Your Mind Finishes First

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Several years ago, my wife suggested I take the setting I made for my friend group’s weekly game night and turn it into an evergreen setting for all my fiction. At first, I told her the idea wasn’t worth it because I had borrowed so much from other creators and wasn’t confident I could make it my own.

She then replied, “If it isn’t distinct enough from your inspirations, why do people keep coming back to it five years later?”

I didn’t have a good answer, so I started making adaptations and changes to the world the next day. I parsed through every facet to be sure it had the love and attention the setting needed to stand on its own. Months later, I had the themes and story arcs I wanted to cover in my first book.

That story idea formed in my mind two years ago, and I only have notes and a half-finished plot grid to show for it. Despite feeling that this story could be a worthwhile return to fiction for me, I struggle to fill in the gaps I already know onto a table.

It doesn’t make sense, and it frustrates the hell out of me. How strange was it to realize that I cared deeply about a creative project I wanted to make for the last two years, yet couldn’t sit down and get the necessary planning work done for it?

There’s an answer for that contradiction, I’ve found. As I have read more of Jean-Paul Sartre’s works, I realized that my issue had the wrong attribution.

Before I delve into the issue, I want to be clear that this letter isn’t about generic productivity advice. I have no problem leaving the vague asks of “just do it,” and the recommendations for 5 am cold plunges to others. A good solution offers the “why” with its “how.”

I’m also not discussing writer’s block today. I find that term to be ill-defined because writers will use it as a catch-all term for why they don’t sit down and write. Not every reason why a block exists for someone is solvable by the same means. Thus, engaging with that term requires definition-setting that would be laborious and ultimately not helpful because of the muddied understanding the term possesses.

Instead, I want to be specific about what sort of problem I want to solve: a gap that exists between your mind and body with regard to drafting.

When drafting a written piece and creating the work facilitating a draft’s creation, the problem is that work exists in two forms, but completes at two different rates.

The first form is the mental picture you have for your work. That ideal inside your mind represents the aim of where you want to be after you finish writing the last sentence. Your mind doesn’t hold all the specific words and choices you’ll make along the way, but the flow is clear, like a river seen from above, flowing towards the horizon.

The second form is the actual written work. It is the product of the time and effort taken to make those choices, made manifest into whatever passages you have typed or penned by hand. In this form, there are no more questions about the flow, as each bend and turn of the river has gone from a passive observation to something known.

Go back and look through these two forms, then tell me: can you determine which one of these forms your draft can take might require more time than the other?

This gap is the rate difference that causes the friction covered today. This gap is why drafting is hard.

This gap is, today, the reason why I struggle filling in a plot grid about a book I want to get into people’s hands.

The glib answer to this question is that thinking is faster than writing, so an imagined state for a piece will always arrive faster than a written one. It is simply true that thought and action share different rates, so work requiring pure thought completes faster than something requiring both thought and action.

But this answer doesn’t cover the full problem. If the issue at hand were solely that the gap between thinking and writing were different, it would make drafting tedious, not frightening. Yet, there are accounts of writers afraid to commit words to the page, and they can’t tell you why. They just know that they should write, feel a desire to do so, but cannot get themselves to go to their office and draft.

In a newsletter I wrote a while ago about harnessing the Zeigarnik Effect for better productivity in writing, I cover the mechanism for this tendency of the mind to fixate on incomplete things. Most of the questions about why the mind seeks novelty and unsolved puzzles are captured in the foundational work for that piece, and apply to the reason why an unfinished draft cloys at the mind of the writer.

That draft is a new idea it wants to explore or an unsolved problem your mind wants to fix, but something else keeps you from getting it done.

Rather, the difference causing this gap in desire and action is that the mental version of what you create gets to stay vague, while the written version must become clear to exist. The imagined version of what you want to write never needs to stand up to the reality that a finished, written draft exists in.

Even when creating a plot grid like I am today, I get the benefit of leaving notes for myself in bulleted blurbs for each category I set, in all chapters I expect to write. Once I get to writing that draft, I have to find out if the original version I planned holds up. But, while unfinished, it never has to resolve to any scrutiny, imagined or real. It stays low resolution and grainy, difficult to make out in detail but vague enough to be malleable when thought about.

My plot grid and the info in my head yet to be recorded into it get to stay fuzzy at the edges. My story idea is a safe, untested one. Making it real by writing it forces a higher resolution.

I’ve come to think about the distinction between the vague theory of what a written piece could be and its realized, physical version as like a cartographer making maps.

