On Drafts
This post will be a bit shorter than usual.
In a fitting twist of fate, I realized yesterday that my first draft restated much of what I covered in Writing Badly, so I’ve decided to try to extract and distill the difference which is not much.
As I alluded to then and last week, I am always trying to find new ways to trick myself into revising my writing, and I think I’ve found a new way of looking at it.
Or in the words of an old friend, I think I was thinking about it wrong.
Oddly, I also have no intuition as to whether everyone else has been on the same page this whole time or if everyone else is as confused as I am.
Either way I suppose it makes good blog fodder.
The Same Writing Advice That Everyone Gives
Many people are certainly on the right track.
Every teaching and book about writing gives the exact same advice: first drafts should be shitty or fast, bad and rong or whatever, and you revise and improve the first draft until you get to the final draft.
It’s weird advice because, while I agree with it, it also implies that each draft is the same sort of thing.
The first draft is just a bad version of the final draft, and you keep revising until you get from first to final.
While I agree with the spirit of the advice: you should focus on getting words out on the page without comparing yourself to other people’s published pieces.
But it undermines itself in its very wording.
When you call two things the same type of thing, it invites comparison.
That’s why no one ever says, don’t compare green apples to red apples.
Thinking is not the same as writing
Paul Graham loves to write about how you don’t understand something until you write about it.
I think he conflates explaining something to an audience and understanding it yourself.
I know how to drive to work, but I would struggle to write directions for someone else.
That doesn’t mean I don’t understand my commute.
It just means that explaining it to another person is a different skill.
There was a great example of this phenomenon in the Ben, Ben, and Blue podcast (can’t recall the episode) about people not being able to describe how to change lanes.
Hopefully, all drivers understand that.
As with driving, so with other topics.
Even if you have a healthy inner monologue that can think in full paragraphs or even essays, it would be strange to constantly justify why you should care about what you’re thinking about to yourself.
You may have assumptions or worldviews that prop up your ideas or give them meaning that you don’t need to revisit every time you think about them.
When you’re writing for others or even your future self, you need to anticipate your audience’s mental state and meet them where they are.
You need to work your way to your conclusions from the audience’s premises and background rather than your own, and you need to justify to them why they should care (unless they’re your friends and they’ll read your stuff regardless).
Again, this is contrasted with thinking, in which you don’t need to do any of this most of the time.
The Central Dogma
In biology, the Central Dogma states that DNA is transcribed to create RNA (which, as the name suggests, is pretty similar to DNA), and RNA is translated to create proteins (which then become your toenails or let your neurons work or help transcribe more DNA).
I posit that the difference between a first draft and a final draft is as stark as the difference between RNA and protein.
A first draft is simply a transcription of thoughts into a more workable format (words on a page).
Subsequent drafts are the translation of those thoughts into stories or essays.
Like proteins, they are more suited for interacting with the world outside the cytoplasm.
If we revisit the common writing advice, it’s essentially saying that you should focus on transcribing your thoughts before translating them into something other people can digest.
Trying to write the combine the two steps would be like trying to give DNA to a ribosome and expecting it to make a protein.
I think we all know that would be ridiculous.