Hope Writes

Getting it right

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”
- Robert Cromier

I’ve often started stories or articles, only to scrap the project several times over because it didn’t feel “right.” For some reason I’d rather start over from scratch at times, rather than go through several rounds of editing. What is “right”? Is there a right way to write?

I think some writers have a tendency to do this, especially if you’re obsessive about getting it “right” the first time around. I personally hate writing draft after draft. My writing routine usually consists of either writing and re-writing sentences or paragraphs until I’m happy with them until the whole piece is finished.

I don’t think any piece of my writing is ever necessarily perfect. I just dislike the process of writing one draft after another until the end product is polished enough to send off. It’s like my brain is always in edit mode while I’m writing, too.

I hear a lot of writers talk about being on their fifth (or eleventh!) draft of copy. Yikes! Maybe my writing could be better or more polished if I took the time to keep writing draft after draft. I think it’s a waste of time to keep doing that.

With technology and computers, we have the ability to delete, change, edit, alter text quickly and with great ease. I think it would drive me nuts to keep writing the same thing over and over until I’ve worked out all the kinks. I’ll just work my kinks out as I go.

I’m not saying that I only write one draft. In fact, I just finished my first short non-fiction book, and I wrote about five or six drafts before I finally whittled it down to my last draft and sent to my editor. That’s the most edits I’ve probably ever done, though.

Most of my articles are written in one draft. Some have gone through one or two edits, but never more than that. My essays are usually written in one or two drafts, too.

I said all this to say that whether you get it “right” the first time around, or suffer through endless edits, the good thing about writing is that you can always go back and change things.

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