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Show HN: Avoid editing while writing your first draft
- chadlavi 7y agoHow do you reference what you've already written? Why not just make it uneditable?
- rolandas 7y agoThis experiment was made with intention to write down everything there is on your mind without making connections between them. Reading and referencing previous thoughts can create an urge to begin editing early on (for example, your next idea needs better support from previous one).
- i_am_proteus 7y agoI have a simpler method to accomplish the same task: a typewriter. The key, for me, is to retype into a computer and edit during that phase.
- disintegore 7y agoHow in hell is that "simpler"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gk1 7y agoProbably meant technologically simpler, since no software is involved. Acquiring and operating a typewriter is definitely not, in my view, a simple alternative. Just writing with pen and paper seems simpler on all counts.
- i_am_proteus 7y agoTypewriter operation is on the same order of simplicity as typing on a computer and operating a printer. Typewriter acquisition is about an hour of time and $50. Admittedly, I've owned a typewriter for longer than I've owned a conputer. I put it down in favor of WP5.1, but picked it back up a few years ago. The advantage over pen and paper, for me, is speed and legibility.
- djsumdog 7y agoI think they might have been referring to needing to type the whole thing again. Back in the typewriter days, I remember drafting papers on pen and pencil until I was read, and then typing it out; occasionally switching to white out ribbons to fix mistakes. Word processors changed a lot of that, and big high school we could all type our papers in Word97 or Corel WordPerfect and print them out; no intermediate steps. I suppose with a typewriter today, you could still just OCR the result using an old scanner you can pick up at a garage sale or thrift store for nothing, if you didn't want to re-type everything by hand. R.R. Martin has said he still uses and old word processor with Word Star on it, to have fewer distractions. He transfers things over via floppy disk.
- _trampeltier 7y agoYesterday I watched "All the President's Men". Even I knew of course, there was an time without computer in the offices, but still, it felt a bit .. really like from a different time. I also did think about, how it would not be so easy like today, to change words or just wrong chars like today.
- ken 7y agoA go (囲碁, not ~lang) master once taught me how to get my subconscious to reveal moves it knew were bad. We played a quick game, cleared the board, and then played the same game over again. The moves I remembered immediately were the right ones. The moves where I hesitated were the wrong ones. He was easily 20 stones better than me but my subconscious knew, at least, every time I made a mistake against him, even in complex situations. Repetition is under-appreciated today. I think it's something we lost when we gave up typewriters. I'm not saying we should go back to ink and paper in all cases but I do think there is an aspect we're missing out on, like someone whose fitness deteriorates when they start driving everywhere, or who doesn't know where anything is now that they have a GPS-enabled smartphone.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- oblib 7y agoIt certainly accomplishes the intended goal of hiding what you've just typed in a slick and quick way. I'm not sure why this is a good thing though. Often times I find I need to go back and edit something for the purpose of continuity. This doesn't prevent that, but it does hide the reason for it. But, hey, if it works for the user I find no reason to criticize those who'd use it.
- DTrejo 7y agoCool! Another easy way to do this is to close your eyes while you write. Feature idea: prevent you from leaving the page or doing anything else on your laptop for the time period, that way you can’t research anything. More tips: https://dtrejo.com/how-to-write-consistently-painlessly-and-without-writers-block https://dtrejo.com/how-to-write-consistently-painlessly-and-...
- CalChris 7y agoI completely agree. The first draft should never see the light of day. Just put down your ideas and your points in no particular order. Do not outline. Do not format. Adhere to no rules except to get the first draft done well before the deadline. After that, you write.