Imagine yourself as said cartographer. When beginning the survey of a new area, your starting point is the general shape of the region provided by someone else. There’s no certainty in the scale or distance measured in this map because you are the first one to do so. The map you received as your foundation for your work could be a stylized map full of creatures and sketches of the imagined peoples in the area, not unlike maps we saw of the Americas back during the Age of Discovery.

These sorts of maps aren’t bad or unworthy. Someone could theoretically guide themselves to where they want to go using this sort of map. At the very least, this map bounds the work to be done and gives you, the cartographer, a scope and scale to work with.

A utilitarian aspect exists in that initial map regardless of its accuracy or resolution. This makes the map complete, but given that the measurements within are inaccurate, it completes a low resolution.

But, like in the concepts I covered in a piece about how acting as a writer comes before viewing oneself as a writer, the problem at hand isn’t a question of utility; it’s a question of what is true. The initial map is true in its ability to offer a direction, but not in the exact measure of the distance you will have to travel.

And you can’t know what that measure is until you go out and survey the area, take your measurements, and record them to scale.

For drafting your writing, you cannot know how long you’ll need to develop a certain plot point or character without setting out to do so through writing. Even professionals can get it wrong in the planning stages, making the act of drafting not just about the creation of the initial version, but also a test of what does and does not hold true from the original, fuzzy vision you had.

The process of drafting, of taking that unclear mental version of your work to a clearer, physical form, will show what gaps exist through that translation. From what I see in my current works, there are four types of gaps in total.

The most obvious gap will be the reveal that something is missing in your planning. Like a blank, unsurveyed area of a map’s interior, this part of your planning is empty and requires an answer to fill it.

In my manuscript, I found that I had not defined each protagonist’s answer to the thematic question my story was posing, meaning the characters my readers looked to for their response on the matter would only disappoint. That required me to go back to each character and consider what their answer would be, and do so in a way that matched their characterization while still being distinct enough to offer chances to debate or dissent with the other protagonists.

Conversely, one of the more difficult gaps to see is when the writing makes an assertion that excludes a justification. Specifically, you make an assumption about how something must be, but fully rule out another possible, reasonable answer. In our cartography metaphor, this is akin to drawing a river’s flow from your measurements, then assuming its watershed follows the same direction without measuring. It’s likely to be the case, but there’s a chance it isn’t.

For instance, take this newsletter. I committed to a cartography metaphor early on because I think the symbology makes the concepts easier to grasp. However, in my last letter, I talked about how action precedes creation, and being handed an imperfect map means creation happened before you.

That conflict is why I treat the imagined whole of your planning as the territory itself. In a way, previous planning done by me was the creation of the uncharted territory I am now surveying.

Many of us experience this gap in writing we engage with today, where the audience has their expectations set by the narrative, only for the story to never deliver on it. Something gets promised in the first chapter or episode and never comes up again, like drawing a road to a coastline never explored.

In my fiction, I find the pattern here is when I create a sentence that creates an expectation that something interesting will happen with an element I described, but doesn’t. If I describe a location in a way that promises previous elements will matter in a pivotal scene later, only to never meet that expectation, that’s a problem. I am a firm believer that Chekhov’s gun must always be fired.

Finally, a gap that gets more obvious as you reach the end of your draft: the narrative structure you laid out to start doesn’t best fit the story you want to tell. Authors can indulge sometimes, and that is precisely why one of Stephen King’s most infamous pieces of writing advice is something he popularized from Arthur Quiller-Couch: “kill your darlings.”

I did this in a previous novel I wanted to write. I had chapters of exploration in a different environment because I wanted to explore that new setting, but it didn’t serve the story, and read back as dull because there wasn’t anything worthy for the reader.

I ended up taking the handful of key narrative elements from those chapters and moved them elsewhere in the story, and trimming those chapters from the book. I cut roughly 10,000 words from my manuscript after my first draft was done because I didn’t know that marker was wrong until I had finished surveying the first draft in full.

Understanding these gaps and overcoming them are two different beasts, however. During a first draft, balancing the work of creating new, defined areas of your writing while also keeping in mind the shapes and edits of future drafts is a large task.

And that is why I say don’t bother with the actions of editing during your first draft, or during any drafts for that matter.

Whenever there is doubt or concern about something you’ve written while drafting, treat it like a survey waypoint to revisit. A marker driven into the ground to remeasure when the greater picture is clear, and you have more narrative reference points to use for setting your scale.

If you have the means to flag these markers in the margins of your manuscript, that’s the place to keep them. Many word processors and manuscript software have commenting tools you can use to keep all these flags as you work. For those that prefer the analog, pages have margins for a reason. As for what to do with all these marks, we’ll come back to that.

