Let Your Writing Rest
Clicking PUBLISH after writing and a quick proofread means mistakes and forgetting things.
The last few weeks, I’ve been writing my posts the same morning they are due to go out.
While consistency is certainly important in the regard of putting out content on a schedule, it’s equally important to be consistent in the accuracy of your writing and making sure you’re delivering complete thoughts.
So, I’m writing this on Tuesday to publish next Monday, so I can be sure to include everything I wanted to say. Over the course of the week, I’ve written 3 more drafts and edited an existing one, so I have a good bank to draw from.
In my article last week about my iPad purchase, I meant to include a couple of sidenotes. I’ve forgotten one. The other was this whimsical set of writings from Margaret Atwood who I indirectly criticized in this post for not understanding what the crap she was writing about.
My last sentence of my iPad article that was meant to drive everything home, had a typo! It said:
Make sure the thing you’re resisting is the total change you desperately need.
When it was supposed to say:
Make sure the thing you’re resisting isn’t the total change you desperately need.
🤦♀️
Ideally…
My writing process would and should look something like this:
The initial brain dump - open that blank box/page and write until you’re finished.
Let it rest! If you’re in a pinch for time, the soonest you should look again is a few hours…after you’ve done other things. Let it go overnight if at all possible. Longer is better.
Read through and fix things: grammar, punctuation, etc.
Let it rest! Yes, again.
Add in what you forgot and remove what’s unneeded.
Rest!
Final proofread and tweaks.
PUBLISH!
In an ideal world, I should have, at minimum, a few articles in the works at all times. This is how I started my Substack and the last few weeks have proven that it’s better that way.
No Matter What You’re Writing…
Unless it’s time sensitive like the news, let it rest!
(And don’t write news. Every time someone reads the news, hope dies..)
Let things sit overnight. If you’ve just written your magnum opus, let it sit longer than that.
When you return to it with fresh eyes, you have the perspective then to make it even better.
I was just thinking about how I should really sleep on my writing before finishing and publishing. As eager as I am to get it out there, when I do let it rest, something better always comes out than what I'd first drafted.