Tuesday’s writing tip for authors

Whether your goal is to write an article, a book, or a monthly newsletter, the secret to making the most of your short, daily writing sessions–scheduled with the help of a free online calendar, as previously described–is to cover as much ground as possible during your budgeted time. To do this, you must avoid the “curse of perfection,” the widely held, but totally mistaken, belief that your first draft has to be perfect.

Nothing can be further from the truth. Your first draft is simply the starting point of the journey your words will take between your brain and the page (or computer screen) where your words will be displayed.

There will be time enough, later, to refine the first draft, to take care of the pesky details that obscure your ideas, such as:

• Eliminating run-on sentences, (2 short sentences are always better than a single long sentence)
• Replacing passive verbs with active verbs (i.e., “The ball was hit by John” versus the clearer “John hit the ball)
• Deleting extra, unnecessary, redundant, unwanted, words
• Making sure that verbs agree with nouns, (i.e., substituting “They were wrong” for “They was wrong”)
• And the like.

So, write the first draft as quickly as you can, without self-editing. Later, review it with the help of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, after you have shared it with a co-worker, or after submitting it to your editor.

There is always time to improve something after it’s been written, but it’s impossible to improve something that hasn’t been written.