Happy writing, Joshua, and thank you for stopping by. Well, now I know. You see, writing is a art, and a way of expressing yourself. I will start writing the shitty draft first and see how that works for me. In fact, I hate to admit this, but the truth is that I avoided writing for many, many years because I was sure that my desire to run quickly out of the room with my tail between my legs every time I faced a blank page was a sign that I had no hope of growing into the writer I so wanted to be. Maybe because when my husband gets home he will do the adult male version of a grocery store toddler yelling “MOM MOM MOM MOM MOM” in hopes of getting some sugary cereal. ((Imagine all the things I could DO with that extra time….)) Review your first draft with kindness, looking for the jewels, rather than ruthlessness, summing up everything that’s wrong. The purpose of your first draft depends on your writing process: Sometimes you may need to produce content quicker, and at other times you may have more time for exploration and experimentation. For the mobile writer, I like Evernote and Google drive because they synchronize to my main computer easily and allow me to copy paste into Scrivener easily. Crazy world. On the text editor front, consider Notepad++ its a very flexible editor built on Scintilla. After reading your article and the responses, I realize I don’t know anything about any of these tools. $700 bucks per month … now that could make a big difference to a lot of people (and just by writing articles). Often times, nonprofits hire writers to create the copy for grant proposals for governmental or charitable foundations. Understanding that the doubts are normal and that the crappy first draft is just a first stage in the writing process made a big difference to me. But there is this gap. This post could not have come at a better time! I love your post. I appreciate it. It’s good to step off the treadmill and try some different ideas now and then. I don’t write in chunks, like Scrivener. You can see his personal site at willmoyer.com and find him on Twitter where he tweets about web design, writing, and heterodox political philosophies. Not as robust as Word, but I could do what I needed to with styles, so I was happy. I don’t know how it works, but this voice is the force that will make a reader listen to you.”. There are fantastic plain text apps that provide a heavenly writing environment, especially compared to the hell of Microsoft Word. "There's a premium placed on well-developed writing skills," observed one human resources director. And I use it on my iOS devices too. Sometimes more like flypaper. At that time, WordPerfect was the standard word processor, and many of my friends thought me crazy for choosing the upstart Word. (https://www.apple.com/mac/pages/) Have you gotten a chance to try it out? But even so, I don’t get Word. . As Donald M. Murray writes in “A Writer Teaches Writing:” The purpose of the first draft is to discover. If it's easy you're probably not being honest. But more often than not, it’s just a slog, and the more you write, the more slogging you must do. Most of the writing and publishing world uses and relies on Word. It takes them a lot of time to write even one paragraph. I love Autocorrect so I can type 2-3 letters and have expand to long names, words, phrases and places that I don’t have to write out every time. ~ Stephen King. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. I’ll be trying out your suggestions post haste. So I did some research and by learning how to use the Heading styles and Navigation pane I was able to reproduce in Word some of the features in Scrivener that I liked. BTW, you may be interested to know, last year alone, IBM invested a mind-boggling $5 billion in new technologies. (Each was bundled with a daisy-wheel printer.) But I do like the idea of the shitty first drafts. In so doing, my blog runs dry as it now lacks fresh content. BUT, I’ve recently switched to Mac and I don’t have MS Word installed and I’ve been going through withdrawals! And weren’t you going to call your friend? I believe that free people free to choose make good choices. Gates was a marketing genius, and he priced MS-DOS perfectly for the IBM market. Lol. Just like you said you did with last week’s article. I’ve not heard it described like that before. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. How to overcome writer’s block The 5-step revision process to edit rough drafts 17 blog writing prompts to kickstart your creativity. We are our own worst critics. Learn more about books and courses, I never saw myself as a writer, but in my early forties, I learned how to write and discovered the joy of writing. To start, you might try another, better word processor. , For me, I found that writing with a pencil and paper also helps me with the first draft. It enables me to focus on my writing, without having to worry about the mechanics of the tool. It was very clunky and hard to read straight through. The problem with Open/LibreOffice is that it is a MS clone. It’s normal to take awhile. There’s a trade off – the more meaningful something is, the easier it is to accept “bad” writing. I find all Microsoft’s products bloated and unwieldy. I’m not saying that all writers hate all writing all the time, or that writers are mentally and/or emotionally challenged individuals who compulsively indulge in self-destructive behavior just for kicks (though that has been said before, unfortunately, since it’s such a gross misinterpretation of authorial behavior). Just be kind to yourself—it may take a while to get into the spirit of freewriting. Once again, you’ve made us all feel a whole lot better. Im enchanted! This article on shitty ‘discovery’ drafts have really helped me a lot. Yeah, this is a huge problem for a lot of writers. When I quit doing software training, I got a Mac and switched to Pages, which is a great little program. (I just want to start writing) Pieces are scattered and disjointed. And also the opposite: the paragraph I like best while writing my first draft, often gets scrapped when rewriting. I never used outlines until extremely recently, and even then, I suck at them. I love reading and I like writing for the creative expression but I just hated the process of writing. Life is messy & I ‘m always trying too damn hard to make it neat! For the time being, it looks like I’m stuck wrangling with the beast. You have motivated me. So many people I know don’t even know their typing speed because the software corrects all their little typos. I would definitely be interested, Alexis! I stepped in to the unknown and wrote an am and pm entry. Microsoft became the industry standard because Bill Gates was smart enough to install DOS (as was) on every office machine he sold for “free”. i would lose time and interest – all at the same time. I’ve fully jumped into the Google ecosystem, and Google Docs/Drive is the setup that works best for me. My opinion a lot of the time too! Following the guidelines would be great! So happy. Talk about serendipity. As Donald M. Murray writes in “A Writer Teaches Writing:”. Just an update on the Open Source topic mentioned. There’s also Open Office, which is an open source version of MS Word’s programs (and it’s FREE). Maybe also you are bad at planning. