Coming Back to Edit Later is for Losers!

Throw out some words, edit as you go, and hit publish. It’s that easy.

Perhaps you have noticed that there is a great deal of writing advice available for consumption on the Medium platform? I have.

I have read quite a bit of it because I want to get better as a writer, and I am genuinely interested in hearing others share their experiences.

If you let all the advice overwhelm you, it can make you feel inadequate at times, particularly if you are new to the writing-for-an-audience game like me.

There are many people on the site that have been writing since they could hold a pencil. Perhaps they journaled, wrote short stories or poems, doodled etc. and the writing habit just followed them onward into adulthood. Not me. Not even close.

I didn’t enjoy writing in elementary or secondary school and did it only when mandated by sadistic teachers. I loved math and science, but any sort of English or history class that necessitated putting words on a page? Barf.

Most of my adult and working life I did little writing except for patient care reports which are lingo and abbreviation heavy and follow a specific and repetitive format.

That said, I do have an appreciation for the English language, perhaps developed when I learned Russian in the Army years ago. There is nothing like learning a second language when it comes to being able to dissect and understand the flow and, well, beauty of your native tongue.

I also have a respectable vocabulary thanks to voracious amounts of reading I did as a kid and into adulthood.

Read? Yes! Write? No thanks.

That is until I entered a management job in the fire department and simultaneously began pursuing an undergrad degree to support my newly retained responsibilities.

I found myself writing several white papers regarding my industry. The fire service is changing and evolving more rapidly than it ever has in the past, and I discovered that writing about emerging issues was the best way to organize my thoughts around complex ideas.

Most of these were unpublished and served only as a memory prompt for me; a way to catalogue my thoughts. The few that did hit the public received some praise however, for the succinct way in which I expressed myself.

I also wrote a lot of papers for my undergrad classes in fire service and Emergency Medical Services management, as well as business-related topics for my graduate degree.

A lot of papers.

These were typically heavily researched and almost always in APA format with citations, executive summaries, cover pages and all that jazz.

I developed a pattern and method for cranking out these papers. But here is the kicker, I didn’t follow the “traditional” pattern of making an outline, researching, writing a rough draft, revising, editing, making a final draft and then submitting.

Instead I did some preliminary research first, finding applicably scholar-like articles on the topic and throwing them into my ‘References’ page. I didn’t read much of them, just enough to get the gist.

Then I started writing. I did deeper research and editing as I went. Most of the time I ended up discarding half of my first references and finding better ones along the way. Granted, it was a plodding style at times, but it worked really well for me.

It is a bit like crossing a river, hopping from stone to stone. If you stand on the shore and attempt to plot out your path for too long, the task becomes intimidating, and it can be difficult to see well enough to judge the distance of the stones at the far side.

I found it more intuitive to start leaping, and to make path decisions as I went. And then, once I hit the other side, I certainly wasn’t interested in taking the path again just to see if there was a better way across.

I would edit from about a paragraph to a page backward, catching rough phrasing and repetitive words and phonic structure. And occasionally I would find that I needed to backtrack a bit in my writing and redirect the course.

I found that I could see the pattern of the stones much clearer mid-river and could then adjust my path, even if I had to back track a bit occasionally.

At the end, I would whip up an executive summary, re-read for spelling, punctuation and format errors. Then I took a deep breath and hit submit.

I paid for a membership on Medium before I ever started writing here. I enjoyed the articles and the insight, and the fact that so much variety of thought was available on a single platform.

When I first entertained the idea of publishing something here I, of course, began reading articles on how to do so. I found a lot of common themes. Two of the seemingly oft-repeated mantras were to find a niche in which to write as well as the concept of just letting your writing flow and then coming back later, perhaps hours or days, to edit and re-work your story.

I have to admit that hearing this offered by experienced writers caused me to pause and even proved to be a barrier to me submitting for several months. First off, I don’t have a niche. (I wrote a little bit about that here):

But even more worrisome, my writing methods weren’t on par with those that seemed to have a great deal of success (or at least followers and claps).

Eventually I convinced myself to throw caution to the wind and published my first story. It was something I am passionate about and draws from my experience as a pre-hospital medical provider.

I used my well-worn method of writing, concurrent editing, deep breath… and publish.

And I’d say it worked. The article flowed well, I am proud of it, and for what it is worth, it got curated as well. I haven’t second guessed my writing method since.

But, let’s be clear. There is a lot I haven’t done as a writer yet. I have been limited to 3,000 to 4,000-word academic pieces and generally 1,000-word stories here on Medium. I haven’t written a novel; or even a short story.

I honestly see a great deal of potential value in the ‘flow’ technique, especially in a book or story where a lot of dialogue is present. Getting the grammar and punctuation correct in conversation is tedious. I can see losing one’s train of thought while figuring out whether to put the period inside or outside the quote marks.

And, I am not saying I my style and method won’t change over time. I consider myself too old and wise to say, “never”.

But what I am saying to whomever has made it to the end of this story is to let your writing freak flag fly! Particularly here on Medium.

Don’t let advice from experts (or “experts”) keep you from putting words on the page. And particularly don’t let others deter you from doing it your way. Just write. It really doesn’t matter that much how you do it, just that you do.

The best advice on this site, in my opinion, is to not listen to too much advice!

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Timothy Key spent over 26 years in the fire service as a firefighter/paramedic and various fire chief management roles. Now moving forward to writing and consulting. For more articles like this, join the mail list.