- rayalez 7y agoShameless plug - my app, Writing Streak, has the "typewriter" mode (Alt+T) that prevents you from editing the text you wrote, and a "blurred" mode (Alt+B) that hides the text you type, achieving the same effect: https://writingstreak.io https://writingstreak.io
- skrebbel 7y agoGood plug. I just gave it a try. I like the blur, but I find it hard to use. I make extremely many typos and my normal typing method involves simply hitting backspace a lot of times. Obviously I should address that instead of complaining about your blur feature on HN, but the gist is: if I can't even see the last few words I wrote, I'll end up writing gibberish :-) If there'd be a "blur everything except the last 15 characters or so" kind of mode, or something where it gradually blurs characters as they're further away from the cursor (like a warcraft "fog of war" for typing), then that'd be ultra neat. That said: WOW that app is nice. You got yourself a new user. I love how it's essentially device local and signup is optional. Super user friendly that way, in a literal sense (i.e. it's very kind & friendly to the user)
- oplav 7y agoThis is cool, will give it a try. Just FYI, in "typewriter" mode, you can still delete if you use Ctrl + Delete or Option + Delete on a Mac. And then if you delete everything in "typewriter" mode using either of those key modifiers, using the other modifier on the empty text input crashes the app.
- msla 7y ago> Shameless plug - my app, Writing Streak, has the "typewriter" mode (Alt+T) that prevents you from editing the text you wrote Does it support overstriking? Typing o<BS>/ is a legitimately good way to type ø, for example; it isn't a universal input method by any stretch but when it works, it's very mnemonic.
- godot 7y agoThis is a bit funny to say, since I've only seen both this and the Show HN app in the last 5 minutes, but something I immediately wished for was this blurred mode + the hide everything except the current line from the OP. In other words, blur everything except the current line. Blurring everything makes it impossible to fix (or see) typos which is annoying, knowing that the output of the thing is going to be full of typos. Hiding texts has another issue (even if not hiding the current line), that is you don't even have a rough idea of how much you've written and what the paragraph lengths look like so far. If we do blur, but don't blur the current line, it solves both problems for me.
- jpincheira 7y agoI saw other options, but I love how minimal this is. Really.
- voiper1 7y agohttps://draftin.com/ https://draftin.com/ also has a hemingway mode that disables editing.
- fbelzile 7y agoYet another shameless plug - my app, Cold Turkey Writer, forces you to write for a certain amount of time or word count before letting you close the app. The pro version also lets you disable the backspace/delete key to prevent editing. https://getcoldturkey.com/writer/ https://getcoldturkey.com/writer/
- mbrock 7y agoHere’s my attempt at a tool for writing not even a draft but a stream of consciousness that evaporates like a daydream or prayer. https://swa.sh https://swa.sh It doesn’t work on mobile, but you should use it with a proper keyboard anyway. There’s nothing sent from the JavaScript to any server; it’s a static page hosted on Netlify with very simple code. It’s just an index.html with style and script tags, 39 lines total. I use it in the evening when the baby is asleep and I just want to reflect and think for a while. Maybe you will like it too.
- mynameiskyleok 7y agoThis is great. I often write just to clear my head. There's never an output/deliverable. It's just meditation. Thanks for sharing!
- mbrock 7y agoGlad you like it! Feel free to save it to your disk and modify it. I forgot to put a free software license, will do later...
- nickjj 7y agoThis might be an unpopular opinion but I always edit while writing my first draft. This is how I've written 250+ technical blog posts and over a million words worth of course notes. I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I'll give it all a final reordering / fixing until I'm happy with it. I feel like I can't progress to the next chunk of an article until the prior section is 95% edited because what I write next depends on what was previously written. Does anyone else work like that?
- mortivore 7y agoYeah, I work like that. I don't like writing, and haven't done a lot of it professionally, but this has always been my process when I've had to write.
- pier25 7y agoI work like that too for small stuff but I guess the advice of not editing while drafting is more geared towards longer forms (books, scripts, etc).
- tajd 7y agoMe too. I find that I use the writing process to identify what I'm really trying to communicate. I see that it is important to get the text on the page, but I can't seem to move on until I can't reduce the writing before losing meaning. A book people might find interesting is Joe Moran’s "First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life". He examines writing from the ground up. I found it a really wonderful book to read. Each sentence in it is great.
- john-radio 7y agoThe "never edit while drafting" advice comes from the creative writing community. It might be of limited use in cases like technical writing, where you already might have a solid idea what the final product should look like before you start. Most people find that trying to write a novel and edit it at the same time is like baking cookies one by one.
