good without much time spent thinking, and it’s not always the case that lengthier deliberation produces better stylistic results. By letting go of your “standards”, you may surprise yourself with what you end up producing.
What it looks like
To give you an idea, here is some unedited prose from the first draft of this essay as I decided its title. It took about 90 seconds to write:
I am writing this current sentence in a “stream of consciousness” style - I am not editing, not pausing to think, not backspacing at all, and for illustrative purposes, I will include this in the final post. I have not yet thought of a title for the post beyond the words “stream of consciousness, so let’s think of one now. The idea behind it is that I will just crank out as many bad ideas as my brain will produce, ugly and unrefined, and hope that one of them is reasonably good, and run with that. Here we go:
The productive power of Stream of Consciousness
Stream of Consciousness as a creative tool
Stream of consciousness disinhibits the mind productively
Stream of consciousness cures writers’ block
Cure uncertainty with stream of consciousness
Don’t edit before you create
Don’t edit before you write things down
Don’t edit your ideas before having them
The first draft is supposed to be bad.
Most of these titles are bad, but it doesn’t matter - I got a title I like, and an amusing snippet of bad writing I can use as an illustration, in just over a minute.
Brainstorming
A related tool is brainstorming - generating a wide set of ideas quickly, often in a group. When I would brainstorm as a kid in the classroom, I missed the point entirely - I would try to only contribute good ideas to the storm. I treated it like a competition to see whose idea of the group was best, and the one who puts the best idea on the whiteboard wins. I probably missed out on having many good ideas because of this attitude. The purpose of brainstorming, stream-of-consciousness, and any anti-editing practice, is disinhibition.
Conclusion
Editing does not belong in the early stages of the creative process. When you’re sitting at a desk typing a draft nobody will see, there is no danger to be avoided with inhibition. What remains are the disadvantages - it stifles and paralyses, and kills your ideas in the crib. Instead of trying to articulate things perfectly as you go, do the opposite.
Act like every word you say has a fixed probability of being the perfect word, but it can only be discerned after it’s written. Under this assumption, the rational thing to do is articulate as many ideas as possible, recognise the “perfect” ones, and remove the rest afterwards.
Give yourself permission to focus on actually creating something first. Only then should you take a chisel to it.
Editing is far easier than writing. You can usually look at a finished product and notice its flaws in a single read-through. “This section is a bit redundant”, “the tone in this passage is jarring”, “this paragraph feels overlong”. As long as you have something that’s rough but substantive, there’s plenty of low hanging fruit for the fixing.
Nobody wants to create flawed work. So, it can be very tempting to try to tackle the task of identifying and fixing flaws in your own work, as you do the work. By just taking extra care, one might avoid making the mistakes they will later need to rectify in the editing process. In most cases, this is a trap that will stifle you.
This is because creating something bad on the first try is vastly easier and faster than creating something good. So, by backspacing every word that doesn’t strike you as correct on a first pass, you severely curtail your ability to complete a first pass at all.
Far more pleasant and effective is the practice of letting go of all standards, and just throwing words onto the page as they occur to you. Picking the best bits out of something you churned out in a few minutes is much more productive than trying to generate exclusively “best bits”. You can easily write the length of ten “perfect” drafts this way in the time it takes a backspacer to write one.
How I use stream-of-consciousness to write faster and better
First, let go of all standards. Avoid backspacing beyond fatfingered keys. Commit to clumsy word choices. Allow convoluted sentences. As long as it is intelligible English, it stays.
Do not read back the things you have written until it is time to edit. Getting halfway through a paragraph, and re-reading it from the beginning before you’ve finished it is a fantastic way to triple the time it takes without any improvement to the finished product. Do one thing at a time - when you write, write. When you edit, edit. Reading things back is editing, not writing.
Once the first pass is complete, it’s just a matter of checking for mistakes, cutting out fluff, and fixing inelegant wording.
Surprisingly, I often find that I keep much more of the “stream of consciousness” wording in the final draft than I expect. Your brain is capable of producing prose that is quite good without much time spent thinking, and it’s not always the case that lengthier deliberation produces better stylistic results. By letting go of your “standards”, you may surprise yourself with what you end up producing.
What it looks like
To give you an idea, here is some unedited prose from the first draft of this essay as I decided its title. It took about 90 seconds to write:
Most of these titles are bad, but it doesn’t matter - I got a title I like, and an amusing snippet of bad writing I can use as an illustration, in just over a minute.
Brainstorming
A related tool is brainstorming - generating a wide set of ideas quickly, often in a group. When I would brainstorm as a kid in the classroom, I missed the point entirely - I would try to only contribute good ideas to the storm. I treated it like a competition to see whose idea of the group was best, and the one who puts the best idea on the whiteboard wins. I probably missed out on having many good ideas because of this attitude. The purpose of brainstorming, stream-of-consciousness, and any anti-editing practice, is disinhibition.
Conclusion
Editing does not belong in the early stages of the creative process. When you’re sitting at a desk typing a draft nobody will see, there is no danger to be avoided with inhibition. What remains are the disadvantages - it stifles and paralyses, and kills your ideas in the crib. Instead of trying to articulate things perfectly as you go, do the opposite.
Act like every word you say has a fixed probability of being the perfect word, but it can only be discerned after it’s written. Under this assumption, the rational thing to do is articulate as many ideas as possible, recognise the “perfect” ones, and remove the rest afterwards.
Give yourself permission to focus on actually creating something first. Only then should you take a chisel to it.