Failure to Revise Drafts

The first words you write are the first draft. Writing is thinking. You'll rarely know what exactly you want to say when you start writing.

The time you put into editing, reworking and refining turns your first draft into a second draft, and then into a third. If you keep refining it o...

You don’t “find the book as you write.” You have to do the hard work of solving the problem first. You have to figure out the best route, too. Before you start to write, articulate the idea in one sentence, one paragraph and one page. Nassim Taleb wrote in

• Writers at their most natural when they write in the first person.
• Better to have an opinion and say 'I', 'we', 'us', 'me' than to take everything into a passive voice.
• If you aren’t allowed to use “I,” at least think “I” while you write, or write the first draft in the fi...