- kazinator 7y agoIf you don't do some editing while writing a first draft, but instead defer your intent to make those corrections, you will fail to execute some of those corrections later. The virtue of editing on a computer is that you can easily correct as you go. If you don't think that's a good idea, you might as well go back to a typewriter or handwriting.
- kazinator 7y agoBy the way, I understand that editing while writing disrupts some people's "flow". But that doesn't mean that we have to write an entire larger work in a flow. We can switch to flow mode the granularity of paragraphs or sections/chapters.
- thdrdt 7y agoMasters in all kinds of areas have in common that they start with the big picture and then start refining level by level. But they can keep themselves from refining details that are smaller than the current level. I think this works for writing as well. Personally I also use this in programming. When I was young I directly dove into the details but that just doesn't work. Now I'm more like a painter. First big strokes and taking smaller brushes as I move along.
- alpaca128 7y agoIt also makes it easier to still make larger changes early on; details often depend on how the basic structure looks, so they make changes more difficult.
- tyre 7y ago> I think this works for writing as well. Many many many fiction writers have said they don't plan things out this way. A vast majority of writers I've read interviews of do not plan things out this way. Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, Stephen King, and George Saunders are a few I've seen talk about this in person. Reported pieces are sometimes different, but even then in narrative non-fiction that narrative can evolve along the way. For technical pieces it could be the same. The reason it works is that it is far easier to futz around with the master plan/outline than it is to get your ass in a chair and write. Also, in fiction certainly, the characters reveal themselves as they go. You can't build more than a pastiche of a human with an outline.
- munmaek 7y agoI do something like this from time to time, just with pen and paper. I often have thoughts for blog posts, and I'll write out as much as I can in a dedicated notebook. After ~2-6 days, I'll look at it again with fresh eyes and type up a first rough draft, doing edits, writing more, and rearranging everything to be more cohesive. Again, after 2-6 days I'll take another look and polish the draft. Generally by that point I find the post is ready to go, but sometimes I go through three or four edits on pieces I'm not sure about. Feedback is also good- I typically ask a friend or my brother to see what they think. Planes and trains are great for this; I find that I get a lot of writing done while traveling. Even on the subway, sometimes I just type up thoughts into the Notes app, and then pull it up on my computer later.
- tyre 7y agoI think you'd enjoy "Draft No. 4" by John McFee. He talks about a very similar approach to writing. You might pick some things up from him talking in depth about the same :)
- munmaek 7y agoIf you mean this [0], that was a very good read. [0]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4
- jeffwass 7y agoI wrote the second half of the draft of my novel (kids Sci-Fi) on my iPhone on the train to/from work (scrivener app). I could get in the zone and just tap away. Now editing, that’s a whole different ballgame. I find editing very hard to do on the phone.
- Justindiamond 7y agoLove this so so so much.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y agoDoesn't the fact that language improves ability to reason suggest that structure does too? I wonder if this edit later advice is any good. ISTR Harper Lee said she worked on a page at a time till it was right.
- lower 7y agoYou should try ed sometime :).
- rpastuszak 7y agoHa, this is so cool! I'm working on a very similar problem atm: https://ulysses.sonnet.io/ https://ulysses.sonnet.io/ My approach is slightly different though: - you can see the previous lines (the last 4 lines of text), i.e. they don't fade, so you can still keep some context - you cannot select, edit (the UX makes it hard). I'm still working on making the UX around it more explicit, curious to hear feedback. There are several reasons for that (or use cases): - I use it to foster a better writing habit - During the day, I keep it on split screen and write to organise my thoughts when I work on more complex problems - I use it as a diary (and paste the text to the Notes app) Do you use it in a similar manner? Did working on the app change your writing habits in any way? The reason I ask is because in my case writing this way feels somehow more natural. I ended up writing 800 words per day on average (with spikes to 2-3k). Also, I'm following the same `div.fade` approach to mask text in my app. The main reason for that was incorrect colour correction/mixing on Firefox (banding or shifting the colour by 1 point). PS. I'll send over some of the apps here to my partner (a writer) and see which one suits her needs better. I'll let you know if I get any feedback.
