I recently misspelled my mother’s name in my father’s obituary. Had my excuses–it was a rush job and I’d started it on my phone, where my clumsy thumbs got in the way–but I still missed my typo and ended up with a draft that would have told the world that I’d been born to a foodstuff.
My brother, who’d asked me to write the thing, caught the error and corrected it before anyone else saw it.
Which was another in a lifelong series of reminders that we can write, or we can edit, but we can’t do both at the same time. Good first drafts are usually sloppy. Even subsequent drafts can be messy. Neither is supposed to complete the process. Editing shouldn’t start until all your ideas are down, typically with a bit of company that will be trimmed later.
And it’s best not to count on adding a bunch of material once you’ve donned your editing cap. When you’re writing, write. Dare to throw it all in, dare to misspell something embarrassing. You’re creating something out of nothing, and that’s a magnificent thing. There’ll be time to turn that something into a more particular thing, which is what editing amounts to.
