One Weird Trick for Writing a First Draft

Seriously, it’s really weird. But it’s helped me for 25 years!

via Pixabay

Writing first drafts is hard.

Like most writers, I procrastinate like mad. When I’ve finished my research and time comes to start writing, I’ll poke around in a zillion other tasks — rearranging my desk, tackling old email, going down Wikipedia rat holes. Anything to avoid cracking down on the task at hand: Writing a first draft.

So for me, first-draft writing is all about finding ways to trick myself into avoiding procrastination.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about one of those tricks, “parking downhill.” As I pointed out there …

… a big chunk of avoiding procrastination is about emotional regulation. Procrastination tends — in my case, anyway — to be ultimately about fear.

The reason I avoid sitting down to write is because I’m worried I’ll immediately get stuck. I’m terrified that the words (or concepts) won’t come; that it’ll be too hard for me; that I’ll suck at it then and the next day too and so everything will doomed for me forever. A miserable cycle of septic self-talk, as it were. (We writers love to catastrophize.)

My four rules for writing first-draft prose

So here’s another trick I’ve found to keep myself from procrastinating on a first draft.

When I’ve finally convinced myself to sit down and start writing, I write prose by following four rules. They are:

• I begin each paragraph with a hyphen.
• I lower-case the first letter of every sentence.
• I don’t put a period at the end of a sentence. (A question mark or exclamation point is fine.) Instead…
• … in lieu of a period, I end each sentence using two forward-slashes, like this //

The upshot is that when I’m writing a first draft, the text looks pretty weird.

For example, a few weeks ago I wrote a column for Wired about recent innovations in spreadsheets. Here’s what the first draft looked like, in a screenshot from my copy of Scrivener…