- zacharycohn 7y agoThis strategy seems like it makes it very difficult to write. What if you lose track of what you've already said? It seems like a better solution is to just disable backspace.
- Psyladine 7y agoEven typewriters supported strike through (or barring that, asterisks).
- miki123211 7y agocat /dev/stdin > yourfile.txt ctrl+d to exit. You can edit the current line (to fix spelling misteaks) but not anything else. You can reference as much as your terminal shows. This is a perfect example of the superiority of the Unix way. Simple programs that do one thing and work well together, combined into things their authors didn't think of. This is my idea of beauty.
- m463 7y agocat > yourfile.txt :)
- miki123211 7y agoI knew there was a faster way to do it. I just didn't know how. Thank you very much.
- AlexCoventry 7y agoA good book in this vein is Writing With Power.
- 1wFaith 7y agoThe placeholder text is a reference to a wonderful game called The Talos Principle.
- mirimir 7y agoSo this is an interesting idea. And I do tend to write that way. Especially if I'm not sure what to say, or how to say it. But I'm not sure what the point is. I mean, searching yields "We couldn’t find any repositories matching 'rolandasb'". And I'm certainly not going to write anything substantive on this site. So how would I do this locally?
- redacted 7y agoThe advice we got from our professors when writing theses was: crack open a bottle of fine whisk{e}y [0], get a couple glasses in, write (while keeping your drink topped of course) until writing is a serious challenge, edit the next morning in the harsh and sober light of day [1]. Works a treat, even if you liver may not fully appreciate it. [0] Whiskey may be substituted for your preferred liquor, but it is a solid traditional writers' choice [1] TL;DR 'Write drunk, edit sober'
- ryeights 7y agoHmm... I might just try this
- reubenswartz 7y agoThis works for many kinds of writing. I often tell people who are trying to work on their website copy to do this. Otherwise your mind comes up with too many objections and you don't get anything done. ;-)
- robbrown451 7y agoAll I can say is, I am old enough that I remember when writing rough drafts, by hand, on paper, was how you did writing. If you changed your mind right after you wrote something, it was awful because you had to squeeze it in between the lines or in the margins or draw circles and arrows and such. I hated writing then. It was just painful. I procrastinated any writing assignment till 2am the night before it was due. Now I love writing. Writing is often something I do when I'm procrastinating something else. (ummm, that would include right now I guess) I'm not a linear thinker and forcing myself to do it that way would just be a way to make me hate writing again.
- ghaff 7y agoIt wasn't so bad when you were writing something that was going to get retyped anyway (like for a newspaper). But a lot of the time something like a paper just basically got submitted as essentially a rough draft because you weren't going to edit and retype it.
- robbrown451 7y agoWell for school assignments we were generally expected to turn in the rough draft first. At least in high school, and sometimes in college. So rewriting was generally always expected. Either way, there was no way I'd turn in my rough draft as a final, as it would either be a mess to look at, or terribly/confusingly written. I just don't see the benefit of imposing a linear process. I prefer to start my writing with what comes easily, and immediately start tweaking.
- ghaff 7y agoI guess it's an age thing. I never turned in a rough draft and basically never typed an assignment until college for a class (leaving aside a thesis, etc.) The only time I really did back and forth editing was for newspapers.
- softwaredoug 7y agoI find perspectives on writing workflows are very subjective and hard to generalize. I know some people who outline to the sentence. Others who gestalt write and let the structure evolve from writing. I reread/edit as I craft the next section. Others get driven crazy by such open endeness. All perspectives have been successful tech book authors. The more difficult thing is how you collaborate with coauthors with different writing style that might conflict with yours.
- ilamont 7y agoWriting and editing for me is like sculpting with clay. Constant tweaks, revisiting something that I wrote the other day, referencing material from earlier in the piece, moving stuff around, etc. FWIW I learned to write longhand and then using an early electronic typewriter with only three lines of text retained in memory. Modern word processors have been great. Sometimes, though, when planning something out, I'll use a paper notebook.
