How to Write Faster with Successive Drafts

Today we’ll be discussing how to write faster by streamlining your writing process.

When people say they’re going to write a book, I cringe. Not because I doubt them—exactly the opposite. I cringe because I know how much thankless work is required to write a book. From a business perspective, there’s almost no direct financial return, and only rarely does it have indirect financial return. For every billionaire J.K. Rowling, there are 10,916,371 writers who lose money creating their masterpiece. If you write efficiently, at least you can minimize the damage.

(Note to listeners: If I’ve completely discouraged you from writing a book, great! You’re free! If you’re now more determined than even, that’s also great! Because it means you have the grit to see it through.)

Start at a very high level

Any long piece of writing has a high-level flow. It takes you through the big-chunk concepts in a specific order. Write down that flow in a few sentences. Write one sentence for every major concept for an essay. For a book, write one sentence for each chapter. Just get the thoughts down. Don’t worry about the order, yet.

If you’re writing about the dangers of keeping woodchucks as pets, your big chunks might be:

1. There was a tragic woodchuck incident in Topeka, Kansas, in 1986.
2. Woodchucks can, indeed, chuck wood.
3. Lack of numeracy plagues attempts to quantify woodchuck output.
4. Woodchucks shouldn’t be kept as pets.

That’s just four sentences long. Congratulations! You’ve written your first draft.

Review your masterpiece

Now that you’ve written your first draft, review it. Does the order make sense? Do the pieces flow logically? If not, change the order, add or remove points, and edit your draft until it’s tight. Have someone else read it and give feedback. It’s just a few sentences, so editing will be quick.

Reviewing your woodchuck article reveals that the logic isn’t quite there. Nothing in your outline actually suggests woodchucks shouldn’t be kept as pets.

You think. You revise. You change the order. You tweak and deepen the points to make the logic explicit:

1. Woodchucks can indeed chuck wood, thanks to their amazing teeth.
2. In Topeka, Kansas, the local lumber authority did not know how much wood the Magilicuddy’s pet woodchuck could chuck. The city council sent a representative to measure the woodchuck’s output.
3. The sun, glinting off the woodchuck’s teeth, blinded the representative and caused them to fall, tragically...

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