This week I wanted to share the best writing advice that I’ve gotten in a while: write a word vomit first draft.
Like many others, I’ve heard the age-old adage to “write a bad first draft” and iterate after, but I never understood just how bad it was supposed to be. So when my English teacher said that the best college essays she’s read came from literal stream-of-consciousness first drafts, I finally took the plunge. I set a timer for 10 minutes, pasted the essay prompt, and typed away.
The key is to focus on maintaining a consistent typing speed rather than focusing on what is written. For me, that meant I wrote down everything I thought of in those 10 minutes, including all the self-conscious remarks about my typing posture or my complaint that the room was a bit too cold.
If you’re like me, you’re not satisfied with some anecdotal self-improvement advice. So, here’s some reasoning behind how this works.
The Science Behind Good Bad First Drafts
Googling led me to discover the concept of “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,” which hints at why something like this would work.
Essentially, it’s a hypothesis that our native language controls our perspective on the world. We can have instincts about something (like love, for example), but it requires language for us to share that feeling with others. Over time, each language created slightly different definitions of the same feeling. Thus, “love” to an English-speaking person should be somewhat different than “愛” to a Chinese-speaking person.
But why does this matter? Well, it seems like the same mechanism is happening with everything we think in our brain. When we’re faced with a writing prompt or question, we have instinctive responses that we typically write. However, many of our unconscious feelings are left repressed unless we spend time putting everything else into words.
Another way to conceptualize this idea is by thinking of the brain as a treasure chest. The least valuable treasure is the top layer of the chest, which you need to dig through to get to the bottom of the chest — where the most valuable items are. However, your hands will quickly be full with all the less-valuable items unless you put them down into another container. In this case, we’re simply putting all of our less-valuable thoughts onto paper, slowly emptying the chest, until we can put even the most valuable thoughts into words.
Now, would this work by speaking for 10 minutes? I had the same question. From my experience, my brain simply doesn’t have enough to say if I’m forced to talk continuously. However, typing has that sweet spot of being fast, but not too fast. Without conclusive evidence, I’ll leave you to experiment with different tactics.
The Takeaway
This week, I encourage you to do more word vomiting. Here’s how:
Set a timer for 10+ minutes (any less and you’re not sifting through all the surface-level ideas).
Open a new document in whatever is your favorite drafting software (Notion, Google Docs, etc.).
Type (or talk, if you prefer) and focus on maintaining a steady pace.
Once the time is up, go through your document and highlight some interesting insights/ideas that were written.
There you have it, a great starting point for your next writing task!
Until next time,
Ethan