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Bad writers continue to write badly because they have many reasons – in their view very good reasons – for writing in the way they do. Well, I’m here to tell you there’s a way out. I really enjoy formatting as I type, and using keyboard shortcuts makes it fast and easy. I wish it was a hot topic because writers deserve better! . To be surprised by new wisdom. I knew it! Papers to write, but I hate writing papers. Now, I’d like to empower you to find your voice, share your ideas and inspire your audience. Word, as that’s what I have with my laptop. I could write a third of a novel in the time it would take to learn Scrivener. No matter how much they hate it, no matter how much they wish they could stop, no matter how much it affects their professional and personal lives, they keep using MSW. Trailblazers don’t worry themselves with such things. In the same way that no-one was ever fired for buying IBM, so no-one ever lost their job buying Microsoft – certainly not in the corporate world. Keeping a. Because grant writing is so precise, learn the ins and outs with this Federal grant writing … It’s not always about how well you do what you do; I think it’s also about how well you manage to keep your head held high even when you’re constantly tripping. Another Evernote user here! so, i realized that if i start commenting without thinking very much about how best to put it, i flow freely, and i produce rich content. You can transform a shitty first draft into magical content like a caterpillar morphs into a butterfly. I never thought of writting in this manner. Good-bye MSOffice. So it’s understandable that they hate the whole process of staring at the blank sheet of paper. By the mid-80s, computer manufacturers stopped offering multiple possible operating systems and simply relied on DOS. Apple, by comparison, was tiny. I do appreciate the gems free writing can open up but when you’ve followed a certain process for years it takes time to try something else. In the future, when we see a blank screen or a jumbled mess of words, we’ll remember that you suffer from shitty first drafts too! I can imagine that writing with pencil and paper could help, too. I suppose I don’t have to explain how this has benefited simple, poor families all over the world by providing universities, governments, and commercial research labs with technical ability to address a wide range of problems that had simply been too complex to tackle. I can see how MS Word isn’t the ideal tool for composing. hello henneke! So, try to make the first task as small as possible. I remember the first time I saw a fellow journalist write that way and realized it saved a lot of time. At the time, most computers were sold without an operating system. Try out IA Writer! Thinking about it though. I, for one, will no longer enable the use of Microsoft Word. Or, at least, better writing. My thoughts of the day, events and with no idea where my year would take me. It’s ironic, isn’t it? Using an actual program, whether MSW or one of the ones you mentioned, means I’d be switching from Chrome to another program constantly – and that’s just a big annoyance. In contrast, writing a first draft has always seemed damn hard work. I think another reason why so many writers hate writing is because AT FIRST – and this is critical, since the rewards of a writing practice are too numerous to begin to list — writing demands so much, yet it promises so little in return. Evernote is great for idea capturing and notes, but I’ve never been a fan of using it for composition. The majority buying an IBM machine back then opted to add MS-DOS because it wasn’t free and it wasn’t expensive. I have often felt that my writing fell short of what I was capable, and this probably has to do with the fact that I’ve been in this high productivity world of writing, where your first draft is essentially your only full draft. Susan, I am like you. That's not a put-down on myself, since it's simply due to sheer lack of practice. Its funny what the subconscious comes up with, if you let it. And if they don’t, I have to throw them out completely. Among them were all of the big producers like IBM, Gateway, Dell, Tandy, Commodore, and so forth. And you’re still stuck looking at a bloated interface built for formatting, not composing. You may just have to trust me on this one for now, but soon you should find that being able to express your thoughts clearly in writing can produce an enormous sense of delight and satisfaction. To transform your shitty first draft, you go through a similar process. I so enjoy receiving your posts Henneke, as all of them are have been such a timely support and learning throughout my writing journey, including this one. That’s my favorite quote from Stephen King! By using ThoughtCo, you accept our, Guides for Students and Instructors in English 101, The Basic Characteristics of Effective Writing, A Writing Portfolio Can Help You Perfect Your Writing Skills, Grant Writing Courses You Can Take Online, Definition and Examples of a Transition in Composition, Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia, M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester, B.A., English, State University of New York. As the old adage says, “kill your darlings.” This is a bleed-over from rule #2, but it deserves its own rule, because it’s important. Also, OP, I just posted the same thing under "I can't write anymore". That sounds like a great strategy to simply write. I always knew that a rough draft is not your final draft but somehow still struggle. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. Had you ever attempted to market a product or service, you would not hold a notion like this. We should learn to value that rough draft. I’m sorry this post arrived too late for you. Writing involves comparison, favorable or not, to more seasoned authors engendering insecurities about how much better or faster a favored scribbler might have treated the novice’s topic. Google Keep is also a great way to quickly type up notes to be used for later, on desktop or mobile. Hey Henneke! We use cookies (your browsing data) to provide content that's helpful to you. And a second one for the office in 1985.

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