The two approaches to writing well are practicing your swings and puking it out.

Practicing swings draws from the training of concert musicians and professional athletes. They practice every day so when it’s time to perform, they know exactly how to play. The same principles apply to writing. Train your dialogue, description, and even grammar to be second nature, so when you sit down to write, you express your ideas gorgeously.

The opposite approach is to puke out a first draft and revise it into something beautiful later, akin to rapid prototyping in tech jobs. Despite your best plans, your idea has flaws. Shaping those ideas into a rough draft helps you discover those flaws faster and gives you something tangible to work with and improve.

Now, if either of those work for you, congratulations, stick around anyway because you might pick up a useful trick.

But if you’re like me, you ran into big problems trying both of these.

I spent maybe nine months going through the practice your swings approach, taking courses and deliberately training my writing skills. While I definitely improved, writing a bunch of excellent flash fiction was just an gymnastic feat of procrastination from me. It was technically productive, but the point of bettering my writing was to write great novels, not collect and polish shiny new skills all day.

On the other hand, I could puke out drafts for short stories no problem, but when it came to novels, I got maybe 10-20k into each project before I couldn’t go on anymore. There were huge, glaring problems that I just knew would persist through the rest of the draft, and having that hang over my head while I wrote unsalvageable trash each and every day burned me out for three to six months afterwards each time.

Now,

You might ask, “why didn’t you just practice your swings with a big project?”, or “if there were such big problems with your puked out draft, why didn’t you stop to fix them and then continue?”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

And you’d be right!

I overlooked some obvious solutions—project tunnel vision will do that. These are my suggestions for how to improve both systems.

The big weakness of practicing your swings is productive procrastination, so build that practice into your big projects instead. Evaluate your recent writing, figure out what you’d like to improve, build systems or find exercises and suggestions that improve those areas, and apply those during drafts or revisions. Evaluate how well those changes went, integrate or reject them accordingly, and repeat. This allows you to simultaneously hone your writing skills and make progress on your big projects.

Likewise, the weakness of puking out drafts is generating 200k of seemingly unrecyclable garbage, IF you get there. If you never even finish the draft, then the whole point of pushing through is moot. Likewise, if you finish, but think it’s too worthless to even try fixing and then give up, that’s also a problem.

Instead, draft an arc, do a quick revision, THEN draft the next arc. It’s amazing how much a bit of polish can realign the story and help it shine. Focus on broad structural elements, avoid rewording phrases or hunting down typos, and leave notes for future granular revisions.

Now, despite their seemingly opposed perspectives, both approaches emphasize progression, both systems help you write more and to write better. Neither prescribe you rework the same section endlessly or chase perfection.

Though this problem is most associated with newbie writers, even after almost a decade, I still catch myself preening prose sometimes.

In the moment, it feels like you’re precisely laying the first brick so your house has a firm foundation, but in reality, you’re trimming the lawn with a pair of scissors. Everyone ends up revising, and you improve so much along the way—not just in skill, but in maturing your vision for the story—that it’s not worth it to spend blood, sweat, and tears on fragments that’ll likely be trashed anyway.

Beyond that, chasing perfection will paralyze you. Your taste will always exceed your ability, nothing you make will feel perfect for long. Unless you want your writing career to end with one decent paragraph, scene, or story, it’s best to crush this practice and move forward.

Anyway, to undercut everything I just said, you should ultimately follow your own judgement. If you’re wrong, then learn from your mistakes; if you’re right, then learn from your successes too; and if you post online, then everyone can share in the learning with you.

If you'd like to gift the rest of us lessons smelted from painful burnout or frustration, then share your perspective down below. If you disagree with anything I've said or have contrary experiences, I’d love to hear them and have more data for the databank.

(No more procrastination by penning essays, back to the novel. See ya.)