Numerous years of writing academic papers, essays, poems, blog posts, white papers, et cetera, have taught an important lesson: write first and edit later. The initial words must flow. They cannot and should be stopped. They should not be weeded or burned before they come to fruition. They and their weedy counterparts have to go a little wild at first so that the right and good words can be discerned and put to use.
It is only in their final presentation that words appear beautiful and smell as wonderful as freshly cut grass; they first appear as grass being choked to death by the weeds. Strike too early with the editing, and the grass gets lost while the weeds get found. The writer follows each and every weed until she finds herself in a corner of the yard not knowing how or why she ended up there. She has lost her sense of direction because she edited as she wrote.
Again: write first; edit later.
The words and the weeds, which do require editing, need to enjoy each other’s company for a while. The grass – the words – is of primary importance, but it usually is impossible to tell the words from the weeds at the very beginning. Will one word be a weed? Is a weed actually grass? It’s too hard and too soon to tell, so the writer keeps writing, knowing that the weeds eventually will reveal themselves. They’ll raise their showy heads and threaten to subsume not only her yard but also the neighboring ones.
It’s only then that she goes after the weeds, and she goes after them with all her might. The grass is at stake now, and she has to rid it of the weeds. She mows and hoes and poisons. She does not put up with any stragglers; she purges her yard of the offending things. It is the time of editing. It is the time for the killing of weeds so that the words can live and become what they were always meant to be: grass meant for bare feet, games of freeze tag and Ring around the Rosie, and cartwheels and somersaults.
Remember: write first; edit later.
Image: Alec Couros (CC BY NC SA 2.0)