The best training I had for writing something without editing it to death was freelancing for a tiny tiny newspaper in a tiny tiny town in rural Prince Edward Island.
It was the mid-1970s, so no computers. Editing ad nauseum meant retyping ad nauseum.
I was in my early twenties, so no experience except high school, where I’d perfected the art of “just-in-time” essay production, with little research and less editing (thankfully, with just enough native talent to end up with a reasonable GPA).
This approach did not translate well to university courses after first year, but it worked great for that tiny tiny newspaper.
Why?
For someone with ADHD, there’s nothing like a deadline to light a fire under your butt.
And there’s no deadline like deadlines in the media business. Everything depends on getting the story posted in time for the press run, the broadcast, the delivery trucks. If my article was late, they wouldn’t be stopping the presses.
They’d just replace my article with something that fit the space allotted for mine. But they wouldn’t be happy about it. And there was a good chance I wouldn’t get hired again anytime soon.
At the time, I didn’t own a typewriter, so I had to use one at the newspaper office, which meant I had to be done by the time the office closed or the rightful occupant of the desk I was using needed the machine, whichever came first.
So I learned how to stop editing and just hand in whatever I had when my typewriter time was up.
I also had to learn to just let it go. It wasn’t mine anymore. I wouldn’t even see it again until it came out in print.
Once I submitted an article, the editor did whatever he wanted with it, up to and including cutting it off mid-sentence if the word count was greater than the space available. When he said 500 words, he meant it. Not 501, not 499. Five hundred.
But even with the editor as backstop, I still had to produce something he could work with. Since I wasn’t a fast enough typist to retype something if I didn’t like it, I settled for simply refining what I’d learned to do for those high school essays.
I’d compose my article straight from my notebook, planning it in my head on the fly, and drafting, revising and proofreading at the same time. I learned how to create a “good-enough” draft all in one go and to hand it in without even rereading it.
While this did work just fine at that tiny tiny newspaper, it’s actually not a good habit to get into.
Editing as you go activates our most critical, judgemental inner voices, which goad us into unreasonable levels of perfectionism and a myopic view of what we’ve written.
Composing on a computer makes it even worse. The fact that you can change anything and everything, infinitely, means that if you have a perfectionistic streak, you’re doomed. You find you just can’t leave it alone.
So what to do instead? How do you stop editing, declare your piece “good enough” and just hit publish already?
(To be continued)
