Early drafts aren’t about getting it right.

It’s easy to drift into the habit of thinking the first few drafts of any piece of work should be good. That you need to spend time crafting your sentences, improving grammar, and correcting spelling. Only, it’s unlikely that your initial thoughts are going to be any good.

Which is fine because ‘being good’ isn’t the job of the first drafts.

Early drafts are about giving ideas substance, not shape. They’re about taking something insubstantial, vague, and half-formed, that exists only in your mind, and turning it into something concrete. You need to get ideas out of your head and onto the page. Later, when you’ve laid them all out, and you can see them, that’s when you can shape them.

Writing apps

In order to focus my thinking on the ideas, I like writing early drafts in a markdown or plain text editor that limits my options for formatting. This makes me less inclined to think about structure, headings, spelling (you could even turn spell-checking off), and grammar. I’ve even experimented with monospace fonts to make it feel like the words I’m putting down are temporary, and that they’re meant to be deleted.

There’s a bit of magic for me in these monospace fonts. When I started editing on my new imitation typewriter printout, the font itself seemed to disappear. Like typescript, it was so pedestrian it simply vanished, leaving only the content.

Friedlander, J. (2011). Monospace Fonts: How and When to Use Them in Book Design.

I use Obsidian for all my writing, after having tried Simplenote, Evernote, Keep, Bear, and Joplin. These apps are all cross-platform (except Bear, which is Apple only) and free, so you’ll almost certainly find something that works for you. But, there are plenty of other options for markdown and plain text editors (see this useful overview of markdown).

If you’re in the habit of using Word for your first drafts, consider using a markdown editor for a change. You may find a switch to plain text liberating.