- city41 7y agoHiding the paragraph seems extreme to me. I'd like to refer back to what I wrote to get a sense of what I still need to write. Would it be better to instead make the previous paragraphs uneditable?
- BurningFrog 7y agoThis sounds a lot like the old Agile slogan for writing software. 1. Make It Work 2. Make It Right 3. Make It Fast (maybe)
- mc3 7y ago1. Make It Work 2. Ah it doesn't work 3. Make It Right 4. Big refactor, better rewrite it. Ah no time. 5. Make it Work, but without it being Right, what is the bug level we can get away with shipping? 6. Make it Fast, scale up the VMs!
- SteveJS 7y agoI wrote something for myself that removes the editor entirely. This gives a word sprint of 15 minutes with a visible goal of 1000 words. Hitting ESC leaves it ready to paste elsewhere. No backspace, no delete, only enough feedback to know your typing is captured, and whether you are on pace. https://github.com/SteveJSteiner/BantamScribe https://github.com/SteveJSteiner/BantamScribe It is also entirely local. Spelling and grammar errors take something like 60 seconds to fix in any reasonable editor that has suggested spelling fixes. The goal is to focus on the idea and dispense with what should be automated. This is for exploring ideas not refining wording. For a novel, the choice to edit as you go is orthogonal to avoiding editing during a word sprint. The real issue is during revision you’ll find you corrected a bunch of stuff you are cutting. If that editing was cheap who cares? If you sweated over a sentence for 15 minutes you might do the wrong thing and not cut it even though that is better for the story.
- harshil9968 7y agoI love the idea behind this. It only disappears when I'm done writing the para, i.e. when I move to next para. Which renders the feature obsolete when I'm writing big paras. Could this be done to letters, after x secs they disappear.
- chipotle_coyote 7y agoAll the various "let me save you from editing" programs I've seen over the years have been well-meaning, but... Okay. Look: here's an actual snippet from the first chapter of a novel I wrote a few years ago. It's not unusual for dialogue to be written like this: short paragraphs, one or two sentences each, right? --- If he’s based on Panorica or one of the half-dozen platforms that have a compact with them, he could lose his license for that. Or worse. But a lot of the private yachts berth at places where space law is more space suggestion. “Who else have you called?” “Just you. I’m pretty sure the ship’s completely dead. The crew either got out already or didn’t make it.” “Jesus, Randall.” She runs a hand through her hair, stopping outside the bar. Could she lose her license for following up on this? “If it’s dead, how’d you find it?” “I picked up an emergency beacon. It stopped before we made visual contact.” “What kind of ship is it?” “The beacon data was for a Horizon class freighter.” “A Horizon went missing and nobody noticed? When was this?” “Yesterday. Maybe fifteen hours ago. I’ll send you the telemetry data.” --- Now: imagine trying to write that when every paragraph immediately disappears after you type it. I'm sorry, but that's just not going to be helpful. Writers don't need to have their past paragraphs hidden from them; we may, in fact, need to see those lines for context. If you want to grey them out the way iA Writer does in "focus mode," fine, although I confess I remain skeptical about how much benefit that truly brings. If I'm actually typing, like I am at this moment, my eye is following the cursor and I'm focused without the extra benefit of disappearing text; if I stop typing, it's because I need to think about what I'm going to write next, and I may need to, you know, read what I've just written in order to do that. If it so happens that I notice a typo in the previous sentence -- or even, heaven forbid, the previous paragraph -- I don't actually feel like my editor is helping me if it prevents me from doing that. And this is the problem I have with an awful lot of these "let me help you write by being super super minimal and throwing in one neat trick you haven't seen before that makes this even more minimal than those other minimal" editors. I sincerely appreciate the ideas and the work and, yes, the aesthetics. This particular one is really elegant and I don't want to take away from that. But it's part of a whole class of editors that feel, at least to me, like they're kind of solutions in search of problems.