How to not wear out your backspace button

Part of being a practical writer is reflecting on your writing process to see if there are any self-defeating habits that are holding you back from writing more or writing better. Since I’m not a paid writer (yet!) and am not usually working under someone else’s deadline, nobody’s holding my feet to the fire. I have to hold myself responsible. (Paid writers do too, of course; it’s awkward at best to blow a deadline or have to rewrite an article, so self-awareness is key for any writer.) And one thing I’ve noticed is that I sometimes delete my work.

Now, I don’t mean I get rid of everything in a fit of pique, turning into a drama llama who despairs of ever writing the Great American Novel. (Come on, I know I'm totally capable of that!) I mean that deleting is more useful for a second draft, when I need to consider where to cut as I edit. In a rough draft—or, as happened recently, a third draft that had a totally new scene—making big cuts can interrupt the flow of my work, creating more problems than it solves.

This is something I told my college students back when I taught composition. Research on what makes a writer “good” or “bad” shows that, while even the best writers feel unconfident at times, mediocre writers can get positively neurotic. What happens then is a lot of self-doubt—and deletion. The idea that everything must be done perfectly all at once leads such writers to delete the rough material they’ve created, giving them nothing to shape in later drafts. Then the deadline passes, the paper is way too short, or the sought-for perfection is far out of sight. And what does get submitted lacks quality; the obsessive (and premature) search for correct grammar causes the writer to introduce more errors into the passage and “fix” things that weren’t wrong to begin with. It makes for a very frustrating experience, and the students—in high school or even earlier at this point—learn that they are “bad” writers. In an academic setting, this can hold them back from going to college, but those who do matriculate go to their first English class already freaking out because they just know their instructor will hate them forever and delight in covering their shoddy papers with red ink.

On the other hand, writers who succeed, who feel confident in their work, who produce good writing, tend to be more tolerant of imperfection on the page. They’re able to produce rough drafts because they know that anything that comes out of their brain is good enough—sure, it's just for now, at this point, and revision will be necessary, but it’s good enough nonetheless. From there, once they have something more substantial to work with, they can delete, refine, edit, and get as close to perfection as they can.

And the erstwhile bad writer can become a better writer by learning to leave imperfection on the page. While it wasn’t easy for most of my students who were convinced they were destined to be terrible writers, when they decided to try something different and just put everything on the page, something changed. Now they had raw material to work with. Their classmates and I could point out what was working well—often much more than they’d thought—which made it much easier for them to hear what wasn’t working well. And from there, with a clear view of what needed to change, they found it much easier—and less distressing—to edit their work.

So when I’m writing a rough draft, I try to just let the work be a mess at first. I can clean it up later. It’s harder to remember to do this when, as I mentioned, it’s a later draft but a brand-new scene in that draft, but it’s good practice to slow down long enough to ask myself if I can let myself speed up.