How many times have you heard authors advise you shouldn’t go back and edit while writing your first draft?
For decades, I believed this was optional advice – Advice to help writers push forward if they were having trouble making progress.
I figured it was just another piece of well-meant advice for writers to get over … whatever current hump they’re experiencing. A way to keep going. And that there wasn’t anything more to it.
Surface-level analysis? It makes sense.
Editing halts your momentum.
It follows that everytime you lose momentum, you must make a concerted effort to regain it. So why risk losing momentum at all?
But I always figured there was no harm in it, so long as you’re willing to go back to where you were and continue writing at some point during your session. Turns out I was missing one crucial piece of the puzzle.
Deeper analysis? It doesn’t make as much sense as I thought.
Take what I’m writing right now. I have no trouble editing as I go. Sure, I’ll do a final clean-up pass, but it’s easy enough to write and edit these articles simultaneously.
Fiction is more of a struggle.
Why is that?
Maybe it’s just easier to focus on a thesis and spill your nonfictive thoughts onto the page than it is to orchestrate a complex narrative with many moving parts. Perhaps it’s because we received so many nonfiction assignments in school, and continue to write non-fiction Emails and the like in the the working world.
Whether it’s particularly sound advice or not, “Don’t go back and edit your draft” is bog standard advice you’ll see just about everywhere, especially aimed at those who struggle with writer’s block.
Not everyone needs it – There’s some who can belt out a final draft on their first pass (and, let’s face it, pass the buck to their editors.) Others struggle to tread water on their WIPs, whether they edit or not.
But maybe there’s something more to this advice, something most successful authors have subconsciously discovered (even if most can’t seem to fully articulate why it works).
INVESTIGATION
With the mindset I’ve had, I pretty much always do edits here and there while writing new material. After all, I don’t want to add more to my story if I don’t have what came before somewhat fully fleshed out – I’ll have to come back and edit it anyway, right? This just makes the final edit that much easier.
That’s how I always talked myself into editing as I go.
YouTuber Carl Duncan has an excellent channel on writing (Canadian accent and heavy cat branding aside /joking).
He had this to say in his most recent video:
“…regardless of pantsing or outlining, I think rereading, or at least reminding yourself of what you’ve written in the last session–where you stopped writing last time–can help get you back into the mood and pace of the story –
Carl Duncan
You have to be careful with this because if you reread too much, you may be tempted to go back and start editing. And that can be bad.“
There’s that advice again.
He doesn’t follow his statement with why going back and editing can be such a bad thing. And you’ll see this pattern across the writersphere. People will often drop this advice and just … kind of say it’s a bad idea without much elaboration.
So again, my mind shifts back to thinking, Surely it’s because if you’re reading and editing, you aren’t writing. And if you aren’t writing, you’re not pushing your story forward. Simple as. Right?
Well, if it were that simple, it wouldn’t be a very good topic for my “Often Misunderstood Writing Advice” series. /cheeky
THE BATTLE WITH YOUR BRAIN
Let’s talk about brain behavior. I’ve covered this topic in the past, from dopamine receptors to skinner boxes, from negative feedback loops to “brainhacking” with supplemental “stacks”.
But now I believe thinking about your brain in this way is unhealthy. Believing that dopamine builds overwhelmingly large and nigh unstoppable neural networks is … a terrible mindset.
It can make one feel like breaking a bad habit requires inhuman amounts of willpower, hardly worth the effort if you’ve let those bad habits fester for too long.
But if people can overcome heroin addictions, I’m sure you can find it in yourself to overcome Disney+.
Sometimes you have to be heroic to write believable heroes. So whatever your addiction(s) may be, live by example and make heroic efforts to overcome them. You owe it to yourself.
All that to say it’s better to believe if you ever need to change, you can overcome all that brain science and dopamine and just achieve it. It’s a choice you can make. No twelve step program needed – Just change. Today.
THE MISSING PIECE OF THE PUZZLE
Let’s simplify things. Let’s just talk left brain and right brain.
My previous post foreshadowed the deeper secret to this writing advice when I said:
This whole Noun Game is a very right-brained exercise. It’s a sort of hack to bypass your stubborn left-brain, to spring ideas forth from your subconscious. Stories grow in much the same way.
I’ve also observed this phenomenon many other times in my writing career. Another example can be observed in this post:
…something peculiar happened: I found myself thinking about problems in my story while playing the piano, and found myself thinking about how to improve on the piano while I was writing.
Here’s a post from 2021, where I first shared that tedious activities seem to spark creativity in the quiet of the back of your mind:
…mowing the lawn usually does the trick. Once again, if I go into it thinking about the scene I’m having trouble with, the answer will almost certainly enter my head. And the moment it does, I have to cut the engine, run inside, and type down what I came up with.
It’s hard to deny the fact that I’ve observed this phenomenon many times in my life now – that focusing my mind on something menial brings out an undercurrent of overwhelming creativity, whether I like it or not.
The greatest storytelling discoveries seem to come in the quiet moments. Times when my left brain is going through the motions. I have no say. It just happens.
And therein lies the secret. The right brain seems to light up when the left brain is, for lack of better word, bored.
And then everything becomes clear: It’s easy to edit nonfiction as you go because editing is also a left-brained exercise.
- Editing: Left Brain
- Writing Nonfiction: Also Left Brain!
But when you’re writing fiction, the moment you go back to read–and especially when you go back to edit–your brain goes into an analytical left-brained mode, which kills your momentum.
This is what all these writers have been trying to tell us without actually saying it out loud: Doing anything left brain-focused is a combo breaker when you’re freewriting. The right brain thrives on momentum.
Each time you go back to reread and edit, you’re swapping from a Right Brain activity to a Left Brain activity.
And if you get enough pure right-brain momentum going, you’ll achieve what’s many writers call a “flow state”.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to recreate flow states for years. Decades, even.
Quote from an old post:
If I’m ever lucky enough to achieve a “flow state”, there are events that tend to knock me out of that state.
You see? Even I couldn’t quite put it into words. I always figured getting into a flow state was a matter of luck and persistence. Maybe the result of daily practice.
And even though I have experienced flow state a few times, I couldn’t put a finger on why I’d get knocked out of it.
But knowing what I know now, there’s a good chance I decided to edit.
I’ve also heard from multiple pro authors that developing the ability to enter a flow state is a valuable writer skill. So clearly professionals believe it’s something you can train yourself to do. It’s something you can recreate.
And now we know how they pull it off.
How can you tell if you’re in a flow state?
- You write much more than usual, an unusually productive writing session where the words seem to “flow”.
- You lose track of time, shocked at how much you’ve written, and shocked at what time it now is.
- You don’t edit. You just keep writing.
It’s truly a trance-like state for writers. If you’ll forgive another gaming analogy, it’s like when you get “in the zone” when playing a particularly difficult SHMUP or rhythm game. You just keep dodging bullets or keep that combo alive, and in that moment it feels like you’re invincible.
That is… until you start thinking about it too much. Then boom, game over.
If you’re lucky, you can recover – You can try and grab another ring and regain momentum from zero. But because you decided to edit, there’s a pretty good chance your freewriting session will die today, and you’ll have to pick up the pieces tomorrow.
This concept was also explored in the recent movie F1 (which I do recommend), where the main character sometimes slips into a trance-like state when he drives, a moment where he said it feels like he can fly.
Even the script writers–and by extension, Brad Pitt’s character–couldn’t quite put into words why this happens. They just knew it does. And the fact that this is a mysterious part of the human condition is, to me, a beautiful thing.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, here’s a few more in the series:
Nick Enlowe 