Write “shitty first drafts” before stopping to edit.
Editing as you draft is inefficient and interrupts your flow.
Parts of the text below appeared in my book Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024), which is available on Amazon and Audible. Please help me sustain the book’s momentum by rating it five stars and sharing my posts with your network.
One of the most helpful productivity tips I’ve learned is to draft before you edit. Editing as you write is inefficient and interrupts your flow. Instead, treat revision as a separate stage of the writing process that involves different, more judgmental mental processes than drafting. (For a complete, step-by-step writing workflow, see § 10.12 of Elegant Legal Writing.)
Anne Lamott proposed one memorable take on the “draft before editing” concept in her well-known writing guide Bird by Bird. As Lamott realized, perfectionism — a tendency that includes a desire to get everything right immediately — is a major source of writer’s block. But what matters at the drafting stage is not getting things right, but getting words on the page.
After you understand the ideas you need to convey, gather most of the authorities you plan to cite, and create an outline, it’s time to write what Lamott calls a “shitty first draft.”
This is not the time to edit, wordsmith, censor yourself, or go down a rabbit hole of legal research. Your sole task at this stage is to complete a first draft, however unpolished it may be. Do not reread or revise what you’ve written until a draft is done; just keep writing.
This principle is implemented in the creative iPad app Flowstate .1 In Flowstate, you set a five-minute timer and start writing in plain text on an empty black screen. If you stop writing, the text you’ve written so far begins to disappear. The app encourages you to keep your cursor moving and avoid editing as you go. I’ve found the app to be helpful in breaking through writer’s block. (Note: I cheat the system a little by periodically copying the text I’ve written — by pressing Cmd + A to select all and then Cmd + C to copy — to ensure the app doesn’t delete it.)
Another way to break the habit of editing as you go is to imagine that your backspace and delete keys are broken, so even if you make a mistake, you have no choice but to keep your cursor moving.
If you try these tips, the draft you produce may indeed be shitty, but it will be done — and that is a necessary step toward a piece of writing that you can be proud of.
Ryan McCarl is a partner of the business litigation firm Rushing McCarl LLP and author of Elegant Legal Writing (Univ. Cal. Press 2024). For more tips about legal writing and argumentation, subscribe to the Elegant Legal Writing blog and follow Ryan on LinkedIn. McCarl’s book is available on Amazon and Audible.
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April 2025 update: The Flowstate app has not been updated in several years, so proceed cautiously if you decide to try it.