Regardless, such flags also need to exist for those times when you can’t think of the next sentence to write, but need to get something on the page to keep moving forward. I have a rule for myself: if I have to think about how to phrase a sentence for more than two minutes, I force myself to write the best thing I can think of, flag it, and move on.

The reason for this is simple: a draft needs to be complete, regardless of its resolution. The process of editing exists, and therefore means you have the freedom to return to your imperfect work when the time comes. While drafting, the goal is instead to get to the end of the survey and see what form your map lies in, and what form would better represent its boundaries and features.

So, don’t mistake a flagged passage as a mistake or failure. It’s not even a compromise.

It’s a marker showing you where you need to go back and measure the position of that flag to other flags you’re more confident in. It is further proof that the enemy in this situation is not the vague map; it’s one that goes unfixed.

I referenced Sartre’s works earlier on in this piece because of their relation to the freedom afforded in drafting. With freedom comes a cost, so it’s worth explaining what that cost is and why writers feel it while drafting.

In writing, there is an unbounded number of decisions made during the drafting process. The blank page represents the limitless possibility space of what can be made, its four sides representing the space you have to make your ideas clear to someone else. Every time you write a letter, let alone a sentence, you take that possibility space and condense it down towards the creation you seek to make.

This is, to borrow Sartre’s terminology, the anguish of writing: that you are the sole actor on your draft, and that no one else can do it for you.

That decision-making process takes its toll. It’s where a significant chunk of the mental load of drafting as an action happens. There’s no physical demand in the strokes of typing or the scratches of writing on paper, so the tiring sensation of writing comes from something else: the mental load of decision-making.

But the other side of this is to assume that decisions made while drafting are final, which they aren’t. As stated earlier, editing is part of the writing process, but it is separate from drafting. If you treat editing as something that does not apply to your work, you force your words to always be the correct ones every time you pen a new word for your piece.

No human can make that prediction 100% of the time, forever, at all times. So don’t try to be some sort of deity of writing. Again, to borrow Sartre’s terms, this is abandonment, a knowing that there isn’t a clear right way for you, let alone everyone, to get things right on the first try offered by anything greater.

The reason why editing stays separate from drafting is down to scheduling. Both tasks offer unbounded decision potential, leading to an infinite regression of decisions if not deliberately separated and worked apart from each other. Don’t do these two jobs at once if you want to ever finish your draft.

And so this is where the concept of despair comes in: that there must be some disciplined measure towards progression by your own hand, and that you will suffer as you do so. Thus, you should use the tools and light you have on any given day to do what you can, accept that sometimes you cannot certify what you wrote in a given sentence, and move on.

This is why one bad sentence marked for later review as such doesn’t poison the next ten; only an unmarked one does. If you know a sentence isn’t good, and you push on anyway, you progress towards the outcome you want. If you refuse to mark that sentence as bad, or never write it in the first place, you build upon something never measured or proven to be worthy. Doing so is a representation of one’s bad faith or an inflated ego, not good drafting.

To best keep one sentence from poisoning ten, we return to our cartography metaphor. During a survey, there’s more to the deed than just planting markers in the dirt. The cartographer also keeps a field log of all the places they marked out for ready reference on later excursions.

Thus, I made the Writer’s Survey Log, your equivalent to said field book. The log allows you to keep all the markers laid during your drafting in one place for easy reference later on.

The log asks you to do more than just list your markers. You’ll sort them through the same four regions of low resolution we outlined earlier, alongside your best diagnosis of what to fix later on in no more than a few words. It won’t help you know your writing output, so don’t expect this log to be a productivity aid.

With that sorting comes data for later pieces. Over time, repeated use of this log will help you know which resolution regions you tend to favor in your writing. That gives you a better baseline to work from in future drafts.

Don’t start with an entire draft on your first run-through. Instead, take 15 minutes during your next drafting session and record the times you feel something is off or too unclear. Where you’re setting up something you don’t know you have a payoff for yet.

Ideally, you should make this 15 minutes centered around where you’re currently stuck in your draft. Use the log as a way to get unstuck and return to the execution of the point of a draft: the completion of a low-resolution version of your writing.

I think if you give this a shot, you’ll find that what once felt like a reason to quit mid-session will instead become a two-minute speed bump, cleared not by giving up, but rather by noting where the bump was for your next trip through the manuscript.

This method survived its own cost before I could name it, back when I marked 10,000 words to cut from a manuscript. Imagine what it will do for you.

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