You want to be a confident, even happy writer who easily produces good first drafts that you easily polish into publishable pieces of work. But you keep finding yourself mired in the process or avoiding it all together because progress feels hard. I know; I’ve been there. It doesn’t have to be so hard.

Over the years I’ve realised that the skills and habits that allowed you to become an academic are the very things that make you an often-miserable writer. As a student, you were writing for assessment. Whether in coursework essays or exams, you had a hard deadline and often your first draft was your final draft – I can’t be the only one who always meant to start her coursework essays weeks before they were due, only to leave it until the week or even night before.

How you wrote as a student worked then, to a degree. You obtained the marks you needed to carry on in your chosen field. You didn’t know that the only way you knew to write, perfect drafting (writing a first draft that’s clean enough to be your final draft), is also the hardest way there is to write.

Also, writing that way has a certain logic that fits with so many other things you were taught as a child and young adult. How many of us were told, repeatedly, to tidy up as we went along? That advice works in some situations, and much as I hate to say it (and I’ll never forgive you if you tell her), my mum was right: it is easier to cook in a clean kitchen, so cleaning as you go works, not that I do, as my husband will attest.

Your draft is not your kitchen, and you’re not a student anymore. Because you’re no longer a student, you don’t have hard deadlines, which means you can now, if you choose to do so, luxuriate in agonising over find the perfect first word. And then repeat the process for the second and each subsequent word, until you're ready to move on to agonising over phrases or sentences.

That way of writing doesn’t sound very luxurious to me, but lots of academics take that approach – I took that approach for far too many years – so we must get something from it. Assuming we aren’t getting some sort of masochistic pleasure from torturing ourselves with our writing, it seems that the real reason academics, who tend to be sensible, clever people, keep writing this way is that it’s all we know.

By the end of this article, you’ll know a better way to write.

Embrace the messy draft

Your first draft has one and only one job: to be done. Not to be pretty or clever or even to make sense to anyone who’s not you. Just done.

There’s a reason we often call first drafts rough drafts or, my preferred term, messy drafts: only rough and messy drafts get finished. I know that for most of you even thinking about writing such a draft is making your skin crawl. How can you knowingly leave a typo on the page as you write? Won’t you save time by keeping things tidy as you go?

No, you won’t.

I know most of you will resist this – I resisted it for years, as do most of the academics I work with, but writing a messy draft will make your writing life easier. When I trained to teach writing, I was taught to teach my students this. And I did – they were undergraduates; their writing was allowed to be easy. I was a postgraduate, or in American parlance, a PhD student. I was doing serious academic work and believed it was supposed to be hard.

 I was excellent at making it so.

Thus, for years I watched my students become happier, more productive writers while I kept making myself miserable. That changed when I left academia, not for the reasons you imagine, but because I’m not a hypocrite. As a coach, I work with my peers; I cannot tell my clients their writing can be easy while mine is torture.

I tried applying my advice to my own writing: it works. It used to take me weeks to write a few hundred words, now I write thousands every week. It will never not annoy me that I wasted years writing the hard way.

I know, you're not convinced. How can you be based on only one person's experience? Let's look at the objections I usually hear when I suggest writing a messy draft to a client.

Objection 1: I can’t start until I have the right first sentence.

Waiting for the right first sentence (or first word) leads to weeks or months of writer’s block. Why? There’s no such thing. The right first sentence doesn’t exist. It’s not magically going to sweep in and fix your article (chapter/book).

Telling yourself it will removes the pressure you were putting on yourself to write: you can’t write until you find the thing that doesn’t exist. Of course, you don’t admit to yourself it doesn’t exist, it’s just a happy little fantasy you use to justify what you really want to do, which is avoid your writing.

Why do you want to avoid it? Because not writing is safe. If you don’t write the thing, you can’t submit it for publication. If you don’t submit it, you don’t risk rejection. Not writing is also safe because you don’t have to discover the gaps in your knowledge or work to fill them.

Blaming your avoidance on the sentence that doesn’t exist takes the blame off you. It's similar to the excuse poets have given themselves for millennia: the ancients owed their talent to the Muses and Milton owed his to God. If they couldn't write, it was because a deity said so; who were they as mere humans to argue the point?

Objection 2: Getting it right to begin with will save time later.

It really won’t save you any time. Instead, you’ll take longer than necessary to write the first draft, which you’ll still have to reshape and polish later. Along the way, you’ll waste a lot of time editing things you might not keep.

I explain this, and the whole writing process, in terms of clearing out your wardrobe (not because I love a good clear out; if you could see the state of mine, you’d know I don’t). The first step is chucking all the clothes on the bed/words onto the page so you can see what you have.

Editing a sentence in your first draft would be like pulling a jacket out of your wardrobe that you haven’t worn in over a decade, tailoring it to fit your body as it is today, and then remembering you’ve developed an allergy to the fabric and it’s going to the charity shop in any case. You’re not going to tailor garments before donating them, so stop fixing sentences you might later cut.

Objection 3: First, I need to get it all clear in my head, then the writing will be quick and easy.

You can’t keep a short article, let alone an journal article or book, in your head. Put it on paper so you can see what you have. Waiting until it’s all ‘clear’ in your head is another way of saying, I don’t want to write. If that’s the case, be honest with yourself and just don’t write that day.

It’s also a way of staying safe for all the reasons I listed under Objection 1.

How to write a messy draft

I realise you may not be completely convinced yet, but if what you’ve been doing hasn’t been working, give this a go. The worst that happens is that it doesn’t work either. You have nothing to lose.

For whatever you’re writing, try using these steps to create a loose plan:

• State your main point in one sentence – your statement of argument.
• List all the questions you'll need to answer to convince your reader your claim is true – set a timer for this; don’t let it take more than about 30 minutes for an article/chapter or an hour for a book.
• Delete questions that take you off topic or that repeat other questions.
• Put the questions in a logical order.
• Start answering questions. You don't have to start with question one, and it's often better to start somewhere in the middle; try question 3.

As you start answering the questions in your outline, answer them as quickly as possible. Answer them as you would if a student asked the question in a seminar or a colleague asked it after you presented the paper to them – you wouldn't make them wait weeks for the answer.

If you really cannot stop yourself from editing as you write, try using the dictation app on your phone or the speech to text option in Word or Google Docs. If you do this, give it a quick read soon after a dictation session to fix whatever it misheard – when I used this for part of my last book (which was about preparing a manuscript for self-publishing) it kept mishearing something I was saying as ‘broccoli’. I like broccoli, but I wasn’t talking about it in that book.

Before you go

On the first Wednesday of each month, I send a newsletter, which is usually based on an article like this one, to academic writers like you. If you'd like to receive these newsletters, you can subscribe by clicking the button below and filling out the form on the next page:

If you know someone who'd enjoy this article, please share the link to the article and/or to my newsletter with them.